World of Warcraft is completely revamping its talent system – but is it any good? Our WoW Demon Cortyn has tested the system more closely.

The beta of WoW: Dragonflight has been running for a while now, and more and more players are flocking to the Dragon Isles. The PTR for Pre-Patch 10.0 is also live, so everyone can familiarize themselves with the new talent system to make up their own minds.

But is the new talent system really any good? Or are they all trivial options that just look like “more”?

I’ve been experimenting with various classes over the past few days and weeks, but mostly my focus has been on Priest and Demon Hunter. If the new talent system is any good, what are the pros and cons, I want to tell you here.

Many playstyles that work in theory

I’ll say it directly: I didn’t pay much attention at all in my experiments to whether a talent selection was the optimum in every aspect and competitive with other specializations. Instead, I just let my imagination run wild and experimented a bit with shadow priests and demon hunters – sometimes with good, sometimes with bad results.

Especially with the Shadow Priest, there were several ways to customize my character to my liking and allow for entirely different play styles.

The first one is quite simple: I tried to recreate the current Shadow Priest as it was played in Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth. It was surprisingly simple and even comes with some bonus effects, like a bit more madness generation.

For the second playthrough, I just tried to go with anything that sounded like “Old Gods” in any way. I went with “Idol of Y’Shaarj,” “Idol of Yogg-Saron,” and “Idol of C’Thun.” The short version of this is that I’ve been summoning some sort of shadow creatures almost consistently. Not just the Shadow Spirit, but several tentacles that cast effects on enemies and even a “thing from beyond” that fights for me. It made me feel more like a cultist of the Old Gods, constantly summoning creatures from the void.

For my third variant, I tried to revive an old playstyle that hasn’t been around since the days of Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm – namely, Thought Spike. It’s a pretty fast spell with solid damage, but it removes all the DOTs on the target. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the same way as it did back then, and you have to play Shadow Priest with DOTs mandatory. Thoughtseize, on the other hand, can be improved so that it often doesn’t consume the DOTs.

These were just three variations that made sense, at least at first glance, and definitely offered different play styles. While there was some overlap, it felt distinctly different depending on whether you were summoning shadow creatures from the void or just trying to maximize the damage of the DOTs.

These three variations were just variations of the shadow talent tree – I hadn’t even touched the general priest tree until then. This is because there are many different possibilities here as well. So even as a Shadow Priest, I can learn a whole bunch of healing abilities or even Holy Nova. With that, you’re not a full healer by any stretch of the imagination, but you can at least help out briefly when the actual healer is overwhelmed or waiting for a resurrection.

Nonsensical connections cause (slight) frustration

The downside is that the sheer abundance of talents occasionally leads to having to co-select things you’re not actually interested in. Often these are skills that build on each other and then it makes sense – but now and then it doesn’t.

Why do I, as a priest, have to skill “Body and Spirit” first to increase my running speed when using “Power Word: Shield” if I want to get to “Bind Undead”? After all, that’s an extremely important control effect that I definitely don’t want to miss. But the only way to get it is through a connection to “Body and Mind” – something that has absolutely nothing to do with tying up undead.

Such strange connections are not frequent, but frequent enough to be criticized.

I absolutely understand having to learn “magic banishment” first for “purify disease” – that has a clear connection, both have to do with removing effects.

But this is only a small point of criticism, which was probably also born mainly out of the need to somehow build the largest possible talent trees. There probably have to be some connections that don’t make much sense at first sight.

There is also criticism about the fact that in the class trees are sometimes absolute “must have” talents, which you need for the shadow priest, for example. The fact that there is a talent in my Priest talent tree that drastically reduces the cooldown of my Mind Blast restricts me unnecessarily – and I think that would have fit much better in the Shadow tree.

Skepticism that remains: What the community makes of it

My first conclusion of the talent system is pretty positive. It gives each specialization a lot of freedom, so two characters of the same specialization can play completely differently. At the same time, though, you have so many talent points that you can choose enough of the whole tree to not feel like you can’t combine the most interesting effects.

I’ll probably put a lot of time into the system to build some entirely custom builds – just to see how much fun you can have with it.

The only thing that really worries me already is the urge of a part of the community to emulate the best 0.1% of players and “kill” the fun. Because my great fear that in the end there will be only one or two optimal talent distributions per class is unfortunately already emerging. And that’s a shame, because the new talent system allows for a lot of cool hybrid skills.

But over the course of about 20 years, the idea of “simulating” everything in the game and getting the best performance possible to the last decimal place has become more and more prevalent – regardless of whether you as a player are even capable of playing in such an optimized way.

My big fear is that while in theory the new talent system offers a lot of variety and allows for a plethora of different playstyles of each class, in practice only one or at most two of them will ever be accepted as the current “meta”.

If the community doesn’t learn to accept the possible variety of the talent system as such, then there would have been little need to change the talent system. Of course, it helps immensely if you play with a tolerant group that doesn’t see every percentage point as necessary and also allows the freedom to simply try out new things – regardless of whether they are “meta”, but simply because they are fun.

If that succeeds, then the “new old” talent system is a big step in the right direction. Otherwise, it’s just an unnecessary complication.

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