wow Revamped Talent System Coming in Patch 10.0

[Staff 1,488]

Blizzard is overhauling talent trees in their entirety in Dragonflight. Here is an in-development preview of the new Druid talent tree.

In the livestream, we caught a short glimpse of the new talent trees coming in Patch 10.0.

And here's the full blue post on it:

Talent Revamp (Source)

Another UI intensive project we’ve been working on is an update to the Talent system. We wanted to look at it once more and find ways to provide players with more choice in shaping their character’s abilities. Currently, as you level up, you receive new spells and skills, but that progression and ordering is entirely predetermined. So, we started looking at creating a system that would provide players with a wider set of options.

One of these ideas that we returned to was that of trees. In this case, it’s actually two trees. One tree focuses on class utility while the other focuses on specialization and the expression of your role whether that’s doing damage, tanking, or healing. We want choosing your specialization to be important and want to make sure that when you choose it, it affects the tree in some way.

When you look at the new tree, you’ll notice the class side will have some abilities filled out for free to get you started off in the spec you’ve chosen, but then you’ll have your first point to spend in the class tree which could be something related to that spec or it could be something from elsewhere in the class.

We wanted to make sure that the new system allows players to take combinations of spells and abilities that may not have been possible in the game before. This opportunity also allowed us to inject more art and fantasy into the actual Talent UI itself.

We want players to be able to tinker with the trees and make a lot of changes while not necessarily feeling like you must fully commit. The power really is coming back to the player. It’s not something we want people to feel locked into and so one of the things we’ll be preserving is the ability to change talents at the same kind of frequency as they do now. Players should easily be able to go from their raid night to playing arena matches by taking advantage of a new feature that allows them to save and load their build. They’ll be able to name it, save it, then load it up very quickly.

Talents really are about having a breadth of options and we wanted to give players the ability to hold the building blocks of what make up their class and spec and put them together in a way that works for them.

This is only a first preview of what we are working on, and we are looking forward to hearing more about your thoughts.

[MeMy10 26]

Interesting to see the return of the talent tree system..

[Arcling 898]

It's different from what we had before and looks quite interesting, but is it really going to change that much? Many choices, although sites will quickly figure out which builds are good, people are still going to complain (or insult) about others playing with their own builds. Also, it's even harder to balance. Having one tree tied just to class (not spec) could also potentially make specs feel more similar to each other.

[Q 200]

I like the idea of this but it isn't going to stop people from making meta builds that just about everyone will follow.

[Prophet001 598]

This is gonna be crazy.

Sim makers are having a heart attack right now LUL

[Prophet001 598]

9 minutes ago, Q said:

I like the idea of this but it isn't going to stop people from making meta builds that just about everyone will follow.

People don't like to think for themselves.

[Prophet001 598]

The art looks soooo sooo good though for the zones.

I'm stoked.

[Q 200]

17 minutes ago, Prophet001 said:

People don't like to think for themselves.

I don't think it is solely that people don't like to think for themselves but there's a lot of theorycrafting that goes into the nitty gritty bits of how talents can make a 1% difference and things like that and while that's fun for some people, for others it just goes over their heads.

[Ragingwolf 310]

Interesting concept however, no matter the system either it be simple or complex will solely revolve how well the player can utilize and synergize with it and their character in a specific gaming setting from open world, PvP, dungeons, and raids.

When I look and read from this article I think to myself that this could be fun with the paths that I pick for my character then I frown when I realize that opening up the pathways will most likely be timegated like the soulbinds in SL for several grueling weeks to even feel somewhat optimal.

[Arcling 898]

21 minutes ago, Ragingwolf said:

When I look and read from this article I think to myself that this could be fun with the paths that I pick for my character then I frown when I realize that opening up the pathways will most likely be timegated like the soulbinds in SL for several grueling weeks to even feel somewhat optimal.

So far, there is no word about such system. Talent points will be gained every time we level up, so they aren't like soulbinds.

[Prophet001 598]

38 minutes ago, Ragingwolf said:

Interesting concept however, no matter the system

This is the truth.

It doesn't matter what they make someone will say "do this b/c this" and people will do it.

If you watched the WF race at all you could see people like Firedup trying all kinds of talents and specs and combinations to see what worked best. Joe WoW player will just choose "meta". Whatever that means.

[Migol 433]

The real problem Blizzard has isn't "meta" specs, those will happen regardless.     But even in the MoP system...Blizzard has been woefully unable to create a good balacne to choose from.    There's always some awful, wretched "How did this make it out of beta" talent that noone ever takes.     That problem is magnified a lot with the trees this size.

[jinsu2301 273]

Regardless of whether or not it actually offers true choice, bringing back individual points is a good idea. Getting to spend a point after you earned it for leveling up grants a sense of progress and meaning, even if the end result is the same.

Your dad buying you an icecream cone is neat, but your dad giving you money to buy yourself an icecream cone is whole different experience.

[Silencio 0]

20 hours ago, Arcling said:

It's different from what we had before and looks quite interesting, but is it really going to change that much? Many choices, although sites will quickly figure out which builds are good, people are still going to complain (or insult) about others playing with their own builds. Also, it's even harder to balance. Having one tree tied just to class (not spec) could also potentially make specs feel more similar to each other.

While this is true, people will want to min-max, it is largely a good thing to give people choices in HOW to play. If you want to min-max and are in a guild that does that type of progression then you can. The flip side of that is there is a large large amount of people who like to play "off" specs or non-meta builds and with their creativity who knows how well some builds can scale.

And your "harder to balance" argument is a good thing. I personally long for the day of class identity. 

[Arcling 898]

3 hours ago, jinsu2301 said:

Regardless of whether or not it actually offers true choice, bringing back individual points is a good idea. Getting to spend a point after you earned it for leveling up grants a sense of progress and meaning, even if the end result is the same.

True, but cookie cutter build won't disappear. It's mostly adding extra steps to them, perhaps even more players now might look up guides online, since they won't like to bother with so many points to distribute.

I just hope most important abilities are still standard and we won't have situations like "I didn't spec into interrupt" or "I didn't spec into dispel". Also talents should be interesting, not something like +1% damage to 1 spell.  

[Carradin 4]

On 4/19/2022 at 7:07 PM, Q said:

I like the idea of this but it isn't going to stop people from making meta builds that just about everyone will follow.

But besides of Meta Builds there will and I hope with a good value to it more options and variations like it was or is in the "classic days" like skilled debuffs for raid support etc. 
It's done when it's done™