World of Warcraft is completely revamping its talent system – but is it any good? Our WoW demon Cortyn tested the system more closely.
The WoW: Dragonflight beta has been running for a while now and more and more players are cavorting on the Dragon Islands. The Pre-Patch 10.0 PTR is also live, so everyone can familiarize themselves with the new talent system to make up their own minds.
But is the new talent system really any good? Or are these all irrelevant options that just look like “more”?
I’ve been experimenting with different classes over the last few days and weeks, but mostly focused on priests and demon hunters. I want to tell you whether the new talent system is any good, what the advantages and disadvantages are.
Lots of playstyles that work in theory
I’ll say it straight out: In my experiments, I didn’t pay any attention to whether a talent selection represents the optimum in every respect and is competitive with other specializations. Instead, I just let my imagination run wild and experimented a bit with shadow priests and demon hunters – sometimes with good results, sometimes with bad.
Especially with the shadow priest, there were several ways to customize my character according to my wishes and to allow completely different play styles.
The first variant is quite simple: I tried to recreate the current Shadow Priest as played in Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth. It was surprisingly easy to do and even comes with some bonus effects, like some more madness generation.
With the second way of playing, I just tried to take everything with me that somehow sounds like “Old Gods”. I picked up Idol of Y’Shaarj, Idol of Yogg-Saron, and Idol of C’Thun. The short version of this is that I summon shadow creatures of some kind almost all the time. Not only the Shadow Spirit, but also several tentacles that apply effects to enemies and even a “Thing From Beyond” that fights for me. It made me feel more like a cultist of the Old Gods, constantly summoning creatures from the void.
For my third twist, I attempted to revive an old playstyle not seen since the days of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King—Mind Spike. This is a fairly fast cast with solid damage, but it removes all DOTs on the target. Unfortunately, the way of playing doesn’t work like it used to and you have to play the shadow priest with DOTs. Mind goad, on the other hand, can be improved so that it often does not consume the DOTs.
Those were just three variations that made sense, at least at first glance, and offered quite different playstyles. While there was some overlap, it felt very different depending on whether you’re summoning shadow creatures from the void or just trying to maximize the damage of the DOTs.
These three variants were just variations on the Shadow talent tree—I hadn’t even touched on the generic Priest tree yet. Because there are many different options here too. So even as a shadow priest I can learn a lot of healing abilities or even the Holy Nova. With this you are not a complete healer, despite all the love, but you can at least help out briefly when the actual healer is overwhelmed or waiting for a revival.
Nonsensical connections cause (slight) frustration
The downside is that the sheer abundance of talent sometimes means you have to choose things you’re not really interested in. Often these are skills that build on each other and then it makes sense – but sometimes it doesn’t.
As a Priest, why do I have to first skill Mind and Body to increase my run speed when using Power Word: Shield if I want to get Shackle Undead? After all, this is an extremely important control effect that I wouldn’t want to miss under any circumstances. But the only way to get it is through a connection to “body and mind” – something that has absolutely nothing to do with binding undead.
Strange connections like this don’t happen often, but they are common enough to be criticized.
I totally understand that Cleanse Disease requires me to learn Dispel Magic first – it has a clear connection, both have to do with removing effects.
But that’s just a small point of criticism, which was probably born out of the need to somehow build the largest possible talent trees. There probably have to be some connections that don’t make much sense at first glance.
There is also criticism that the class trees sometimes contain absolute “must have” talents that are needed for the shadow priest, for example. The fact that there is a talent in my Priest talent tree that drastically reduces the cooldown of my Mind Blast is unnecessarily limiting, and I think that would have suited the Shadow tree much better.
Skepticism that remains: what the community makes of it
My first take on the talent system is pretty positive. It gives each specialization a lot of freedom, so two characters of the same specialization can play completely differently. At the same time, however, you have so many talent points that you can choose enough from the whole tree so that you don’t feel like you can’t combine the most interesting effects.
I’ll probably spend a lot of time in the system doing some builds of my own just to see how much fun it can be.
The only thing that really worries me right now is the urge by some of the community to emulate the top 0.1% of players and count the fun out of it. Unfortunately, my great fear that in the end there will only be one or two optimal distributions of talent per class is already becoming apparent. And that’s a shame because the new talent system allows for a lot of cool hybrid specs.
But over the course of around 20 years, the idea of ”simming” everything in the game and getting the best performance down to the last decimal place has become more and more widespread – regardless of whether the player is even able to play in this optimized way to be able to
My big fear is that while the new talent system offers a lot of variety in theory and allows for a wealth of different playstyles for each class, in practice only one or at most two of them will be accepted as the current “meta”.
If the community didn’t learn to accept the possible diversity of the talent system as such, then the talent system would hardly have needed to be changed. Of course, it helps immensely if you play with a tolerant group that doesn’t see every percentage point as necessary and also leaves the freedom to simply try new things – regardless of whether they are “meta”, but simply because they are fun.
If that succeeds, then the “new, old” talent system is a big step in the right direction. Otherwise it’s just an unnecessary complication.
All information about Dragonflight – story, new systems, beta and more – can be found here.