And I’m Back is a mini-series column dealing with the return to Azeroth after being away for so long. The series chronicles personal reactions to changes to discoveries and making the needed adjustments to the new Azeroth.
Naturally, I anticipated the fact that my favorite class, the sneaky rogue, would see a dramatic talent alteration along with every other World of Warcraft class. Heck, I attended the BlizzCon 2011 panel on the whole ordeal. Some fear change, but I welcomed the removal of “necessary” talents for a focus on customizing a playstyle with my talent points. Rogues still have the same core options, subtlety, combat and assassination, but those trees themselves don’t necessarily dictate how a rogue has to be played. The fabled “optimal way.”
Having been unshackled from completely expected playstyles for my rogue is a magnificent feeling. Clearly, each tree has it’s distinct reason for being, but there’s much more flexibility to create a personal experience within each. Not everything is a new ability that’s seen as required. Instead, I’ve been given a splash of new mixed in with a batch of modifiers. Want to focus on movement and personal damage reduction? I can easily do that. Rather I focus on deadly opening encounters and survivability? There’s a stack of choices. Straight damage and buff/debuffs? Also possible.
Granted, I fully expect some players to stick with the “You’re doing it wrong” mentality. If they’re being helpful, that’s fine. If they’re being trolls, then they (should) get ignored. Thankfully, the talent changes Blizzard made gives those that just want to be left alone to play their way the option, without being seen as newbies.
How do you like the talent modifications for your class?
I play a rogue too… and I feel that like every other expansion, blizzard has given us cool talents..
BUT, they are overshadowed by the other classes and their talents.
If we do happen to get something REALLY cool, the other guys end up getting that too :( and that’s not really cool.
This isn’t a case of “the grass is greener blah blah”, because I’ve played other classes with the new change and it seems like they can do MORE than we can… you know what I mean? It’s like they just have more interesting options when it comes to DPS… (Feral Druid especially)
I do like the flexibility from the new trees though.
With some of the classes, I feel that either the design team was designing the talents around 1) You switching your talents so frequently, or 2) Specific roles/specs/situations in mind. Especially with the Warrior I’ve found some of the talents (like level 30 & 75 for example) to be useless because of just how situational it could be. I use like only 2 out of 6 of my talents about 90% of the time.
Yay, rogues <3. I’m a little put out by the fact that we’re getting beat out by so many classes that aren’t “pure” DPS. But, regardless the new talents are much more intuitive and I like the flexibility we have without feeling so cornered into a specific cookie-cutter spec.
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