Omen of Clarity will be one of the new “must-have” talents for all Druids, proccing off not only melee abilities but spells of all types. Learn about the expected proc rate and estimated MP5 value of this 11-point Restoration talent.
Money sinks are a healthy aspect of any MMO economy, helping to reduce inflation by constantly removing large sums of money from the game. Mounts have traditionally been one of WoW’s main forms of money sink, from the 90 gold standard land mount at level 40 to the 5,000 gold epic flying mounts of Burning Crusade. But with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion looming on the horizon, one can’t help but wonder what the new money sink will be. Players won’t stand for having to spend another 5,000-10,000 gold on regaining the ability to fly at epic speeds again, even if it isn’t allowed until a later level, and there really doesn’t seem to be much need to fly faster than what current epic flying mounts allow. Which seems to point to the need for a new type of money sink. Since it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing player housing any time soon (which would be an great money sink as it’s one that could grow with your character), I’d like to share an idea that Mr. Phae and I have discussed: character Disciplines.
A character Discipline would essentially be a “talent template” system that would allow you to switch between two prespecified talent specs without incurring any cost for doing so. Here’s a basic outline of how this might work:
- Cost: 10,000 gold The cost would be prohibitively high so that it only becomes attainable once you’ve spent some time at level 80, much the same as the epic flying mounts take time to save for. 10,000 gold is twice the cost of epic flight training but is likely to be a more attainable sum after WotLK.
- Swapping Templates You would still need to visit your class trainer to swap templates, preventing players from changing at will. Once starting a raid or instance as one spec, it should be somewhat difficult to change specs midway through. (Of course, with a Druid Trainer in Moonglade, this wouldn’t be much of an obstacle to Druids.) Upon visiting your trainer, you would be prompted with “I would like to learn a new Discipline” (for purchasing your alternate talent template) or “I would like to make changes to one of my Disciplines.”
- Making Changes Once you have a talent template created, making changes to it would incur the same costs as relearning your talents now with the same depreciation over time (5 gold per month to a minimum of 15 gold).
This sort of system would be great for hybrids, allowing us to specialize in two different areas and, assuming we have the gear for both, select either based upon what’s needed that night. Imagine a world where suddenly Fury Warriors could click a button and turn into a tank (if you know many Fury Warriors, you may be going “EEK!” right now). Or a Boomkin could instantly change into a healbot. Or a Feral Druid could swap to Restoration to play her Arena games that week (although I certainly belive that Feral deserves to be Arena-viable in its own right). This would also solve the dirth of tanks and healers issue that tends to crop up in MMOs from time to time. Just imagine not having to make compromises on your spec to try to provide a good balance between two different avenues of play. Or being able to “respec” multiple times a day, depending on what you’re doing next. You could go to SSC for four hours with your guild then immediately switch over to your PvP spec and play in the Arena only to switch back and run a Heroic instance before bed.
Respeccing Shouldn’t be Trivialized
10,000 gold is not trivial. It’s essentially paying for four respecs a week at the maximum cost (50 gold) for one year. Under the current system, at the end of one year, you’d be faced with having to spend another 10,000 gold to continue playing. And while four respecs a week may sound like a lot, hardcore PvPers who also enjoy raiding (or who might if their specs weren’t so restrictive) might often have to respec four or more times depending upon the raid schedule of their guilds and Arena teammates. And if you think about it, there are already some classes that are fortunate enough to have specs that work well in PvE instancing, PvE raiding, PvP Arenas, and PvE solo play. Having the ability to have two talent specs available would make this option available to everyone without forcing them to incur 100-200 gold in respec costs every week.
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You “almost” got it there! I believe a better way would be to NOT have to go to trainer. I log onto my druid and someone wants me to tank: I use tanking gear and “switch” on feral tanking build; I log and someone needs a healer: same but this time with healing gear and talents.
Collecting two sets of decent gear will be enough of a money sink, and the “visit” to trainer (even if druids can do it in Moonglade and Teleport there, other classes would spend more time), is simply a waste of time. Have some cooldown, say a couple hours or so. And can’t switch if in the middled of an instance (actually, can’t see a big problem in doing it!). And even the cooldown could be much smaller, like 20 minutes or so. I mean, what’s the problem if now I’m a healer in healing gear now and in 20 minutes for another boss/part of the raid/innstance, I’m an off-tank?
That would ACTUALLY, make the druid class come true to it’s Hybrid feeling, where one could (decently) fill several roles as needed…
Oh my god. I would enjoy playing my druid SO very much more if I could fulfill the needs of healing in raids and groups and still be able to do things with my character besides waiting around for more things that need healing to come along.
I would jump through some considerable hoops to make this happen. I don’t want the world on a platter, I just want to be able to enjoy playing my character outside of groups because I have to be the healer.
Realistically, I can’t see this appealing to all classes the same way. Your hybrids, and people that tank/heal for groups would jump at the chance a lot more than say, a warlock or a hunter.
I love this idea Phea! It still is a huge time sink while at the same time benefits somthing many a class allways complains about (even thouge dailys have made this allmost obsolete anyway) it would still be a wonderfull convienence, espeshally for 2 particular guild mates that are known for respecing everytime you blink, hehe. I would post this on the WoW forums if you already havent.
@Someone: I’m worried that spontaneous spec switching wouldn’t be palletable by Blizzard. I think a better solution would be to require you to visit a trainer but to ensure that trainers exist in Shattrath and Northrend for just such a purpose.
@Kaera: Certainly this would appeal to hybrid players and healer players (who are all hybrids really since no one is limited to only a healing spec) than pure classes like the Rogue and the Warlock. Even so, pure classes can benefit from a spec that’s optimally balanced for PvP, a spec that often differs from their ideal raiding spec.
@Zackoria: Even with Dailies, I could see it taking a player 3-6 months to save up enough to purchase a new Discipline. And hile I generally consider the Suggestions Forum a gaping black hole where good ideas go to be ignored, I have taken your suggestion and posted this idea: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3268472067&postId=32333516928&sid=1#0 =)
We already have a time sink coming out in the next patch: Death Knights. No way will Blizzard make the quest for that class an easy quest. You have to be level 75 or even 80 to even start the quest.
If they follow the same route they did with many of the BC quests, they’ll make it so you have to be exalted with a number of factions within the quest line. That alone will create a large enough series to account for epic mounts x 2 easily.
I don’t need the need for talent templates. It doesn’t provide any benefits over the current respec system, not to mention, it’ll cost less for most people. I think average repec for people that constantly change is twice a week.
@Akia: Blizzard has said to expect the Death Knight quest to be similar in level of difficulty to that of the Warlock epic mount quest which I completed in a day’s time. Granted that was well after the quest’s introduction, but I don’t imagine that the quest for Death Knight will take more than a few days of dedication. While it may end up being a time sink, it probably won’t be a money sink on the level of the epic flying mounts, especially if it’s their intention to allow DKs the ability to level up alongside other players rather than a separate batch of tanking/dpsing/n00bcoiling players with little group synergy. (I actually meant to write “money sink” at the beginning of this article, not “time sink” although the two are often related).
I think that a talent template system would provide a tremendous benefit: you would no longer have to agonize over how much you’re spending to respec as you’ve already made the committment/investment to allow yourself to respec as often as you’d like. And while on average people that “constantly” respec may do so only twice a week, it’s probable that they would do so much more frequently if they had an option like this (I know that I would).
>> And while on average people that “constantly” respec may do so only twice a week, it’s probable that they would do so much more frequently if they had an option like this (I know that I would). <<<
And I think that’s the sole reason we won’t see this. Blizzard is trying to force people to 1 spec. That was the whole reason for the 50g respect costs. This was implemented before BC, back when gold was harder to farm: people were more inclined to remain one spec. Post BC, gold is so abundant, the side affect allowed for more switching of specs. I would imagine Blizzard would attempt making flipping specs harder, not easier, in the upcoming expansion (although, I doubt they would outright make an apparent attempt).
Plus, even if I was able to switch between two, I wouldn’t know which to goto. ^_^
My Feral dps gear is far better than my Balance gear, but my feral DPS sucks butt ballz.
It’s a cool idea, but there’s no way I’d do it at that price.
It will make raid composition harder. No go.
If you want to raid, you spec into whatever current raid needs. This is greatest money sink already. Time is non-important, it is 5 minutes at most.
Transportation has a lot of options. Look at luxury cars =) A lot of ppl grinded for Netherdrake, so it is just up to designers to make players want some Yellow Neon Sky Fish which will ride at 320% speed and allowing you to swim at 100% while allowing you to poo on opposite faction from the sky.
Or maybe some nifty trinket which allows you to port ppl, like warlock summon.
And remember that BoE epics still sells for thousands gold.
It seems like this change would actually make raid composition easier to manage. Looking at a 10-man (for simplicity’s sake), if you were to have 3 tanks show up, you probably couldn’t support all three. So one could volunteer to switch to his Fury DPS spec for the evening. If you had only 2 healers and a Shadow Priest, and you would normally be asking the SP to heal anyway, she might opt just to switch to her healing kit instead. You would have more flexibility, and this would really help less progress-oriented guilds (like mine) when it came time to filling in the raid since not everyone feels like they must “spec into whatever current raid needs” which I think is a philosophy more common among top-tier guilds (I think we even had a LOLSmite priest at one point >.<).
Oh, and I already have the ability to poo on people in bird form. =D I have an emote and everything!
This post is very interesting. The 10k amount you theorize about would result in about 100 a la carte respecs. I don’t respec much, but this would seem to be a nice value if you were changing specs once per week (break even point). If you consider changing specs even more, then you are truly getting some value from a Discipline Respec ability.
Personally, I think Blizzard will not allow a talent spec change, because they seem to already put so much work into balancing each of 3 trees for each class for PvE, Raid and PVP. Keeping in mind that some servers are PvP and PvE/PvP distinction is minimal. The problem that Blue has alluded to is getting more solo ability for healers and tanks to increase their respective popularity. Blizz made 33% of + Heal count toward DPS in 2.2. No concession for tanks yet, but I think Blizzard’s nod toward increasing the number of tanks and healers will be to make more specs that look like the Feral talent tree, which is basically a dual dps/tank spec (and a good one). For example, I think we will see more +threat in the Retribution tree of palidins and more +damage in the Restoration trees of Druids and Sha-people.
As for a new mount as a money-sink- how about group transportation? Santa’s sleigh with 8 fabled reindeer? I dont know that any speed limit will ever be set in WoW, as you could always go faster…. and they can always design something cooler to ride.
Has Blizz said absolutely “no player housing.” We do know that a woodworking profession is on its way for WotLK. It is hard to imagine that would be a very interesting profession if all you could make were arrows, bows trinkets and staves (no wooden armor as in LW, BS, Tailoring). Maybe player housing from this profession with a substantial fraction of the cost going to Blizz will be the next money sink?
Also, Thanks for the plug on your site for my blog, I appreciate that and have some rigorous numbers just a few days away that I hope will be nice for the drood community.
Noooooooooo, thanks
Specialization should at least be semi-permanent: current system has too much flexibility already. Also continuous “respecs” ruin the point of hybrid builds to some extent. I haven’t played any other MMORPG so I can’t compare to other games of the kind, but when looking at some classic RPGs I feel like in WoW one’s identity is somehow obscure, specially since arena system came out (hey, now monkeys get epics too!). We all have pretty much the same talents and gear (just compare yourself to any other player with the same progress, class and role as you). In the case of talents it’s just a “sure we chose the same basic talents for our role but I decided X would also help me when doing Y, while you.. etc”: it doesn’t feel right the way it is now but at least gives us something unique. If we were also able to choose between full specialties just like that, it would be even worse.
I’ve always thought doing quests to unlock certain stages of the talent trees (or even particular talents) would be nice, similar to profession specialization only doing something more like a quest rather than buying stuff and clicking on “create” (speaking of which, crafting specializations suck; other than a few trainer items and the final epic set for level 70 there’s no difference between crafting specialties
Give more recipes, Blizzard!). Paying some gold to a guy to make me forget stuff in order to learn some other stuff doesn’t sound good.
Anyway, I don’t think such a huge investment would be worth it.. It’s just my impression, but even crazy spec-hopping players willing to change between roles that often only do that for a limited period. Of course people would do it all the time if given the chance, but there’s probably no such need at the moment.
What i was trying to say is that if you as a raid assistant have to decide which ones from 16 ppl online in a guild will go to ZA after 25 man raid then
“I need 3xhealers,5xdps,2xtanks” perspective is much simpler and fair attitude that “I`m taking Smith, Wesson, Jonny,Walker, etc” or “Who wants it”. What if you have 16 ppl who wants it and they can be whatever you need to be. I am seeing it as a harder management.
In current environment when you need special specs for certain situation you just invest some time and money for respecing and walking to stone. It`s not very fast but it`s a working system.
And to be honest that will almost eliminate healing in BGs =))) I know some druids who enjoy healing, but well, when Tree mafia is just one click away … i know my choice.