I am looking at the next xpak as the forest and only see the trees.

With the radical reduction in talent choices it's obvious (to me) that in reducing the player choices they are trying to eliminate the "cookie cutter" builds listed on so many sites. Unfortunately, they have now only handed out the one build. I could not come up with a better example of "cookie cutter" than what they will be forcing on all their customers with the Panda pak.

This simplifies their supposed balancing of classes to "brain dead simple". Ours too as your only concern will be do you want a PvP build or a PvE.
The couple choices you are allowed to make could easily be done with a check box at the top of the menu so that you only have to look at that menu once in your toons life.

I mainly play Hunter's. I don't have the reflexes (or interest) to compete in PvP so it's a real sign of desperation when I resort to doing PvP.
For the past month I have been doing nothing but PvP.
It has become apparent that PvP in WoW is so broken that nothing but a complete redesign of the entire game would be needed to allow all the classes an equal chance against each other.
The only 1 vs 1 matchup that see as somewhat equal is a Priest vs a Druid. Their ability to repair/absorb damage makes them basically unkillable 1 vs 1. Even 3 vs 1 takes many minuets to kill one of those classes and I have seen a Druid hold out against 5 and eventually he just ran off and the 5 of us could do NOTHING to stop him.
A Druid is as Fair and Balanced as Fox News (their slogan).

Blizz is finally completely eliminating the "dead zone" of Hunters ranged weapon. While it's about time they got rid of this limitation I don't see this as making any difference what-so-ever in both PvP and PvE. In PvP if an opponent gets that close to you then you are a "dead man walking". In PvE if your pet is not holding aggro then you deserve to die.

Nothing being added to the forest is anything more than fluff or a small tweak. Even the talent change is nothing but a tweak because virtually everybody took the exact same choices whether they looked up a build or simply looked at the choices. Many of the choices offered to you were so trivial you can not even call them choices so Blizzard cherry picked the most useful few and you will now be forced to chose between them.

A new race? Pfft, whatever.
A new healer class? Obvious. They added a Tank 4 years ago, a Healer class was next no matter how long they took to finally poop one out.

I cannot begin to express my current dis-satisfaction with Blizzard and their shill (stooge?) Ghostcrawler. I can only hope that my account expiring just before SWTOR goes live and the bitter comment I as allowed (forced) to make upon canceling will give them cause for reflection on continuing down their path of self destruction.

Good post.

Can't even be called talent trees anymore... more like talent toothpicks.

 

-----signature-----

I thought the same thing, but I called them talent twigs.

 

-----signature-----

Talent specks?


Harharhar!

 

-----signature-----

you really do have to wonder...with the popularity of rift, and that popularity at least in part due to rifts amazing talent system, what in the world would make blizzard think less choices and essentially kindergarten versions of the talent trees would appeal to people.

we really have to call this what it is. they have an obsession with a fictional thing called "balance" and they're doing this in an attempt to make their goals of balance easier. balance doesn't exist, putting some effort into trying to come close to it is productive but becoming obsessed with it above all else is hubris.

then again, what do i know. the majority of my encounters with other players in game are with people who seem to have the iq of a flea. they may just be right and this might appeal to the majority of the players. it won't appeal to the old school more hardcore gamers like most of us but lets face it we're really a minority in WoW. the game has been getting dumbed down for a while now so i think we have to assume blizzards target market is people who want to mash some buttons, make some big numbers, and not do much thinking. console games followed this evolution too. early console games were tough. by the time the sixth gen consoles rolled out everything had been dumbed down and replaced with gimmicks or graphics.

 

-----signature-----

I've never played an MMO that tries so hard to have it so exactly balanced.

 

-----signature-----

me either. its become an obsession thats a drag on the game. its natural for some classes to be better dps than others, usually the slightly lower dps class makes up for it in versatility or is better at pvp or has higher survivability...etc. you can't balance all those factors. i mean if you balance rogue to do the same dps as paladin why does the paladin get higher armor or heals? does vanish make up for that? not usually. what about ranged vs melee? ranged is almost always preferred since its survivability is higher. basically there are too many variables and even if they exactly balance all the dps it will still be unbalanced due to things like ranged vs melee or specific abilities like heals or higher armor.

a smart dev tries to keep things fairly close but does not obsess over it. blizzard has written the how-to book on obsessing over balance. they are long past the need to either replace the entire team or whichever lead dev or devs are setting the current tone.

 

-----signature-----

I've never understood the way Blizzard approaches balance in WoW. They try to make every single class and spec completely equal to each other when you just simply can't do it like that and ever achieve what you are wanting. You have to use some kind of rock, paper, scissors method to achieve any semblance of balance in a multi-class MMO and Blizzard apparently can't figure that out.

 

-----signature-----

Yet it is not even remotely balanced.

It was more fun when they weren't trying so hard to balance things for eSports. If people wanted to be just like everyone else, they'd go play a FPS game.

 

-----signature-----