Everyone who is mildly interested in WoW might have noticed that the Alpha has started, talent trees are being released, new Alpha builds are released, and so on.
On the one hand I’m following the topic with a low amount of interest, but for example last night I looked at the Warrior Talent Tree and my interest instantly vanished. So many talents, I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to spec out a good build – but then again history has shown that not all talents that sound good are indeed good and ones that sound bad aren’t secretly good. Maybe I simply can’t muster up the hype for any of this anymore. If I read about this, I want to play it, but I don’t like playing Alphas or Betas either. Maybe I should simply stay away from the topic?
That said, I’m moderately looking forward to the new expansion – but I wouldn’t say I’m excited or even hyped. Maybe I’m old and boring but I guess I’ll just take a cookie cutter spec and then change the 2-3 things that annoy me, more of a top-down iterative approach over a bottom-up creative one.
This is Blaugust 2022 – post #6.
In the case of Retail the Alphas or Beta would do me no favors, as I wouldn’t have a frame of reference in Shadowlands to stick with. And to be fair, I’m familiar enough with talent trees –and the corresponding guides that Wowhead will inevitably put out– that I’m not too concerned about it. I have been thinking that it would make sense to level a toon from scratch just so integrate the new systems into my head like I used to do in Retail, but that’s a decision I’d make after the most obvious one: will I play Retail when Dragonflight releases? And that I have no answer for at this time.
I mean I don’t see a huge problem there – some people just love to crunch these numbers and experiment, but I can’t imagine a more boring task for myself, but it’s not killing my enjoyment of the game if I start with a good spec and tweak it. Also kinda weird that I could memorize the Rogue talent tree (and my picks) in Vanilla and TBC, but when I respec my Warrior from Raid to M+ every damn week – the only way I can remember is “3313331” vs “2123321” and even there I had to look up the second one to be sure (1 is first column, 2 is 2nd, 3 is 3rd).