Vault_News posted:
So my question is, with only 6 'tiers' of talents after MoP, what is happening to all the other talents that are currently in game? Are they going to be skills you learn from your class trainer, either active or passive? Or removed from the game completely?
Lylirra posted:
To better explain, let's divide the current talents into five categories: 1) mandatory, 2) very cool, but not mandatory, 3) sort of cool, 4) boring, and 5) useless.
We're going to give you all of the "mandatory" talents to your class spec, and you'll learn those talents at certain levels like you do with core class spells. Players who skip over what we consider mandatory talents today -- like Raging Blow or Hot Streak -- are unintentionally (or maybe even intentionally) gimping themselves, and that's not what we want to have happen. We want players to be able to experience the full power of their class, so we're going to award certain talents straight-out.
Translation: we're shooting for a market demographic that is too fkn stupid to figure out talent trees.
Lylirra posted:
The second category of talents -- the cool, but not mandatory ones -- are really the heart of the new talent system (they're the talents you'll probably be choosing from in each of new six tiers). You may be glad you have talent A, but talent B and talent C are also compelling options, and it should ideally be an interesting choice about which one you take and when.
Translation: we want you to be able to choose if you have red, green, or blue sparklies and rainbow swooshes coming out of your weapon/hands when you attack/cast. This is really the limit of what we think the majority of our target demographic wants to think about when they play the game.
Lylirra posted:
The third category of talents are still pretty cool, but they just aren't at the same level as other talents. These talents make good glyphs. For example, an early version of the warrior tree had Rude Interruption as a talent, but we feel it's too situational to compete with the other talents, so we'll likely make it a glyph.
Translation: glyphs will be the new talents but you can only choose 3 of them at a time that have any meaningful impact on game play - which means it's easier for us to balance and maintain the game without players min/maxing things we were too lazy to playtest and model properly to begin with. Oh but don't worry, we'll still have several "mandatory" glyphs for a few classes which make them unstoppable and which we will tell you for 8 months that we can't patch YET, and have to wait to see MORE numbers/arena ratings/raid content clear rates/etc. (really, we're keeping them until the staff members get over their class-based biases).
Lylirra posted:
The next category are boring talents -- the kind that reduce cooldowns or increase damage on some abilities. In most cases, we're just baking talents these right into the spells themselves. While there were occasionally situations where you got to decide which of these talents to take, the answers often relied on complex math problems that some other player ended up solving for most of us.
Translation: we were too lazy to rally delve into the actual workings of our game and were tired of the playerbase telling us how our game worked, not to mention the fact, we're going after the Hello Kitty Island Adventure MMO playing demographic here - HELLOOOO - remember, dum and dummer! (how many times do we have to remind you?)
Lylirra posted:
Finally, the current trees (despite our best efforts) still have some bad talents. They're the talents you almost inevtiably end up with when you have a talent tree with X rows and Y columns that you need to populate. In the end, not a lot of players end up taking these talents, so we'll just cut them. We don't think they'll be missed, but if turns out that players wind up actually missing some of the Cataclysm talents in the Mist of Pandaria design, then we've probably made a mistake somewhere. Ideally, you won't miss a thing and will have more fun picking talents that cater to your play style (or, at the very least, the current situation.)
Translation: we have been too lazy to devise inspired, creative, useful talent trees and will continue to be so going forward. Enjoy your fewer choices. The new crop of MMO subscriber dollars we're going after doesn't care about this, and those of you who still do represent a smaller portion of our revenue than what we project we'll be able to increase market share by with these changes dumbing things down further. Again, it also reduces our administrative overhead because there will be less stuff to balance and keep track of. It's a win win!
Lylirra posted:
Don't forget gang:
PANDAS!!! WHEEE!!
-----signature-----
If ignorance were painful, half the posters here would be on morphine drips.
Everyone playing WoW knows everything about playing two classes: 1) their own and 2) Hunters
