World of Warcraft is being criticized – because the new talent system reveals more and more technical errors and has failed to achieve what it was supposed to achieve.
World of Warcraft is doing better than it has in a long time. The gearing system is praised, the general gameplay is great and the new raid is a lot of fun. However, there are still points of criticism and some contradictions in the game that are becoming more apparent from week to week.
This topic has now also been taken up in the WoW subreddit. The topic is discussed lively in the article “Making decisions shouldn’t mean choosing between good single-target damage and good AoE damage.”
The thread creator pentarion explains his view on this:
When people ask how a particular spec is doing right now, many say ‘It’s okay, but right now the talents force you to do either good single target damage or good AoE damage, but not both at the same time.’
This seems like such a fundamental thing that Blizzard shouldn’t have allowed this to happen in the first place when they created the talent trees. (…)
It’s not fun to choose to be good in one aspect but bad in another. The choice should change how a specialization feels and plays or which utility types you prefer, not directly make you good or bad at certain content.”
MoiraDoodle adds:
It feels even worse when your ONLY AoE is a talent, which means you effectively lose a talent point that you could have spent on something fun instead of something necessary.
Amelaclya1 adds to the argument:
This is what bothers me the most about talent trees. I believe talents should have been limited to just cooldowns, buffs, or new interactions between abilities. It just feels bad that absolute core skills are now also “talents”. That’s just the illusion of choice. Or can you imagine a Beast Mastery hunter not choosing Wrath of the Beast?
Moregaze writes:
WoW is having an identity crisis. On the one hand, you’re crying out for “meaningful decisions,” but on the other hand, you want a competitive game that actually tries to make everything competitive. These two things are in direct contradiction to each other.
Animal sets only make things worse
This problem is compounded by another major aspect of the game: the animal sets. These sets have been extremely popular since the vanilla version of World of Warcraft. There was a huge outcry when Blizzard took them out of the game for a while – tier sets are just a part of the game and after some criticism they came back at the end of Shadowlands and are still an integral part of the game.
But tier sets only exacerbate this identity crisis. Because these equipment sets are practically mandatory in the respective season. Almost everyone is interested in getting the 2 and 4 bonus of the sets as quickly as possible because they mean a really strong performance boost.
The sets achieve this by improving certain abilities of a class. While the Desolation Demon Hunter’s ability “The Hunt” is improved, Shadow Priests receive an improvement in “Shadow Word: Death”. You can get very upset about that.
However, this completely undermines the desired freedom in talent selection. Because when certain skills are improved through a tier set, then those skills and all associated talents become mandatory.
The tier set directly dictates which talents you have to take in order to be efficient.
This all leaves World of Warcraft’s talent selection in a strange situation. On the one hand, Blizzard wants to give players maximum freedom and at the same time that they make choices that matter. But this is simply not possible if the absolute core skills of a class are part of the talent tree and other talents are given such great importance through tier sets that they become mandatory.
While the current talent system is a good idea at its core, it still needs a lot more work and a change in the tier set and talent philosophy for the system to reach its full potential and become what it is intended to be intended for developers.
Or how do you see it?