10-12-2007, 03:47 AM
Why is it that only warriors seem to be moaning so much in this thread?
Why have 3 talent trees? Variety. Talents are a way of customizing your character to distinguish yourself from other players. And isn't customiztion at the heart of the whole role-playing element of MMORPGs?
Let's take a look at the warlock. The warlock only has 1 role: DPS. And yet the three trees are quite distinct from each other, and boost the warlock in very different ways. Like to cast DoTs and rarely run out of mana? Affliction is for you. Like to nuke stuff with direct damage spells? May I direct your attention to the Destruction tree? Want to have a killer pet? Go demonology.
For hybrid classes, the talent trees obviously help them specialize in one of their possible roles.
But that doesn't mean that all talent trees are effective, or have a clear identity. The Priest discipline tree is a good example of a talent tree that offers lots of support to both Holy and Shadow Priests, but at the moment, the only people who go deeper than 23 points for Improved Divine Spirit are PvP-ers.
The 2.3 patch will make Pain Suppression targetable on other players, which is a pretty significant change, and I think desirable enough that it might convince some healers to sacrifice the deep Holy talents for some serious spot damage mitigation. Will we see the emergence of a class of Discipline priests that heals in a noticebly different way from Holy Priests (eg more Power Word: Shields, fewer Greater Heals)? I wait to find out.
If I had to characterize the two warrior DPS trees, I would call Fury the dual-wield spec and Arms the two-hander spec. If that shows my ignorance of the finer subtleties of warrior talent trees, so be it.
The major issue I see with the warrior talent trees is this: If you PVP seriously, you must have Mortal Strike. The 50% healing debuff is too important to do anything different. So instead of the PVP warrior having a choice between 3 talent trees (or at least two different DPS focused trees), their choice is between deep Arms, or hybrid arms/fury. I dont think there's any other class defined quite so much by one singular skill in PVP.
chris
Why have 3 talent trees? Variety. Talents are a way of customizing your character to distinguish yourself from other players. And isn't customiztion at the heart of the whole role-playing element of MMORPGs?
Let's take a look at the warlock. The warlock only has 1 role: DPS. And yet the three trees are quite distinct from each other, and boost the warlock in very different ways. Like to cast DoTs and rarely run out of mana? Affliction is for you. Like to nuke stuff with direct damage spells? May I direct your attention to the Destruction tree? Want to have a killer pet? Go demonology.
For hybrid classes, the talent trees obviously help them specialize in one of their possible roles.
But that doesn't mean that all talent trees are effective, or have a clear identity. The Priest discipline tree is a good example of a talent tree that offers lots of support to both Holy and Shadow Priests, but at the moment, the only people who go deeper than 23 points for Improved Divine Spirit are PvP-ers.
The 2.3 patch will make Pain Suppression targetable on other players, which is a pretty significant change, and I think desirable enough that it might convince some healers to sacrifice the deep Holy talents for some serious spot damage mitigation. Will we see the emergence of a class of Discipline priests that heals in a noticebly different way from Holy Priests (eg more Power Word: Shields, fewer Greater Heals)? I wait to find out.
If I had to characterize the two warrior DPS trees, I would call Fury the dual-wield spec and Arms the two-hander spec. If that shows my ignorance of the finer subtleties of warrior talent trees, so be it.
The major issue I see with the warrior talent trees is this: If you PVP seriously, you must have Mortal Strike. The 50% healing debuff is too important to do anything different. So instead of the PVP warrior having a choice between 3 talent trees (or at least two different DPS focused trees), their choice is between deep Arms, or hybrid arms/fury. I dont think there's any other class defined quite so much by one singular skill in PVP.
chris