Just as a broad question, do you think we need further ways to customize/optimize our characters outside of Gear/talents?

Something of a more permanent nature really intrigues me as anyone of a class can potentially have all the same skills as everyone else with a simple respec. It really becomes too homogeneous to a point, people respec for whatever is convenient, effectively having access to all class skills. It really ruins any sense of uniqueness, trade offs, or difficult/interesting long term choices. Though that being said I wouldn't want to change the talent system as it does work pretty well for what it's meant for.

Some examples:

Hero Classes- The idea was scrapped, but they could bring them back if only glorified sub-classes (1 per talent tree) which would give passive bonuses/new abilities based on whatever the hero class is. If it were a permanent choice, but still allowed respecs of your talent tree it could allow for some interesting gameplay mechanic changes, new spells, etc, giving you an edge for what you consider your primary role/playstyle while still offering talent respecs in case you need to change roles for the night.

AA point style system- XP at max level = stats. It doesn't so much customize your playstyle, but it would allow you to tweak your character outside of gear/talents. X xp for y crit rating, X xp for y stamina, X xp for y spelldmg, X xp for y strength, etc.

Epic Class Quests- Implement class specifics quests that can take weeks to complete. Quest rewards could be a choice of new abilities, of which you can only choose one.

Does WoW need anything like these? I think it would add to the game a certain level of uniqueness, specialization, etc.

You should check out the end of the Blizzcon speculation thread. It seems like that thread has currently run to this line of thought. I think the general consensus is that these sort of things would be received extremely well, but at the same time would be a bitch to balance in order to avoid the problem of an endless required grindfest to be competitive in PvE when re-rolling, or something along those lines.

I think the main issue would be balancing PvE encounters around the new mechanics. Currently, they can design an encounter assuming that the tank, for example, has access to every available tanking ability. But if there were say an epic Warrior quest that at its conclusion granted either a defensive or an offensive ability, would they have to then design all PvE encounters around the assumption that every raid will have a main tank that has that ability, when potentially they won't?

It's a very cool idea, but Blizzard has shown themselves to be very reluctant to make forms of character advancement that you are forever stuck with. Professions can be unlearned, talent points can be respent. Quest rewards are pretty much the only thing that cannot be undone if the player has a change of heart.

If there is further specialization possible, I think many would claim it's just another step in the min/maxing game. "I'm a prot warrior, so I have to take the prot ability/spend points on defensive stats in order to remain competitive as an MT. And now I can't even simply respec to be competitive in the arena if I want to."

I'd love to see additional ways to advance one's character, but I'd be leery of endorsing anthing that couldn't be undone. But I could be wrong - it add just the right amount of spice to the endgame by giving more depth to your character than simply "I'm prot spec".

I think that you're over-simplifying the differentiation between one character and the next.

If you're speaking from a purely high-level analysis of game-mechanic functions for combat, then yes, there is little to nothing to distinguish one character from the next (barring minor talent adjustments, gear choices, etc.).

However, if you deconstruct the game a little bit deeper, and incorporate some of the more flavorful elements of the game:

- Gear choices
- Socketing
- Enchantments
- Factions you've 'sided' with (Aldor/Scryer)
- Professions you've taken
- Profession 'specializations' you have
- Mount(s) you use
- Pet(s) you use

...and, as far as I'm concerned, that list goes on.

In reality, WoW is very much a combat-oriented game, and I can see where you get your perspective from. WoW lacks many of the more defining RPG characteristics we've come to appreciate in the core understanding of the genre.

If I were going to hazard a guess at what, if anything, Blizzard might potentially do to allow for more specialization/alternate advancement, I would expect to see more 'choice' factions or trainers that would allow you to distinguish your character a little bit further. For example, perhaps the Ashtongue Deathsworn have a sect of martial and arcane trainers, but you must choose whether you fight for Order or Chaos. The two sides may not be 'opposite', but merely inverse, much like the Aldor/Scryer distinction (although with a little more parity).

Take the Hunter class. Say a Hunter sided with the Order trainers of the AD (heh... acronym recycling... that takes me back...). That Hunter might be able to learn a new ability that would increase his attack speed marginally. That same Hunter could have sworn allegiance to the Chaos trainer, and gotten a minor damage increase (roughly comparable).

At any rate, to cut a rant off and make a long story short, I have absolutely no idea what they're going to do, but I think there's more in the game right now than we sometimes give them credit for, and there are very significant limitations to what they could add without undoing so much of the balancing work that they've already done.

The problem as stated is that Blizzard doesn't like locking people in to things. This is a lesson learned from previous games including for example Diablo where you were stuck with your specialization. People don't like to have to reroll because they made a noob mistake when they started.

Then your choice is to allow people to change whatever specialization they do or make it permanent. If you can change it then it just because an extension of talent trees. People will "spec" into whatever is figured out to be the most powerful specialization for whatever they're trying to do. If you make it permanent then people will be disgruntled that they are locked in and need to roll a new character whenever they want to make a change.

Making something that is basically an extension of the talent trees is not necessarily bad though. It is however very difficult to balance. Blizzard is still struggling to this day to make 27 balanced talent trees, or to even decide what "balanced" means in these circumstances.

Well, not adding a new class with TBC was a bad joke really. That would have been a good step to make things a bit more interesting. However they managed to make almost every spec viable. Paladin retribution is the only kinda useless talent tree atm that I can think of. Some classes got useless high tier talents (warrior, priest for example), but those trees still see heavy use, either in pve or pvp.
For raiding there's quite a few classes that can use all three talent trees even, so they managed to improve a lot there over the last 6 months or so.

They did add a new class with TBC.

Horde got paladins.
Alliance got shamans.

I think they should focus on making the current class/spec combo's that are non viable in pve and arena currently worthwhile before they add another class.

There are two things you need to consider when you're drawing this conclusion:

1. You already can choose between X, Y, and Z abilities. Being that you're here and proposing this, you've likely delved deep into the theory and mechanics of your class. You've sat and calculated ideal rotations, socketing choices, resist formulas, and every other miniscule detail behind your character. JoeWarlock is going to cast whichever spell appeals to him right then - you, on the other hand, will always open (and continue with) the exact same routine rotation.

If you had two perfectly equal abilities, with nothing separating them but the tooltip name, you would complain that they were redundant and irrelevant. The issue of 'choice', as you put it, is that you're playing at a level where your choices are governed by more than just simple enjoyment or interest.

2. When you describe 'giving up' having a pet or the ability to nuke, you tread a very fine line - a threshold I'm not sure WoW will ever be prepared to cross.

Imagine that you, as a Warlock, could truly forsake all direct damage abilities for DoT's and debuffs. Are you really a Warlock any more?

You give up your pet entirely for more crowd control abilities. What class are you, again?

The game is built around the notion of separating basic functions from specializations - in WoW terminology, skills from talents. If you started out as a level 1 peasant, and every choice you made resulted in you acquiring a skill, you would be playing a wholly different game, with an entirely different end-game, PvP system, and so on.

The talent system does a fair bit to separate you from your peers and make your character different. The reality is, though, that there's only so much that can distinguish you - eventually, there has to be a point at which characters are replicated.



Now, within that, do I think that Blizzard could improve the existing talents/skills? Absolutely. I think the addition of new and more powerful synergies in TBC revolutionized how we look at certain classes, and the flavor of the new talents added great distinctions to each class (for example, how different are three Warlocks when one has UA, one has a Felguard, and one has SF?). What is lacking are options to reach those ends - so in a way, I do agree that the talent trees could have more breadth to them, and there could be elements of customization that don't exist now.



Overall, I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. Instead of asking for 'more choices', which is what I get from your current angle, look for ways in which the existing model could be broadened, without necessarily adding any more complications via depth or specialization. What if you your talent trees looked just like that - trees? What if you had 8 or 9 options in the first talent tier? The variation between one Warlock and the next (pure min/maxing aside) would be phenomenal, but they would ultimately come to the same points, and you would still have 3 different flavors (with nuances within themselves) of Warlock.

/rant off.

Very much so. Hunters are just another dumb ranged DPS class for all intents now (albeit requiring far more focus on a raid to be viable,) their driving gimmick of "Safe DPS" rendered obsolete by threat meters and Zerg-DPS-beat-enrage-timer.

Shaman, of course, have been silly things with utterly incoherent class visions for a long while now. Every blood elf paladin worth a damn with free time is gobbled up by some guild or another, whereas draenei shaman are a more moderate trickle thats just sort of received as /shrug once the token shaman spots are filled. The shaman class, as it is, is just very unappealing to people and I see more people rolling it out of necessity than the situation for blood elf pallies, which people roll for need as well as fun, PVP alts, the whole gamut. (lvl 70 is 39,092 draenei shaman vs. 47,095 belf paladins, which becomes more accurately about 28000 shaman when weighted for population, a pretty dismal result for a "new class.")

When at least 2/9 of your game classes have either a broken gimmick or a narrow niche very artificially hammered out for them, it would be smarter to do *something* about them than attempt to add anything new. Further tweaking could happen from there, as well. I don't see anything horribly wrong with mages at this point, they're just boring and "samey." Its silly to expect that any class can perform well in any of its roles with just one set of tier armor choices, it reeks of poor class design, but thats the spot mages are at right now.

If done in a hero class form I would no longer be a Warlock, but rather a specialized offshoot of a Warlock. Blightlord, Plaguebringer, or whatever naming convention Blizzard could think up.

At this point I'd even take something like that. When discussing these things I tend to go to the extreme end, but smaller changes and nuances if properly implemented could be just as effective.

(Nice reply, BTW!)

I would be extremely happy with Warlocks becoming an actual debuff class that required something beyond throwing up a two or five minute curse and just DPSing after that.

They should allow you to lock yourself into one role and give you a huge benefit to do it.

Say they allow warriors to be "hero tanks' You become locked into Prot and get +5k to health permanently. Maybe even give you 1 chance to change your mind and go back to normal warrior.

Dumbest idea ever, or was this actually meant to be a joke?

Now let us suppose, for just one moment - and you mention balance with quite an amazing handwave - that Blizzard makes a mistake, and one of these specializations is strictly inferior (or perceived strictly inferior, as the two are functionally identical -). You're now an inferior invite for a competitive arena team/raid for the next four months until the next content patch hopefully fixes you.

What's worse - let's suppose that Blizzard intends one specialization to be PVP, and one to be PVE (or any other functional split you like) - regardless of the merits of that idea, but hey, it's not like talent trees haven't sort of leaned that way in the past so it's a really radical idea. Since you didn't wait for some daring souls on the EJ forums to do the research first, your character you've spent 20-100 days /played on is now perma-crippled (until there's a patch, of course).

Functionally, this all seems like a problem already addressed by the talent trees, and elegantly so - if there's a problem, well, finding 50g isn't as atrocious as re-leveling a new character, or canceling the account for 4 months waiting for the patch to make the one overlooked specialization in 9*(2, 3?, 4?) that you happened to pick balanced.

On the contrary, and I'm sorry if I'm going horrifically off topic, but I'm curious if less character customization (or rather, "lock in") isn't the order of the day. But that's probably the cynic in me responding to the fifth prot warrior retiring who said, "Sorry, I don't enjoy prot. I want to DPS."

That pretty much silences every question for more class diversity.

The classes as they stand now are designed around the content and the mechanics that changed since release - see threat meters. When the game is at the point, where every class is able to perform to benchmark values and they become interchangeble without penalizing the raid, than we can think about creating more differentiation. In times where even your average casual guild witnesses heavy flaws within class design, cause the content forces them to min-max to the limits, class diversity is no topic yet.

Creating even more niches for the existing design will render existing weak talent trees even more useless. When you can take Boomkins and Retribution paladins to your daily raids without second thoughts, if another class would be more effective, than this discussion becomes valid.

Class differentiation is one thing; forcing players to permanently specialize or get left behind is quite another. Honestly, how can anyone play *any* RPG's over the last 10 years, *let alone* MMORPG's, and think that permanent choices are a good idea? How many times has the flavor of the month class in WoW fluctuated from one class to another? Would anyone seriously keep playing the game if, for example, they specialized into being a "hero affliction warlock" before realizing that 40-man raid mobs had an 8-debuff limit? There are too many situations to count where technical pecularities resulted in one class suddenly becoming disirable or undesirable, and moreover, you'd have to be a complete moron to not see that high end raid content would have to be balanced around everyone in the raid being specialized into their particular niche.

Geez, anyone who has ever played a video game should know better. It's like a first person shooter where you used up all your rockets and grenades and then encounter a boss who's immune to everything except explosives, at which point you remember that you haven't saved the game in the last five hours. It's just universally bad game design to let players make serious mistakes that they can't possibly back out of.

I don't really think WoW needs more class differentiation or more classes for that matter - I, for one, would be happy with not seeing a new class, ever, though the latter wish is unlikely to come true if Blizzard stays true to prior MMORPGs.

Any irrevocable changes cutting a player off from some aspects of his class or turning his character into another class seems, as previously noted by several others, extremely unlikely to happen. Either people will make mistakes and some will be desperately unhappy without any recourse but leveling a new character or they will wait for somebody else to have made the mistakes and told everybody that "this is what you must choose". It also makes a hell out of balancing.

The talent trees actually perform the role of class differentiators very well on all except cutting edge-content. While there are cookie-cutter builds that are the best for certain limited purposes, there are many more builds that are viable - unless you are in a guild that requires absolute maximum performance for certain limited purposes. If you are in such a guild, it is unlikely that further potential differentiation would be treated differently - you'd be required to pick specific options. I'm aware that many posters on the EJ forums do live and play for such maximization but that is probably not the norm. And if, in the end, you make a mistake or change your mind, a respec is only 50g away - you can easily try other combinations of talents out.

An AA system/grindfest after maxlevel seems like a self-defeating proposition too, ever increasing the difference between characters based on the time they have played. The ability to fairly easily skip content with the help of some friends instead of being locked in a certain progression is one of its strongest advantages over older MMORPGs for the somewhat casual players that make up the largest part of the playerbase, and, at the same time, it helps the more hardcore players by making it comparatively easy to level up alts and get replacements.


One problem with the talent trees is that they provide a method for specialization, but by their tiered nature and general adherence to the "new abilities come fairly deep in the tree, i.e. if you are dedicated to this particular path and likely to go even deeper" principle, they also strongly encourage the formation of cookie-cutter specs and discourage truly wild experimentation: Why should I not both fart lightning and make funny sparks with a big hammer? Because making funny sparks with a big hammer requires a lot of talent points invested in earlier tiers of the "have fun with hammers" tree meaning that you'll be left with only a small fart of lightning. On the positive side, this makes it easier to balance, but it is a bit of a loss.


If WoW was to get a further layer of customization, what I would love to see would be something akin to LOTHRO's trait system. Hand out traits for doing quests, killing stuff, gathering, crafting, visiting instances, exploring the world, defeating bosses, whatever - in particular, remember to add hundreds that are not related to killing monsters. This would, for lack of a better word, strengthen the "world" feeling of World of Warcraft. Did I just get a "Novice Explorer: +4% running speed" trait for fully mapping 10 zones? (or +6% from "Great Explorer" for mapping 20 zones, replacing the old trait?) Give the player a certain number of trait slots (say 5-10, something manageable) and let him freely choose from any of his unlocked traits which to slot at any given time or give him, say, the possibility to go to a trait-trainer and pay 50g to set up to three different trait-combinations (from out of all of those unlocked) and the ability to switch between these three combinations whenever he's out of combat.

The two primary differences from Talents in this setup would be that the traits come with no preconditions of choosing other traits and that you can have traits doing the same things from different sources. (The "Great Slayer of Murlocs" trait (from killing 10000 murlocs) may give +25% resist vs. silence effects... but so too may the "Fortified Ears" trait that an Engineer can get). Likewise a +1% stamina trait might come from surviving many harrowing encounters, as a warrior specific trait all warriors get automatically, or as a reward for finishing a specific instance while doing a certain quest... The possibilities are endless.

By locking the number of trait slots it allows players to continue to increase in available traits (and hence in power or utility as future traits are added) for those who like spending time on "grinding new abilities" without increasing in power as a function of the number of traits unlocked. Sure, there'd be the risk of "über-traits" declared "absolutely essential" by min-maxers but it seems much less likely to backfire than an eternally-increasing-in-power AA system.

I suppose if you are completely against challenge, choices that matter could be an issue. I've had this general discussion with friends before, about the gradual "dumbing-down" of game design to prevent players from ever actually failing. It's a design philosophy, and Blizzard tries to tread the line, with respecs for money, durability and corpse runs, and class rebalancing. Do you advocate the ability to pay 100g and change your character into a completely different class? Why would we want to lock people into the class they chose over two years ago, when class abilities and roles have shifted dramatically in that time?

Class balance is not perfect as it is, and never will be. Does nobody else remember when warlocks were pvp jokes and you only brought as many of them to the raid as you needed imps? When Warriors had a Mortal Strike that worked on percentages? Seal of Fury? Rolling Ignites? No diminishing returns on ANYTHING? Caster itemization bereft of +damage, and melee itemization without +hit? 100% Illumination crit-stacking paladins? Class balance is constantly changed and tweaked. Any further specialization would certainly complicate balance, but to aoppose it on the basis of "But there might be imbalance" ignores the fact that there IS and WILL AWAYS BE imbalance. Opposing it on the argument that a player might have to make a choice which affects their character is similarly misguided because as I've mentioned, we've all made that choice at the character creation screen.

Except talent trees, where so many classes tend to run "cookie-cutter" builds depending on their preference for PvE or PvP.

I think having so many lackluster 41-point talents and so many cross-over talent spec tend to dilute the field.

Another easy fix would have been for Blizz to add an extra racial talent at 70. For example, Night elves get increased run speed while dead. But if they had minor run while alive, it would make things interesting Or gnomes have escape artist but if they became disarm-proof at 70 and so on, things would be slightly different but not game-breaking or overpowered or too radically different.

If gaining experience could allow you to gain stats after your level cap had been reached, how would that differ, in practice, from extending the actual level cap further?
I understand where you're coming from, but implementing this would mean that people who've already completed every quest available after level 70 (in TBC) would be in serious disadvantage to those starting out a new character or re-rolling one.

In my opinion, this would result in yet another time-sink, because everyone would "have" to complete it.
Further more, imagine you decide to respecc, as a hybrid class, and realize that the ability reward you chose at the time doesn't apply at all. Would you be forced to do the quest chain all over again?

I worry that these suggestions, be they new items slots, talent trees, or stat boosts fall into the upgrade-grind style that people are trying to get away from. The suggestions, both here and in Blizzcon Speculation; What can we expect? seem to be asking for putting more unique abilities whether they are added to items, extra talent slots, or stats. While that would be fun to theory-craft, it wouldn't help extend the life of the non-raiding game (check out Casual Progression for examples of why this is bad).

There are several deep balance issues in pvp that stem from racial abilities as well as many other fun non-raid ideas that could be re-built as character upgrades using existing mechanics. The simple fact that a large portion of my guild doesn't raid much, but still logs on every day to work towards an epic flying mount (many even got it!) shows that there is real value in non-directly-pve/pvp related content. Adding the ability to specialize what a character does outside of how they fight would be great. I'd love to be able to improve my farming ability, work on sub-quests that improve how well I gather resources, increase the amount of money dropped per mob, decrease my threat radius, or many other interesting mechanics. While it would be nice to separate set bonuses from the gear they're stuck on, or give more variety of trinkets (or relics or whatnot), I'd rather see a system that expands the World in World of Warcraft rather than the Warcraft portion (which is pretty solid at the moment).

Another design philosophy that I really disagree with is the placement of advanced crafting materials/recipes in high end raid dungeons. Making these things difficult to get is good, removing the possibility of playing your character as a crafter/small business owner is bad. In general, I (and I think others also) are a fan of solo (perhaps small groups of less than 5???) quests that are challenging but allow you to unlock facets of your character. As I mention in my previous paragraph, these are also places where advanced game mechanics could be taught to players (particularly in the case of class-specific quests). There is a LOT of enrichment blizzard can add to the game without being a slave to the raids-hold-all-advancement-opportunities syndrome. I find myself logging on less and less outside of raid times simply because--other than daily quests--there's nothing for me to do.

edited for content.