Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="dm4hire" data-source="post: 5119333" data-attributes="member: 14848">I recently got back into playing World of Warcraft and for those not in the know there is suppose to be an expansion coming out this year which will increase the level cap from 80 to 85, introduce new features, new races, and change the world.  The name of the expansion is Cataclysm.  Think Dragonlance or the more recent Spellplague for the Forgotten Realms and you’ll understand the importance of what this expansion will do to the game.  My point in bringing this up is that one of the aspects that will be changing is how their talent tree system will work.  From what I’ve read I’m wondering if Blizzard is finally getting something right that RPGs still haven’t got a full grasp on.  Here’s the gist of what’s going to change.Once you reach level 10, you start gaining talent points for your character which can be placed in to one of three talent trees or specializations for your given class.  I primarily play a paladin so I’ll use it as my example which has the three trees of Holy, Protection, and Retribution.  Holy talents increase healing abilities, Protection increases armor, and Retribution increases damage.  Before this pending expansion the only way you can gain benefits from another branch is to spend points in the secondary or tertiary talent branch of your choosing.  The problem is that it weakens your character to some extent.  Cataclysm is going to change that.  You can still spend points on a secondary or tertiary branch if you want but you’ll no longer need too.  Why?  Because starting with the next expansion when you focus on a given branch you’ll automatically gain a slight increase in the other areas.  If you want to be better, than the default for your focus, in those other areas then you will still be able to spend points in the respective branch.  The improvement is that you will no longer need to by default.  Am I making sense?The point I’m getting at is most RPGs break down when a given class (or character) tries to fill more than one roll.  The player either designs the character from the ground up to fill multiple roles or multiclasses to try to fill the gaps.  Multiclassing in the past was the end all way of trying to meet that challenge head on.  Nothing was doe to address it until recent games with 4e being a good example.  WotC actually for the first time tries to address the roles a member of a party fills, but they don’t take D&D far enough if you think about it which I think is part of the initial complaints.  Even in 3.x if you played a ranger as an example you chose either to be a ranged or melee based character.  The crippling comes in having to choose feats to make up the difference.  Then if you wanted to heal or do another aspect not directly related being a ranger you had to multiclass.So you see just as in the current version of WoW you have to invest your feats or skill points outside your focus if you want to cover or fill more than one roll within a party.  People just don’t do one thing in life, they might have a single focus, but they still function in most other areas.  So the question is; is Blizzard starting to get the design right while RPGs are still stuck with the single focus mentality?  If so; how could RPGs adapt to correctly portray this?  Should feats and maybe skills perhaps offer more than just one thing?  Thoughts?</blockquote>

Verification