Why so many talent trees?

[oldmandennis]

I was thinking a bit lately, mostly about warriors and priests. It seems like their talent trees are a mess because they just have too many of them. If you don't want a bunch of rambling speculation about class design, now is a good time to stop reading.

Starting with warriors, there are two things that they do. They absorb hits, and they wack things. They don't need 3 trees to cover 2 functions. It may not seem like they really have problems because 50g will put them at the top of whatever they want to do, but to actually make 3 balanced trees out of two functions is almost impossible. Their trees are unsatisfying with nobody taking the 41 point arms talent at all, and every single quality pvp'er going MS.

In my opinion, they would be better off merging arms and fury.... but moving MS about 25 points into prot. Now you would have a real dilemma when deciding to pvp as a warrior.

Labeling one tree as the "PvP" and the other the "Raid DPS" tree is fundamentally a bad design. To make it worthwhile compared to the other tree, you almost have to make it overpowered.

It seems like priests are in the same boat. Disc just totally lacks focus, because right now priests are either healers or face melters. I would guess that the focus of Disc was going to be the MC/soothe controlling aspects of a priest that never seemed to work out. It leaves Disc as a mishmash. Splitting it up between the other two trees could open up some real possibilities.

Thoughts?

[Lissa]

I was thinking a bit lately, mostly about warriors and priests. It seems like their talent trees are a mess because they just have too many of them. If you don't want a bunch of rambling speculation about class design, now is a good time to stop reading.

Starting with warriors, there are two things that they do. They absorb hits, and they wack things. They don't need 3 trees to cover 2 functions. It may not seem like they really have problems because 50g will put them at the top of whatever they want to do, but to actually make 3 balanced trees out of two functions is almost impossible. Their trees are unsatisfying with nobody taking the 41 point arms talent at all, and every single quality pvp'er going MS.

In my opinion, they would be better off merging arms and fury.... but moving MS about 25 points into prot. Now you would have a real dilemma when deciding to pvp as a warrior.

Labeling one tree as the "PvP" and the other the "Raid DPS" tree is fundamentally a bad design. To make it worthwhile compared to the other tree, you almost have to make it overpowered.

It seems like priests are in the same boat. Disc just totally lacks focus, because right now priests are either healers or face melters. I would guess that the focus of Disc was going to be the MC/soothe controlling aspects of a priest that never seemed to work out. It leaves Disc as a mishmash. Splitting it up between the other two trees could open up some real possibilities.

Thoughts?

Bad idea IMO...by your logic, then Rogues, Hunters, Mages, and Warlocks would all have a single tree and nothing else because all these classes do one thing, DPS. Sticking with three trees is far better because each tree does things through different ways whether you see it that way or not.

[oldmandennis]

Bad idea IMO...by your logic, then Rogues, Hunters, Mages, and Warlocks would all have a single tree and nothing else because all these classes do one thing, DPS. Sticking with three trees is far better because each tree does things through different ways whether you see it that way or not.

That's not really what I said. I think warlocks are fine with 3 trees - debuff/dot, pet, and direct. Mages are probably fine with three for their different schools. Hunters, maybe 2 - pet and ranged... survival still seems to be the odd tree out. I don't know rogues that well, but maybe two trees for stabby and control/debuff?

I started with warriors because that's a class I know fairly well, and trees don't do things in different ways there, the trees do totally different things. Raiding arms and raiding fury are nearly identical, except fury does more damage. PvP fury is just a waste.

[Artega]

Arms has always been the burst DPS and support tree for Warriors, much like Discipline is the support tree for Priests. That Endless Rage, which was made superfluous when Blizzard caved to lolMS warriors whining about not having enough rage, is terribly weak compared to the ridiculous combination of MS+Death Wish (remember that time, long ago, when Warriors had 52 talent points for a couple of days? Remember how obscenely powerful that combination was?) is just unfortunate.

Fury is for sustained DPS, which is mostly designed around PvE. Protection is about tanking, and while it's certainly a viable tree for PvP when done right, there isn't any PvP gear for the spec (since gear with high armor, stamina, and block value would be Welfare Epics™ that would be viable for PvE as well as PvP.) Arms is popular in PvP because of the superb burst damage and lethal debuff combined with the high HP and armor that a warrior naturally has, plus an unending source of damage in Rage.

Melding talent trees is a pretty stupid idea, if you ask me. They're all distinct, even if delving deep into one over another may or may not be common. It'll never happen, anyway.

[Warlock]

Warriors are blessed with strong talents at the 21 and 31 point level that overlap in function. If they do get a 41 arms talent worth taking over deathwish and the other great fury talents around that level level 71-80 warriors with deathwish, mortal strike and the better-than-deathwish-arms-talent will be fun to fight... and they;ll be wondering what to use as a 51 point talent that could be worth taking over the fury goodies.

[Lissa]

That's not really what I said. I think warlocks are fine with 3 trees - debuff/dot, pet, and direct. Mages are probably fine with three for their different schools. Hunters, maybe 2 - pet and ranged... survival still seems to be the odd tree out. I don't know rogues that well, but maybe two trees for stabby and control/debuff?

The point being, each tree does things in a distinct manner or lends a distinct flavor to the way the class is played. Let's look a Priest for a second since it was one of the two you mentioned. Prior to tBC the trees were a mess, but when 2.0 came in, you saw the distinct use of each tree. While Holy and Shadow didn't morph much, Discipline took on the role that Blizzard wanted. If you look at Discipline up through tier 6 it's all about longevity and dealing with disruptions (only three talents don't fit this model, Wand Spec, Improved Mind Blast, and Improved Inner Fire). As you get deeper into Discipline, Blizzard then throws in a couple weird talents, but tiers 7 to 9 still hold with the basic premise of limiting disruption and providing longevity. If you tried to break this down to two trees it would cause a real mess trying to move talents into Holy and Shadow since there are talents that both specs can use effectively from the Discipline tree.

I started with warriors because that's a class I know fairly well, and trees don't do things in different ways there, the trees do totally different things. Raiding arms and raiding fury are nearly identical, except fury does more damage. PvP fury is just a waste.

Just because one tree becomes pretty much a waste in one style of play doesn't mean it should be removed or combined into less trees. How many high ranking Fire Mages do you see in PvP? How many high ranking Destruction Warlocks do you see? Hunters (ok, that's kinda cruel since the Arenas are biased against them more than anyother class)? So why should Warriors and Priests be any different in this regard?

[NiteFox]

Bad idea IMO...by your logic, then Rogues, Hunters, Mages, and Warlocks would all have a single tree and nothing else because all these classes do one thing, DPS. Sticking with three trees is far better because each tree does things through different ways whether you see it that way or not.

Survival DPS Hunters for the win?

Whoo:P

[oldmandennis]

Warriors are blessed with strong talents at the 21 and 31 point level that overlap in function.

Which talents are you refering to? I don't see any that overlap much.

Part of the problem is that in TBC you can get MS and intercept, in 1.0 you had to choose. So you either had higher sustained damage, a huge debuff in MS, or a better ability to tank either zergs or NPCs or run a flag. Now 99% of warriors who are serious about PvP are some variation of 3x/2x/x.

Are people really happy with certain specs being pigeon-holed into certain parts of the end game? Is there a better way to handle muddled trees? I guess they could try and balance things out with stuff like blood frenzy or the new pain suppression, but they start to feel gimmicey to me.

[Lissa]

Which talents are you refering to? I don't see any that overlap much.

Part of the problem is that in TBC you can get MS and intercept, in 1.0 you had to choose. So you either had higher sustained damage, a huge debuff in MS, or a better ability to tank either zergs or NPCs or run a flag. Now 99% of warriors who are serious about PvP are some variation of 3x/2x/x.

Are people really happy with certain specs being pigeon-holed into certain parts of the end game? Is there a better way to handle muddled trees? I guess they could try and balance things out with stuff like blood frenzy or the new pain suppression, but they start to feel gimmicey to me.

But what you're proposing is even more pigeon holing than what we have now. If you take Warriors down to two trees, you make it so you either DPS or you Tank, while with the present situation you either Burst DPS (good for PvP), sustain DPS (good for PvE), or you Tank.

To give you an idea of just how bad condensing Trees would be try this on for size. Let's say Blizzard decides to remove the trees completely and merges all talents into a single tree keeping everything at their present Tiers. You would see Warlocks running around like the following:

5/5 Improved Corruption
5/5 Improved Shadow Bolt
5/5 Bane
3/3 Demonic Aegis
5/5 Devestation
2/2 Grim Reach
2/2 Destructive Reach
2/2 Intensity
2/2 Nightfall
3/3 Empowered Corruption
1/1 Siphon Life
1/1 Demonic Sacrifice
1/1 Ruin
5/5 Shadow Mastery
3/3 Backlash
5/5 Contagion
5/5 Demonic Tactics
5/5 Shadow and Flame
1/1 Unstable Affliction

There's 61 Talent Points and could you imagine seeing something like that in PvE Raiding? All of the best damage dealing talents a Warlock can muster with only sacrificing 10% threat reduction of Affliction spells. Now imagine a Warlock with all the best PvP oriented talents under the same guise, would you really want to face a Warlock like that in PvP? This is why condensing trees is a bad idea. Right now you have to make a choice and sacrifice for your playstyle, condensing the trees makes the game even more pigeon holed and makes it so you don't have to sacrifice at all. I would rather stick with three trees personally and have to sacrifice than to have one or two trees with all these talents put together, at that point, what reason would there honestly be for talents?

[oldmandennis]

But what you're proposing is even more pigeon holing than what we have now. If you take Warriors down to two trees, you make it so you either DPS or you Tank, while with the present situation you either Burst DPS (good for PvP), sustain DPS (good for PvE), or you Tank.

To give you an idea of just how bad condensing Trees would be try this on for size. Let's say Blizzard decides to remove the trees completely and merges all talents into a single tree keeping everything at their present Tiers. You would see Warlocks running around like the following:

The warlock thing is a strawman I wish you would stop using. Each warlock tree has a theme, and you can arrange ways for all 3 to be sucessful at PvP and PvE.

Obviously these changes would take place in the context of a substantial redesign of the class, so it's not really a valid argument to add up any proposed talents and say: OMG that's imbalanced.

Personally I would find two trees to be much less restricting for a warrior if, like I suggested, they moved MS into prot. Having MS would alleviate prot's lack of farming power, and make it an interesting choice for PvP - virtually indestructable, with decent ability to disrupt and a killer debuff. The DPS warrior would remain a pretty tough nut to crack, with decent damage and imp intercept to stay on target.

[Warlock]

By overlap I mean that they're useful at the same time. Such as Deathwish making MS better. Synergise might have been a better word choice.

[Lissa]

The warlock thing is a strawman I wish you would stop using. Each warlock tree has a theme, and you can arrange ways for all 3 to be sucessful at PvP and PvE.

Obviously these changes would take place in the context of a substantial redesign of the class, so it's not really a valid argument to add up any proposed talents and say: OMG that's imbalanced.

Personally I would find two trees to be much less restricting for a warrior if, like I suggested, they moved MS into prot. Having MS would alleviate prot's lack of farming power, and make it an interesting choice for PvP - virtually indestructable, with decent ability to disrupt and a killer debuff. The DPS warrior would remain a pretty tough nut to crack, with decent damage and imp intercept to stay on target.

The point I'm making is that each of the trees is setup distinctly, you're ignoring that. You paid no attention to what I said in the first part at all there and the Warlock was to illustrate why merging and converging trees is a bad idea. Likewise, if you want to get a high rating, forget Destruction, it's not going to be what you need to win, Demology will give you survivability and Afflction will kill the opponent eventually due to using Unstable Affliction to keep someone from dispelling your DoTs, it's why you see all high ranking Warlocks some various of Demonology and Afflcition, but never Destruction.

Let me reiterate what I said concerning the 3 warrior trees, Arms is for burst DPS, Fury is for sustained DPS, and Protection is for tanking and each of the two DPS trees helps the protection tree as well. Just as for a Priest Discipline is for sustaining and dealing with interruption, Holy is mostly healing with some holy damage thrown in, and Shadow is damage with some disrutption. If you cannot wrap you head around these concepts they you're not going to see why they should remain 3 distinct trees.

[oldmandennis]

You act like demon not being good in arena is set in stone, or a good thing.

I've played warrior my share, I am quite well aware of what the trees are for. Calling arms "burst" damage is a way of obscuring it - its the pvp tree. Other then a couple of places where you can let loose with cleave and sweeping strikes (mainly Hydross), it is nearly totally inferior to fury in PvE. Are you basically pretty happy with the status quo, where many classes pretty much inherently have to respec to see other parts of the game? Bliz has said a number of times that they are not. I'm not either.

I am somewhat sidestepping your talk of priests, because I only got to about 40 on one. I do know that they have had a devil of a time balancing the holy talents - too good and they become required, not good enough and people sort of shrug at them. If the Disc tree goes away, then you can make the holy talents into really cool spells, and still sneak enough of the regen/utility stuff low in shadow to make people make choices.

[Sir_Die_alot]

I don't have much experience on priests so I can't really comment on that but I think you're on the right track when it comes to warriors. Right now warriors are a really flawed class that are being pushed out of their main dutys because other classes can do them better. The big flaw is they haven't done for warriors what they have done for other classes: give them their NEEDED abilities as trained skills instead of deep talents.

So what am I talking about? Mortal strike, bloodthirst and shield slam. Blizzard really blew it on these because the warrior is not a hybrid class. Hybrids get their "must have" abilities deep in their talent trees to force them to prefer that role. Not giving warriors access to these as skills instead of talents is like putting flash heal 31 points down in the holy tree. The problem with a warrior is they are a tank/off tank. Always. By removing shield slam from DPS warriors it means their threat when off tanking is very poor. By keeping mortal strike/blood thirst from a protection warrior it means when they are not tanking, they are useless. Mortal strike (let it work similar to current stormstrike) and shield slam being trained abilities would fix a lot of what's wrong with the warrior class currently. I'm not sure what to do about bloodthrist, I wish Blizzard had just never added it as it currently exsists. If they change things now fury warriors will probably be angry, if they simply add it as an alternative to MS? *Shrug*

Another thing is rage. Rage right now is flawed for warriors. I agree with the person who said all the MS warrior whiners who didn't want to get endless rage QQed the buff to rage from damage delt. It should have stayed where it was. The problem with rage is warriors should get more from the damage they take. This has always been a problem, but it was made far far far worse when they normalized rage, as a warrior's tanking gear gets better their ability to generate rage from damage diminshes. This used to be compensated by gaining a better weapon, which did more damage, which got you more rage. Now, you just have to strap on lesser gear if you have raid quality tank gear and want to do a 5 man. It was a dps nerf that hit protection warriors much harder than it should have, and in the end didn't really hurt dps warriors at all.

Tanking in general: warriors are suppose to be the tank class. Now don't get me wrong, I'm glad druids and paladins got their due and are now viable tanks... a little too viable though. As a warrior tank there are a lot of buttons I have to mash to keep my threat going strong. As a paladin? A little seal here a judgement there and keep concecration going and you can easily outdo a warrior in TPS. There is some balance with paladins at least, they suffer the same gear limiting their "blue rage bar" I pointed out above with warriors. As a bear? With a macro I could mash 2 buttons non stop and do better threat than the most skilled warrior tank in wow. This is dumb. Flat out dumb. Warriors SHOULD be a prefered tanking class with only gear and spec separating them from the above 2. Right now they have huge threat issues, even if they are specificly speced for tanking.

SPEAKING OF THREAT. Pre expansion warriors did some awesome raid dps, rogues complained as did many others. The thing nobody got was they have no dump for it. (other classes didn't either, but that has since been fixed as it should be.) Without a dump that means warriors are the burn class for dps. Where others can sustain a high dps and control their aggro, or wipe it entirely, the only way a warrior can do the same is to stop attacking or die. I always thought this was an excellent way to balance a rogue and warrior when it came to dps. "Yeah we may be doing the same dps, but if the tank goes its my face that will get pushed in first, hopefully I can hold it those crucial seconds and it dies. That's why I wear plate."

[Lissa]

And I look at your comments and see someone wanting one uber tree for DPS and one uber tree for tanking. Get over the fact that there are three trees and Blizzard designed it that way to make you sacrifice some talent points to get what you want. My point above with the 61 talent points cherry picking the best talents illustrates what you're looking for, you want to cherry pick the trees so that you get the best talents to get the best possible situation without sacrifice, it's not going to happen, so get it out of your head.

[Mirajj]

*snip*

The one thought that came to my mind while reading all this talk of 'useless' dps warriors was something I've seen played out time and time again in TBC raids.

"Why is a warrior spec better than 2-3 entire CLASSES designed to dps?"

I've seen a dps warrior easily outDPS hunters and mages, and give the warlocks and rogues a run for their money. And that's simply a spec they have open to them to do so...and with it they are outdoing entire classes who are designed for nothing BUT DPS.

Yeah, totally 'useless', those Fury warriors...

[Sir_Die_alot]

Replying to yours because it was the more ignorant. If you're going to do something all the way EVEN IF you gave warriors the abilities as I described you would still have to go deep into a tree if you wanted to be the best at "that". That's kind of the point with every class in the game. By putting the needed abilities you force them that deep, no matter what. Warriors need one of these 3 talents far more than all druids needed innervate to be effective.

@Mirajj, I don't disagree with your statement. In fact I addressed it. Warriors don't have the dump. If you're not almost pulling aggro as a warrior you aren't pushing hard enough. No aggro dump. That is the great equilizer. And before someone brings up shamans they are suppose to be getting some buffs (to reduce) their threat, as they should. Besides other classes are NOT "only DPS" they also are CC/off heal/ support. The only way I CC on my warrior is a sword and board, which is where I was going with this post. To do that effectively you need certain abilities. Should we put sheep 31 points into arcane and banish 31 points into destro?I don't think so. :P

[Mavfin]

Here's some cheese for you to go with what you already have. :shuriken:

(And yes, I have played a warrior, a prot-spec one, a LOT, and respecced as fury and as arms at different times.)

[Lissa]

Replying to yours because it was the more ignorant. If you're going to do something all the way EVEN IF you gave warriors the abilities as I described you would still have to go deep into a tree if you wanted to be the best at "that". That's kind of the point with every class in the game. By putting the needed abilities you force them that deep, no matter what. Warriors need one of these 3 talents far more than all druids needed innervate to be effective.

@Mirajj, I don't disagree with your statement. In fact I addressed it. Warriors don't have the dump. If you're not almost pulling aggro as a warrior you aren't pushing hard enough. No aggro dump. That is the great equilizer. And before someone brings up shamans they are suppose to be getting some buffs (to reduce) their threat, as they should. Besides other classes are NOT "only DPS" they also are CC/off heal/ support. The only way I CC on my warrior is a sword and board, which is where I was going with this post. To do that effectively you need certain abilities. Should we put sheep 31 points into arcane and banish 31 points into destro?I don't think so. :P

And I'll reiterate what I said to Oldmandennis, you want to be Uber, sorry, it isn't going to happen. What your asking for is to make Warrior the best period. You want to tank and do high DPS, how soon you forget with what Feral Druids were like early on in tBC and how they were rightfully nerfed. This is a road that should not and cannot be re-explored. The ignorance here isn't from me, it's from you wanting to have a god character. WoW, and MMORPGs in general, are ment to be a group game where you play as part of a team. If you want to play a character that can do everything themselves, go back and play Diablo (2).

[Taelas]

About the only changes I'd like for DPS warriors are a.) switching Improved Whirlwind and Blood Frenzy, b.) making Deep Wounds stack like Ignite. I never understood why Improved Whirlwind was in Fury anyway, and for raid DPS, Blood Frenzy owns.