Make useless talents useful !

[Heroclastus]

Hello everyone,


every time I look at my talent tab in the game I think about how some talents are objectively terrible
and even the most niche build will do better picking a different talent.

Wouldn't you agree that tweaking said bad talents a bit so they actually worth a consideration when building your character would help diversify them?

I'll go down class by class and mention the worst offenders from each talent tree and update gradually. Feel free to comment and tell me what you think are underpowered talents :


Rogue:

The main problem here is that the 31 point talents in Assassination and Sublety are not good enough and almost never taken - neither in PVP nor PVE. The 21 point talents in all trees on the other hand are extremely good

Assassination:

- the 31 point talent vigor: doesn't really do anything as 10 energy is not enough and doesn't change a lot in long fights as energy reg is not affected - buffing this to 20 energy would make it more useful I daresay. Both 21 talents in combat and sub tree are way more powerful - taking those in the current state is always better.

Combat:

- Lightning reflexes: is almost never taken as improved SS and impr. gouge offer better returns. Perhaps buff this talent to a 3 pointer with 1/3/5 or 2/4/6 percent higher dodge chance.

Sublety:

- Sleight of Hand: in the wrong tree wor the threat part (which isn't worth it). Perhaps give feint a small buff to decrease damage taken for a short while (20% less damage taken for 2 or 3 seconds) after cast.

- Improved Sap: this talent is good - i just feel 3 points should give you a fail safe sap (so 100 % chance to stay in stealth )

- Setup: the premise is good but this is also seldomly taken as most ppl cant spare the points. Buff it a little, make the CP on spell resist 100%.

- Ghostly Strike: a lot of ppl don't take this talent. The biggest problem to my understanding is that this skill always counts as a hit even if u miss the strike (the buff apparently does this) so you never get the energy refund if u miss. Make the buff only appear on a hit and refund energy on miss would be the most common-sense solution.

- Deadliness: the main problem with this talent is that others in the same tier (Seal fate and expertise/aggression) are far better and the follow-up - premedition is rather weak. A change to 2/4/6/8/10% or 3-15% more agi could make it more appealing.

- Premedition: as said this talent i rather weak for a 31 pointer. Perhaps make the premedition target take 10 % more damage for some time after leaving stealth (6 seconds or so) or during the premedition duration (for everyone - like a death mark) would make it a more attractive.


Hunter

Hunters have quite a lot of good talents but also very weak ones (Spirit Bond, Pathfinding, Impr. Scorpid Sting) or one that are gimmicky at best (Improved Eyes of the Beast).

Beast Mastery:

Improved Eyes of the Beast: waste of points. Naming it "Beast Soul" and adding improving scare beast (5/10 more seconds, less resist, less cd) would make it at least decent. Could also reduce the time to tame a beast which is nice but rarely used.

Improved Aspect of the Monkey: Also very situational, as 5 points for 5 % dodge is okay, but you need to have the aspect activated which kills it. In PVP you'll often get jumped and cant change the aspect in stun lock or when feared. Change to 5% dodge in general and reduce mana cost of aspects by 20/40/60/80/100 % . Name suggestion: 'Aspect Dancer'.

Improved Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack (Pathfinding) : also quite bad. Perhaps add general movement speed bonus to you.

Spirit Bond: the heal over time is very low and hardly noticeable. Increase healing received for pet (and possibly you)
by 10/20 % so it buffs mend pet and helps keeping the pet alive.


Marksmanship:

Improved Arcane Shot: quite bad. Arcane shot has bad scaling but nonetheless finds itself in a raid hunters rotation. Add a chance (20/40/60/80/100 %) to dispell one effect against other players to give it a better use. Or give some spellpower based on attack power (or intelligence) so this scales a bit like in TBC. This would also help alleviate the quite stagnant power increase of hunters the further one progesses in raids.

Improved Scorpid Sting: Scorpid Sting is bad to begin with and this talent doesnt make it better. Merge this into improved stings which affects then could affect both serpent and scorpid sting.


Survival:

Improved Feign Death: One does't have the points to spare for this normally as FD is resisted rarely as is. Bake it into Suvivalist with 1% less resist chance for every point into survivalist.

Both Slaying talent in first tier: Merge them to a 5 pointer to increase damage/crit damage against tracked targets (improved tracking) by 1/1.5/2/2.5/3 %.

Wyvern Sting: this is normally not taken as the main contestant -scatter shot - does similar things but much better and more reliably with lower CD and no OOC restriction. Removing the OOC restriction and possibly lowering the CD would make this more useful.


Priest

Priest is well designed and I wouldn't change a lot.

Shadow

Improved Fade: this talent stinks and nobody i know ever took it - its quite common for healers to draw aggro but this is much too far into the shadow tree to be worthwhile. Since you're fading, give attacks/spells on you a chance to miss you (5/10 %) for 6 seconds or increase your movement speed would make it at least a consideration.



Warlock

The Demonology Tree has some bad talents which doesnt make the tree bad but one with few choices.

Demonology:

Fel Domination: this talent is good but 15 mins CD seems excessive for what it does. 5 or 10 mins for an instant demon summon seem more appopriate.

Improved Enslave Demon: this very rarely comes to use and uses up up to 5 points for that to boot. The investment ratio is off if i daresay. Make it a 2 pointer for the same gain and leave it at that.

Improved Firestone: the fire stone sucks as it is and this might be the worst talent in the game. Making the fire stone an item similar to a grinding stone to buff your weapon with would make it a little less horrible.

Improved Spellstone: i dont have a warlock at 60, please tell me if this is any good. Afaik you can use it to absorb magic damage.

Mage

Fire and ice Trees are mostly good, arcane CAN support other specs but has quite a lot of underwhelming talents.

Arcane:

Arcane Focus: spell hit is good but there aren't any arcane spells you would want as primary damage spells since they are too mana consuming. AE, counterspell and poly resists are bad in pvp but even there 2/5 points is enough. Merging it with improved arcane missiles (which is useful in certain situations/pvp) could help.

Magic absorption: the premise is good but the 10 resistance doesn't help and full resists are quite a gamble. Perhaps tie the mana-restore to the degree of resist,e.g.if you resist 1/4 you get 1% mana, if you resist 1/2 you get 2% mana, full resist 4% to make it proc a little more often.

Arcane Meditation : 15% mana reg is low (I know other classes get the same), perhaps buff it to 30% to support going down into this talent tree.


Shaman

The enhance tree has some problematic talents which probably stem from the time when shammy was planned as a possible tank.

Elemental:

Elemental Devastation: tell me if I'm off but in TBC this wasnt consideredd worthwhile since it procced not enough since spell crit wasnt high enough for a melee focused shaman. Making this a proc on general offensive cast would make it better (3/7/10%).


Enhancement:

Improved Lightning Shield is quite bad as Lightning shield doesnt do a lot of damage and has to be recast very often. Making this give more LS orbs (3/5/7 more orbs) would make it considerably better.

Anticipation and Toughness are both pretty bad and dont offer enough to be worthwhile. Increase the bonus or merge them.

Stormstrike increasing nature damage to the target by 20 % for everyone for a set time (e. g. 6 seconds ) could make it better as a support ability.

Druid

Druid has mostly well designed trees with only very few inferior talents. Balance druids have mana issues, should remedy that.

Balance:
Improved Entangling Roots and Improved Thorns whereas the latters damage isnt really worth it. Improved Entangling Roots is overshadowed by natures grasp if u need someone rooted as it roots very fast and allows for bear form instead of getting beaten trying to cast entangling roots.

Also add some mana efficiency, ideas are: omen procs on damage spell, wraith and starfire proc with buff to reduce mana cost of one another, mp5 component to moonkin Form.

Feral: Feral Aggression is the most skipped talent here as others are simply better.

Paladin

Protection:

Redoubt: the proc only going off on receiving a crit is the main draw back here and goes against tanks gearing up exactly to NOT get hit by crits, the talent anticipation actually anti-synergizes with this talent which should never be. Changing it to proc on taking damage, on a successful block/dodge/parry or proc when under a certain health threshold could all make this more reliable and could make paladin tanking more viable.

Perhaps add a mana recharge proc on blessing on sanctuary (when blocking) or to holy shield block.


Warrior

All in all warrior has a good design but a few talents don't do much and aren't viable. Also some are quite poorly placed and force you to take them even if they won't have much effect (Enrage for PVE fury)

Arms:

Improved Thunder Clap: not particularly good as the 3 rage decrease for 1 ability is not much and it isnt an ability you really spam. Increasing the radius or allowing it to affect more targets MIGHT make it better. I have no better idea here :(

Fury:

Improved Cleave: the percentages sound like a lot until you realize its only the BONUS damage not the entire ability damage. Giving it a chance to crit, increasing the general damage of the ability, reducing rage cost could all be better than the current state.

Enrage: WHAT? Enrage ?... well, the slight problem here is you have to invest 5 points here to advance to flurry. Its good in PVP as you will get hit and crit often, but for PVE where you dont want to get hit (or dont get crit by regular mobs)its a bit wasted. Changing it to a chance proc on general physical damage received, proccing on taking a big hit (>25% (50%) of your (base)health could make it a bit more rounded for both PVP and PVE.

[Wenzel]

While I haven't thoroughly checked every single gripe on here, I'd argue that many of these talents are a lot more useful than considered.
This is an extensive list, and changing all of this would drastically change the meta, or so I fear.

Something like Elemental Devastation is incredibly powerful when you have an Enhancement shaman spamming Frost Shock.

That 10 extra energy for rogues is massive, I almost picked up this talent myself but went for hard combat(SS) spec. Lightning Reflexes is really niches, and super useful if you're fighting melees that aren't warriors with imp overpower.

Improved Fade is usually worth it unless youre a really well geared Shadow Priest who gets aggro super quick

The Hunter talents you pointed out are already incredibly powerful and changing them would likely make Hunters even stronger than they already are.

Generally speaking I don't think changing the talents will improve how we play the game.
If we do, we would need to change more than just the talents at the end of the day.

[Heroclastus]

Thanks for the response Wenzel !


As I said in the post I'm a bit unsure about Elemental Devastation. As with a lot of the talents one of the main problems is that they are often pitted against something that is better in lower tier in a different tree making them a bad choice.

The example I already gave:

The 31 point hunter talent Wyern Sting has a long CD, can only be used out of combat (why ?) and is range restricted making it difficult to get someone off you even if you used feign death. So its really only usable as a combat opener or OOC long range CC. Additionally the DOT can be detrimental as you would have to scorpid sting to keep a trap from breaking. Things keeping Wyvern Sting from being a viable choice : (long cd), OOC requirement.

Scatter Shot - 21 points in the marks tree - can be put to similar use and has a much lower CD, can be shot in close range, can be shot in combat, can be used to interrupt casts and doesnt give a dot ,so scatter shot trap is a lot to use easier than wyvern sting trap and I think 95% of hunters will agree that its the superior talent choice of the two --> so there is actually no choice but the illusion of one, as both abilites are not balanced against one another.


I disagree with you saying 10 energy (vigor) for rogue is massive, you even say you nearly picked the talent and went with something else which actually kinda supports my case :) I played vanilla back in the day and vigor was nice with t1 to get 120 energy for ambush-backstab but wthout t1 it didnt really give any benefits. With only 10 bonus energy cheap shot (60 energy)-backstab (60 energy) isnt possible: it would afford you an untalented SS after cheap shot which is silly (60 +45). Garotte backstab is possible with this (50+60) but thats about it.

The main point here again is that taking vigor keeps you from taking blade flurry or preparation which are both unquestionably better. It also keeps you from taking Dirty Deeds which may - and this is up to debate - do a better job since it just cuts the costs of two openers by 20 energy thus giving you more energy in the moment it counts the most.


Don't get me wrong I can undestand the worries, I think a server like this could be a great opportunity to make specs truly balanced and with more choice and individualism without adding tons of new spells and such. Some of the suggestions i made are even what blizzard did later which didnt ruin the game (wyvern sting OOC requirement gone in TBC, vigor buffed to 20 energy [and moved up the tree iirc] at some point).

Alas, Id like to hear from more people what they think about an endeavour like this !

[Heroclastus]

Bump. Sad that nobody writes here.

Edited OP for better readability.

I'd really like to hear some (considerate) suggestions.

[Pompa]

Hello! I really like some of your ideas, but you must know that at this moment we are very limited in regards of spell / talent modifications since most of the changes to them require custom client patches!

[Chilltools]

Hello! I really like some of your ideas, but you must know that at this moment we are very limited in regards of spell / talent modifications since most of the changes to them require custom client patches!

That's a shame I was looking into thunderclap skill for warriors at the moment it's at 103 lighting damage. I cough when to a nameless server not as good as the mighty Turtle WoW to see if it scales with magic or even nature damage which it doesn't oh well. Also, Cleave would be my pick to change but with whirlwind yeah save that for another day I guess.

[Heroclastus]

Hello again,

sorry to kind-of necro this post, but it seems custom-made client patches have become a thing.

I would very much still like to hear about any gripes any players have with talents and if

you agree with my suggestions or not !?

I tried to be as reasonable as possible to make builds potentially more interesting instead of the

all-known cookie-cutter specs.

Also: which warrior talents are awful ?

[Connelly]

That's a shame I was looking into thunderclap skill for warriors at the moment it's at 103 lighting damage. I cough when to a nameless server not as good as the mighty Turtle WoW to see if it scales with magic or even nature damage which it doesn't oh well. Also, Cleave would be my pick to change but with whirlwind yeah save that for another day I guess.

Thunderclap doesn't need more damage. It was made to apply a debuff, and that's fine. One could argue it needs more range (no), be able to affect more than 4 targets (eh... maybe?), cause greater threat and/or make it usable in Defensive Stance for tanking use (a decent idea, considering the stance dancing and rage cost involved), and the talent to either provide a greater rage reduction or do something different. But that can upset the tanking balance, with the warrior being the threat king, and this isn't a hill I plan to die on.

Improved Cleave could be be changed, as it's a very small increase in the bonus damage. But as said I don't think warriors are lacking too much in area damage, so I don't see it as a priority either.

I would very much still like to hear about any gripes any players have with talents and if

you agree with my suggestions or not !?

I tried to be as reasonable as possible to make builds potentially more interesting instead of the

all-known cookie-cutter specs.

Also: which warrior talents are awful ?

Most warrior talents are mostly fine, I think. I think there are a couple Protection talents that are a bit lacking (Improved Disarm only increasing the duration of the disarm in 1/2/3 seconds isn't particularly appetizing), but I'm not an expert in vanilla tanking.

About Fury. Improved Cleave was already mentioned above, and that's actually a bad talent. I don't have the numbers in my head but that's about a flat increase of 20-40 damage, independent of gear.
You could make a case about Blood Craze and Enrage being limited in use. BC is fine in PVP, helping against dots and rogues, and Enrage increases your damage a good deal. Both are useless everywhere else. But they aren't bad talents, they are just intended for PVP. One could find a way to make them more broadly useful without upsetting PVP (like allowing BC to be useful to tanks even with defense nullifying critical hits), but that might be too hard to balance and I'm afraid of messing it up.

Most of the Arms talents are functional at the very least. Mace Specialization is completely non-functional in raids, for instance, and people will raise an eyebrow if they see Mortal Strike occupy a debuff slot in a boss, so they tend to not allow the spec in raid. I made a post here about changes that could be made around the Arms spec to make it more desirable to bring it to raids, if you want to look at it for ideas, but I'm not sure if that's applicable to what you're talking about.

[Heroclastus]

Hi Connelly,

yes, I actually read your post about arms warrior in PVE. Wouldn't the simplest solution just be to make raid bosses immune to the mortal strike effect (if possible)or have a crafted item like a weapon chain or so to alter the ability (remove the debuff of MS and increase damage a little... as the debuff is quite important in PVP it wouldn't really be an option for PVPers) ???
I have to confess I'm not too avid a fan to introduce a load of items to make feasible an otherwise non-raid-feasible spec, IMO the basic talents should provide that for the most part.

Anyways back to the topic. My intent was adressing talents that dont have a place neither in PVP nor PVE. The examples you gave e.g. blood craze and enrage which have a place in PVP I would like to see unaltered, e.g.Improved Cleave on the other hand is objectively too weak and shouldnt be considered in PVP nor PVE in its current form.

Regarding rogues:
I read a suggestion somewhere in quite a lot of detail to swap the places of the 21 and 31 talents in assa and sub respectively and up vigor to 20 energy bonus. I went through this a lot in my head and think this could open up a lot of interesting possibiites while still not forcing you to go all the way to 31 in a tree to work well. I would like to hear opinions on this too.

[Connelly]

Wouldn't the simplest solution just be to make raid bosses immune to the mortal strike effect (if possible)

That would be the simplest way, yes. I'm *guessing* it would just need to make a change in the server database, in the table concerning the boss, and no other change would be required. But I ignored it in the basis that it wouldn't directly answer the issues inherent to the Arms spec itself.

or have a crafted item like a weapon chain or so to alter the ability (remove the debuff of MS and increase damage a little... as the debuff is quite important in PVP it wouldn't really be an option for PVPers) ???

This is not an idea I like, to be honest. Some people may not have the option to use different weapons for PVE and PVP, and in the end this is the same as what I proposed with a piece of gear you equip and then take off, with the difference that you're forcing it to be used always while the chain/enchant is applied. Not to say, the strange precedent of forcing a spec to rely its viability in one aspect of the game in such a way? How would you produce that chain/enchant? A profession? Now you're beholding that viability hostage for all those players who aren't running that profession. A skill in the style of conjure food/water? A bit convoluted. Reagent sold at a shop? Spell reagents have always been an awful and inconvenient way to allow the use of those spells, it would be worse to use them to enable a spec.

Let's be fair, at the very least it's not an elegant solution.

I have to confess I'm not too avid a fan to introduce a load of items to make feasible an otherwise non-raid-feasible spec, IMO the basic talents should provide that for the most part.

I took this approach because that's the way some previous suggestions have been presented and encouraged before. *shrug* Thing is, as far as I know that's not in the cards for this server, but I absolutely agree it should be something provided from the basic talents and it would be the most elegant solution.

For example, I won't give names, but I just recently became aware of what they're doing in another server with talent trees and it's amazing. Apparently it's all in beta testing still but I mean, just for the Arms spec:
the Impale line gets reversed, with Impale as the first talent, and Improved Rend becoming Maim, the increased physical damage debuff introduced in TBC, which already fixes half of the problems with the Arms spec.
2H Weap Spec gets buffed from 5% increased damage to 10% and Sweeping Strikes gets buffed from 5 stacks to 10. Mace Spec is changed to ignore armor scaling with your level.
A new talent to reduce the CD of abilities by 20%, and another to reduce rage costs by 20%.
Mortal Strike increases its damage against wounded targets (which might mean affected by the MS debuf, by Maim, or simply below 100% hp, though any of those cases are good enough), and an additional improved MS that reduces CD by 2 secs.
Improved Overpower gets 50% crit chance for revenge and 50% reduced CD on Retaliation for some improved tanking.

It all helps you work with the slower rage generation of Arms, makes MS actually useful and stronger in PVE, brings unique raid utility, and even some tanking without the need to go down the Protection tree. Meanwhile both Fury and Protection gets some interesting things for both PVP and PVE, like increased effectiveness the lower your health is for Fury, or increased strength and immunity to disease and poison the higher your health is for Prot. There's even a cheap T1 Fury spec that allows a small % of your base health regen while in combat; nothing life saving, but I assume it helps your healers in reducing their work pressure. Of course other classes are getting other things anyway (I'm seeing the mage talents being even more lethal against warriors) so it isn't like they're buffing a single spec alone.

Even assuming it's designed for a slightly different PVE/P content, It looks beautiful and reminiscent of the much more polished Warrior trees after TBC. I don't think TurtleWoW needs to do the same in 1:1, it's obviously an amount of additional work that they might not be able to spare time to focus on and I wouldn't hold it against them. But the idea similar general talent trees reworks would be interesting to the addition to the custom content, or even designed around such custom content.

Anyways back to the topic. My intent was adressing talents that dont have a place neither in PVP nor PVE. The examples you gave e.g. blood craze and enrage which have a place in PVP I would like to see unaltered, e.g.Improved Cleave on the other hand is objectively too weak and shouldnt be considered in PVP nor PVE in its current form.

Yep, pretty much.

[Heroclastus]

Hello,

thanks for the very thorough response Connelly. It seems you're quite a warrior fan

I too would like the turtle devs to take into consideration making more specs viable e.g. moonkin, arcane mage, deep sub rogue, perhaps even enhancement shaman tanking come to mind just by tweaking the talents a bit and making them worthwhile and/or enabling the spec to actually function.

As a server whose main points going for it are enjoying your levelling experience and roleplaying making more talent specs viable could have several advantages:

• lure in new players who want their favourite albeit dysfunctional spec to work without changing too much and keeping up the high quality of the server

• give more roleplaying possibilities - I for my part like roleplaying but enjoy an effective build too

• make levelling more interesting for experienced players, new/changed talents make you try out things differently from the beaten path

• Possibility to tie-in the restored content abilites with a talent, afaik theres not talent atm that does that, e.g. sub rogue talent (e.g. tied in with the not-worthwhile 'improved feint ' talent) which makes disguise more than just cosmetic (makes affiliated mobs not attack you or severely reduces their aggro range)

• Make absolutely uninteresting talents more interesting (shaman enhance tree comes to mind, allow 2h, allow parrying *yawn*)

I would like to hear from more people if this is something they'd like or not. As I see it the addition of 'Holy Strike' -probably the most impactful change up till now for it actually changes combat - for Paladin was quite positively received and breathed some fresh air into the Paladin.

[Heroclastus]

Added some Warrior talents and rewrote/added stuff in the Opening Post. Feel free to comment !

[Sheila]

This is probably not the right thread to post this as it's kind of off-topic regarding talents, but it would be cool if rogues could wield one-handed axes, although there are no talents that would make this beneficial in combat compared to using other melee weapons.

[Heroclastus]

Hello Sheila,

thanks for the response. Actually I suggested some tie-in with a talent in one of my other posts.

Racial Abilites for All Classes viewtopic.php?f=14&t=848

Improve bad Class/Race Combos viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1004

Allowing rogues to wield axes would just give more options as there are some 'hunter-axes' already out there which could be also wielded by rogues. Also i think it'd really fit dwarf or orc rogues (and look cool), axes for a rogue make more sense to me than maces, it's a blade weapon after all.

[Krokzogg]

Watch the vanilla designer video on creating the warlock class. (And firestone too)

Vanilla WoW Class Designer On Making Warlocks:

[Paw]

Why not just start a new post if u are promoting your channel? U needn't act like its a spam. Just put it in a place where it belongs.

[Paw]

I'm mind reader. So your reasoning is probably "There are no proper sub channels and it doesn't stick that way." /pray

[Paw]

Regardless... even if I am entirelly wrong I suggest you make a new thread with this topic!

[Krokzogg]

Why not just start a new post if u are promoting your channel? U needn't act like its a spam. Just put it in a place where it belongs.

This is not my channel. I posted this link to the video because I was searching the internet for interviews with the vanilla developers. To find out the reason for such strange warlock spells. And find out how the gameplay of this class was planned in general and what they wanted from the player. I recently found this one and only interview with a vanilla developer in video form.

I wanted to share it with people who are fixing problem areas and flaws in vanilla. With the developers of Turtle-WoW and with players who are also interested in the history of the warlock class. Is it bad?

[Krokzogg]

Regardless... even if I am entirelly wrong I suggest you make a new thread with this topic!

Thanks for the advice. I'll create a new topic.

[Paw]

Why not just start a new post if u are promoting your channel? U needn't act like its a spam. Just put it in a place where it belongs.

This is not my channel. I posted this link to the video because I was searching the internet for interviews with the vanilla developers. To find out the reason for such strange warlock spells. And find out how the gameplay of this class was planned in general and what they wanted from the player. I recently found this one and only interview with a vanilla developer in video form.

I wanted to share it with people who are fixing problem areas and flaws in vanilla. With the developers of Turtle-WoW and with players who are also interested in the history of the warlock class. Is it bad?

Not at all. It's very interesting. I read the firestone thread to an extent and I hope that they will be reinforced in some way. Ability balance and their math is not my field but if you can bring something to the table. Welcome!

[Heroclastus]

Hello,

Thanks for necroing my post from before the class changes Funny how many of the suggestions have actually made it into the game.