New Talent Trees! What?

I have to confess. When I first heard about the fact that Blizzard was totally reworking the talent trees, effectively halving the amount of talents in the process, I was flabergasted. I'm not one that's normally against change. Though change for the sake of change has always been annoying to me. Of course, in practice I can see Blizzard's point. The higher the level cap, the more complex the talent trees become. And while Blizzard wasn't introducing a new tier of talents, having 5 more points to spend in the trees would require a rethink. The existing talent trees weren't designed around the possibility of having 5 additional points.

Now in practice, for some specs 5 additional points wouldn't be all that useful. But for others, 5 points would be a massive boost. Imbalances there would be inevitable. Which I figure is the main reason why Blizzard was planning such a major change in talents anyway. Of course, their plan now is quite a bit more radical. Characters will only receive 1 talent point every other level now. And talent trees will be smaller--more like they were at level 60. I assume that the trees will be simpler in design as well.

In some ways this change seems very similar in purpose to the idea of only increasing the level cap by 5 instead of 10. I assume Blizzard realized that an increase of 10 level every expansion would be difficult to sustain and lead to uncomfortable levels of bloat. Even a 5 point talent change in an expansion could lead to the need of a major revision. With the design now, characters will only gain 5 levels, and effectively 2 additional talent points. 5 and 3 with the next expansion, if they follow the same design.

It took me a while of thinking about it before I got to the heart of why I didn't like the change at first. You see, I was looking forward to the possibility of greater flexibility within the existing talent trees. By not increasing the depth of the tree, I was expecting to have a few more options on how to spec. It might make spec types previously worthless more interesting, depending on how they redesigned it. I liked the idea of that choice, and didn't really want to let that go.

Of course, in practice that was never going to happen. Talent Trees were already being reworked to such a degree that they wouldn't look anything like their current design. And those 5 points would have been planned for accordingly. And the Mastery stat itself would force people towards 51 point talents, making specs that don't go all the way down one tree even more useless than they are right now. The idea of an expanded tree with more options was a pipe dream from the start, and would never be realized anyway.

So, in the end I figure Blizzard is probably going in the right direction here. A shallower tree, and a more simplistic one at that, isn't necessarily a bad thing. Talent Trees have always been around the illusion of choice anyway--in practice, for each class/spec combination there are only 1 or 2 competitive options. And talent bloat itself will be reduced. Sure there will be fewer points to spend. But then again each individual point will be more valuable because of that. And if Blizzard follows through with the promise of getting rid of 'boring' stats (i.e. ones that just provide static boosts), and focusing on more dynamic talents that provide more interesting benefits, then a shallow, simpler tree might even lead to more actual choices than we have right now. We'll have to see, though. To date I haven't seen any indication that Blizzard is achieving this goal. But maybe we'll have a clearer idea when Blizzard actually implements the changes.