Comments on: My take on new Cataclysm Talent Specs

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 05:48:43 +0000

There’s a very simple reason touched on by your first commenter. They HAVE to release interim builds. And not just for QA of the interface itself. Sure, they may know that X talent isn’t really ready or that Y talent may be a little OP. What they DON’T know is how players are going to spend their points, which talents they will or won’t pick, and how they all work together. The only way to see how each talent point interacts altogether is to have beta testers … well .. testing them out.

Also, while they may know a specific talent is underpowered or not exactly right, they want that interaction with other talents and differing builds to know HOW wrong it is. How to scale it properly in combination with everything else. Number crunching can only go so far and they need real people to give it a spin.

That being said, you were right by not commenting on them. They didn’t release them to be analysed in isolation (they can do that themselves). They will change, there will be alterations, things will get dropped or added or transformed beyond recognition.

By: lokyst

lokyst — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:24:32 +0000

Just playing devil’s advocate here, but technically Blizzard did not “release” the new talent trees for consumption by the general public beyond providing a glimpse at the general UI; that would be the fault of the fan sites that datamined the info.

Currently the trees are so broken in beta that it’s not even possible to get some talents if you’ve trained the spell at the trainer, so my guess is they released the beta with the changes in place so that the testers could comment on the UI, not the talent trees.

That said, I agree that it’s a complete waste of your time to comment on the talent changes at this point.

By: Nimizar

Nimizar — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:43:38 +0000

Lissanna over at Restokin actually posted some interesting ideas for rearranging the first two tiers of all the druid trees to be a bit tidier and more appealing for all three specs.

@Moonra: if you mean Swiftmend, all Resto druids get that when they choose to specialise into the Resto tree at level 10 (or whenever they respec).

By: Nimizar

Nimizar — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:40:34 +0000

In their defence, this build *did* open up WPL, Deepholm and the Stone Core for testing. I expect getting that content out to the beta players for testing was their real reason for pushing the build to the beta server and the criteria for the talent trees was “will the beta players be able to put a spec together and actually play their class?”

That said, I think they’re getting some useful feedback on the more finished classes (like warriors) and druids were explicitly listed as “really not very done yet folks” in the build patch notes.

By: Rowtan

Rowtan — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:19:23 +0000

LOL … I KNEW you couldn’t resist it. My OH is a tree druid and he wasn’t much impressed either – I’m refusing to even look, because otherwise I’ll end up feeling like you do now!

By: Moonra

Moonra — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:03:51 +0000

Main restodruid here and yes, it took me a while to view the new builds cause of massive traffic on mmo-champ and my old browser at work but when, after a spending a lot of time trying, go it up i felt it was a waste of my time.

It’s nice to see where they want to go with this but I’m a bit scared, the former Beta tree’s were a bit to much maybe. But where are all the amazing talents? Ye we get a few but where’s my instant rejuvenation heal? haste talents? cast time reduction stuff?

Blizz said that fire mage is more complete that some others, but I do believe they are missing a lot of stuff to..

I’ll wait for more finished content before I write a review on the new talents

By: thrinetu45

thrinetu45 — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:57:28 +0000

agreed on the druid talents, its insane.

By: Fobok

Fobok — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:28:44 +0000

During software development and testing, unfinished things are released all the time, not for the press but to get them out there and being tested. Right now they’re not caring whether the talents are all correct or balanced, right now the important part is getting the UI right, making sure it does give you the spells you’re supposed to get when you select a spec no matter what the conditions of timing or how you click or heck, there’s probably some tester out there picking a spec as they’re being pummeled in combat. That the whole thing doesn’t crash the game as soon as you bring up the talents panel. (Well, ok, I’m sure internal testing discarded that last bit, but you can never be sure.)

So, you’re right. Don’t waste time analyzing the talents, they’re definitely not ready yet. But also don’t be mad at them for releasing something unfinished until Cataclysm ships and there’s still showing signs of being only 85% done.

By: bigbearbutt

bigbearbutt — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:23:56 +0000

No, wait, I lied. I can’t let this go. I’ll keep my damn mouth shut about every other class, and every other spec, but WTF is up about the entire first tier of restoration for Druids being either for other specs, or for ALL specs?

Hey, they’re nice talents, but is this REALLY the best you could come up with for making the first point in the Restoration tree feel like you invested an actual valuable point in Restoration?

Damnit, no, I’m shutting up. They do not deserve my giving a shit. They do. not. deserve. my caring.