The choice of talents in World of Warcraft: Legion is intended to actually become a real “choice” again. Blizzard is experimenting a lot in the beta.
The eternal promise of meaningful talents
If there is one major theme within World of Warcraft that has significantly changed with every expansion, it is the talent system of the various classes. Legion will be no different. During the alpha test of the next addon, the talent trees were shuffled around a lot. Blizzard explained the reason for this in a lengthy forum post:
They did not want players to choose between 3 very similar talents in each row. If all 3 talents are AoE abilities that differ “only in color”, the correct choice is not important. A similar problem existed with control abilities, for example with priests: here, players could also only choose between different kinds of control, making the decision not difficult and, above all, not “important”.
For a while, they turned this around drastically in the beta. However, Blizzard is also backpedaling here and admits that they may have gone a bit too far:
“In many cases, we had talent rows where the choice between talents was from different ends of the spectrum. This was the case with the Arcane Mage at level 15, where you could choose two talents that increased damage against a single target and one that benefited AoE damage significantly. That was not a real choice but just a simple query of whether you selected the right talent for the right situation, and the difference was so significant that you felt punished for choosing the wrong talent.”
In the meantime, they have changed the arrangement of the talents a bit again, so that the selection should be more exciting and each talent has its justification, is fun, without being superior to all other talents.
“In any case, we do not want to return to a world where a talent row only consists of which color of an AoE spell you choose. We decided to arrange things so that there are more choices between “generally useful” and more specialized talents. Hopefully, this will blur the lines between “theoretically the best talent” and the others, and the talent that you ultimately select does not feel like a wasted point.”
Finally, Blizzard adds that these changes to talents will also mean a variety of further adjustments across the entire game. In the coming weeks and months, many more patches can be expected to further change existing and new systems until the desired effect is finally achieved.
What else is changing with the upcoming expansion Legion in World of Warcraft, you can see in this post.
