World of Warcraft is under criticism – as the new talent system reveals more and more flaws and has missed 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 overall 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 become clearer week by week.
This topic has now also been addressed in the Subreddit of WoW. In the post “Meaningful talent choice shouldn’t mean choosing between good single-target damage and good AoE damage,” the topic is discussed lively.
The thread starter pentarion explains his view on this:
When people ask how a particular specialization is performing, many say ‘It’s okay, but right now, the talents force you to either do good single-target damage or good AoE damage, but not both at the same time.’
This seems like such a fundamental issue that Blizzard shouldn’t have allowed it 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 types of utility you prefer and not directly determine if you are good or bad in certain content.
MoiraDoodle adds to that:
It feels even worse when your ONLY AoE is a talent, which means you’re effectively losing a talent point that you could have spent on something fun instead of something necessary.
Amelaclya1 further adds to the argument:
That’s what bothers me most about the talent trees. I believe talents should have been limited to cooldowns, buffs, or new interactions between abilities. It just feels bad that absolute core abilities are now also “talents.” That’s just the illusion of choice. Or can you imagine a beast mastery hunter not choosing Wrath of the Wild?
Moregaze writes about this:
WoW is having an identity crisis. On one hand, there is a cry for “meaningful decisions,” and on the other hand, there is a desire for a competitive game that actually tries to make everything competitive. These two things directly contradict each other.
Tier sets make everything even worse
This problem is further amplified by another major aspect of the game: the tier sets. These sets have been extremely popular since the Vanilla version of World of Warcraft. When Blizzard temporarily removed them from the game, the outcry was huge – tier sets are just part of the game, and after some criticism, they returned 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 each season. Almost everyone is focused on obtaining the 2-piece and 4-piece bonuses of the sets as quickly as possible, as these mean a significant performance boost.
However, the sets achieve this by enhancing certain abilities of a class. While the ability “The Hunt” is enhanced for a Havoc Demon Hunter, Shadow Priests receive an enhancement for “Shadow Word: Death.” One can really get worked up about that.
This, however, completely undermines the intended freedom in talent selection. Because when specific abilities are enhanced by a tier set, those abilities and all associated talents become mandatory.
The tier set therefore directly dictates which talents one must take to be efficient.
All this leads to a strange situation in World of Warcraft’s talent selection. On one hand, Blizzard wants to grant players maximum freedom while simultaneously wanting them to make a meaningful choice. However, that is simply not possible when absolute core abilities of a class are part of the talent tree and other talents become so significant due to tier sets that they become mandatory.
Even though the current talent system is fundamentally a good idea, it still needs significantly more overhaul and a change in the tier set and talent philosophy for the system to realize its full potential and be as the developers intended.
Or how do you see it?
