World of Warcraft completely revamps its talent system – but is it any good? Our WoW demon Cortyn has tested the system in detail.
For a while now, the beta for WoW: Dragonflight has started, and more and more players are gathering on the Dragon Isles. The PTR for the pre-patch 10.0 is live, allowing everyone to familiarize themselves with the new talent system to form their own opinion.
But is the new talent system really worth it? Or are these just meaningless options that only look like “more”?
In the past few days and weeks, I have experimented with various classes, but I have primarily focused on priests and demon hunters. Whether the new talent system is worth it, what the advantages and disadvantages are, I want to share with you here.
Many playstyles that work in theory
I’ll say it straight: I didn’t pay any attention during my experiments to whether a talent selection was optimal in every aspect or 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, sometimes with bad results.
Especially with the shadow priest, there were several ways to customize my character according to my wishes and allow completely different playstyles.
The first variant is quite simple: I tried to recreate the current shadow priest as it was played in Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth. This was surprisingly simple and even comes with some bonus effects, like a bit more insanity generation.
With the second playstyle, I simply tried to take everything that sounds like “Old Gods”. I took “Idol of Y’Shaarj,” “Idol of Yogg-Saron,” and “Idol of C’Thun.” The short version of that is that I summon shadow creatures almost continually. Not just the shadow spirit, but also several tentacles that apply effects to enemies and even a “thing from the beyond” that fights for me. I felt more like a cultist of the Old Gods, who is permanently summoning creatures from the void.
In my third variant, I tried to revive an old playstyle that hasn’t existed since the times of Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm – namely, Mind Spike. This is a fairly fast spell with solid damage that removes all dots from the target. Unfortunately, this playstyle doesn’t work the same way as it used to, and you must play the shadow priest with dots. However, Mind Spike can be improved so that it doesn’t often consume the dots.
These were just three variations that at least made sense at first glance and offered quite different playstyles. While there were some overlaps, it felt distinctly different – depending on whether you were summoning shadow beings from the void or trying to maximize the damage of the dots.
These three variants were just adaptations of the shadow talent tree – I hadn’t even touched the general priest tree by then. Because even here, there are many different possibilities. As a shadow priest, I can learn a lot of healing abilities or Holy Nova. While I’m not a full-fledged healer by any means, I can at least help briefly if the actual healer is overwhelmed or waiting for a resurrection.
Meaningless connections cause (slight) frustration
The downside is that the sheer multitude of talents occasionally leads to the necessity of choosing things that one is actually not interested in at all. Often these are abilities that build on each other and then make sense – but sometimes they don’t.
Why do I, as a priest, have to skill “Body and Soul” first to increase my movement speed while using “Power Word: Shield” if I want to access “Bind Undead”? This is an extremely important control effect that I definitely don’t want to miss. However, the only way to access it is through a connection to “Body and Soul” – something that has absolutely nothing to do with binding undead.
Such strange connections are not common, but they are frequent enough to warrant criticism.
I absolutely understand that I have to learn “Dispel Disease” first before “Dispersion” – that has a clear connection, as both have to do with removing effects.
But that is just a small point of criticism that was probably born mainly out of the need to create as large talent trees as possible. Some connections must presumably exist that don’t make much sense at first glance.
There is also criticism that in the class trees there are sometimes absolute “must-have” talents that you need for the shadow priest. That there is a talent in my priest talent tree that drastically reduces the cooldown of my Mind Blast unnecessarily restricts me – and I believe that would fit much better in the shadow tree.
Skepticism remains: What the community makes of it
My first conclusion about the talent system is quite positive. It gives each specialization a lot of freedom so that two characters of the same specialization can play entirely differently. At the same time, however, you have so many talent points that you can choose enough from the entire tree to not feel like the most interesting effects can’t be combined.
I will probably spend a lot of time in the system building some unique builds for myself – just to see how much fun one can have with it.
The only thing that already worries me is the tendency of part of the community to emulate the top 0.1% of players and “calculate” the fun away. Because my great fear that in the end, only one or two optimal talent distributions will emerge per class is unfortunately already becoming apparent. And that is quite a shame because the new talent system allows for a lot of cool hybrid builds.
But over the course of around 20 years, the idea of “simming” everything in the game and extracting the optimum performance down to the last decimal point has increasingly taken hold – regardless of whether one as a player can even play that optimized.
My great fear is that the new talent system, while theoretically offering a lot of variety and enabling a wealth of different playstyles for each class, will in practice only have one or at most two of them accepted as the current “meta”.
If the community doesn’t learn to accept the possible diversity of the talent system as such, then there was hardly any need to change the talent system at all. Of course, it helps greatly if you play with a tolerant group that doesn’t see every percent point as necessary and also allows the freedom to just try new things – whether they are “meta” or just 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.
