Nope, I’m just not very excited about the new talent system for Mists of Pandaria / WoW 5.0 that Blizzard have announced. And it took me most of the livestream to figure out why.
It’s a total revamp of a major part of the game. There are lots of interesting, shiny new toys to play with on offer. And yet –
And yet, I realised, my problem is that they’re still touting the same old model.
“We want all talents to be fun. “
“We don’t want there to be a “cookie-cutter” build.”
“We want everyone to have different talents.”
It’s yet another stab at the same goal – to defeat the hundreds of expert theorycrafters out there and create a system that they really, really can’t game. No, really this time.
I just can’t see it working any better than their other attempts. Already I’m seeing expert theorycrafters on Twitter making calls as to which will become the “mandatory” talents in each talent tree.
Sure, a few choices will remain – just like they do in the current system. Healers and tanks will be more flexible than DPS. But overall, WoW is a numerical system.
No matter how hard they try to obscure the best way to add up the numbers, the mathematicians will always win.
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I’m not sure how I feel about the news yet, but I disagree with you that it’s doomed for failure.
It’s a different stab at the same thing, but it’s being done in a different style. Instead of choosing what you want in the normal sense, you’re now choosing the type of thing you want.
Which of the following ways do you want to get your speed increase?
How do you want to CC something?
Which way do you want your cooldowns boosted?
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays. PvP is going to be a clusterfuck, because there’s no way to know what abilities your enemy has, and raiding will probably have more rigidity than other ways to play. I’m as cynical as anyone, but it does seem believable that there will be more choice, and less forced choices.
And if it’s as easy to swap talents as they say, it’ll be very nice to not, for example, need to bring a ton of boomkins for H. Rag, when any druid can spec into that talent.
We’ll see how it goes during Beta. I’m skeptical, but hopeful.
The first talent trees were good. The second talent trees were good. The third talent trees were good. I am sure these and all the future ones are going to be good as well. But what the hell is the point of this?
I do think that they’re just shifting cookie cutter builds to a fight-by-fight basis, and that they’re a bit naive to think otherwise, but I’m not sure COMPLETELY eliminating cookie cutters was their intention. WoW is a game based on math, after all: not all numbers are created equal. They seemed to really hammer home the desire for people to not even be able to spec so incorrectly as to miss core abilities and mechanics, and this redesign defintely helps usher players toward that goal.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
We should add to that: “If it broke and you don’t know how to fix it, don’t touch it.”
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
What was broke about tablets, portable MP3 players, and PCs that Apple decided needed fixing?
Not saying the changes are the best idea since the iPod or anything. Just that that saying isn’t particularly applicable here. There was plenty broke about the old talent system, or talent systems in general. And even if there wasn’t anything broken, we wouldn’t have nice things if someone hadn’t decided that a thing could be made better.
Some of these talent choices look like actual choices rather than calculations. This is a good thing – we may get to choose based on what we like, rather than one being just better than another.
I’m hoping the new talent system will make it easier to balance PvP at low levels.
“No matter how hard they try to obscure the best way to add up the numbers, the mathematicians will always win.”
Most talent choices in the new system is about playstyle, with not a lot of raw numbers. In some cases its adding another button vs. a passive skill to keep the button count low. Different CC for different situations. PvP abilities vs dungeon abilties vs raid abilities. Sure there will be recommended abilities for certain situations, but given there are only 6 choices, and not all are relevant in all situtions, I barely consider that big enough to make a “build”.
Well, its easy for me… The minute that this hits the live servers, im out for good. QQ, flame whatever…i dont feel this as a good change, or the change that shold be made. Tryin to make a game green again or better by keeping to modify old into a different shape? Why not bring new instead of morphing. To keep it simple, im just not happy with making the type of choices this talent system requires you to make. Indeed if it aint broken dont fix it…
P.S. there are theorycrafters about the damn irl univers, life, matter and so on and so forth. How the hell does one expect this not to happen in a damn game…. Take ANYTHING from RL and youll see that someone is theoretizing about it… Lets learn to play wow again every several years…
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