A new talent system

Disclaimer: Since the whole system is difficult to follow in writing, each option is illustrated with a graphic (Warrior skills because I am most familiar with that class - no, they're not intended to be actual suggestions or a wish list of mine, just ideas of how the system in general is supposed to look like).

The new talent system is an attempt to keep the advantage of the MoP-system (which introduced the feasible option to pick varying talents depending on the situation for the first time) while simultaneously increasing its application range: Since every skill gets its own set of skill points, more exotic or rarely-used skills can be customized and improved on their own without being left behind for being "too trivial" in comparison to the bread-and-butter-skills of a class.

Customization talents

The fundament of the proposed system is that players get to customize their skills individually: they get a few customization options for their skills (either for all, for most or at least for the more important ones). The impact of this customization should be roughly on par with what's in the game in the existing talent tables or what major glyphs did when they were still relevant.

There are four different ways of designing customization:

• A: 1-X-1-1: The most baseline version. Every skill has 1 list with X different specializations, and the player gets to pick only one.
• B: 1-X-2-2: A more complex system. Every customizable skill has X different specializations with up to 2 slots, and the player can allocate 2 points - either by picking two specializations once or one specialization twice. In order to make split specializations more attractive, the efficiency should be something along the lines of 60%/100% bonus for the first and the second point respectively, so picking the best and the second best option for a given playstyle should be roughly on par with picking the best option twice.
• C: 1-X-Y-1: A system that offers considerably more variety - every skill on the list has X different specializations, and the player gets to pick Y of them (the X:Y-ratio should be around 3:1).
• D: Y-X/X-1-1: The skill has Y lists with X skills each, and the player gets to pick one of each list. This is comparable to how things were when you could both use talents and glyphs to improve a particular skill, the difference being that this time there are more different options to do so. This system is particularly interesting if a skill should have different lists in order to disable specific talent combinations: either because the differing lists affect drastically different areas (like, say, performance vs. movement-enhancing) or because there's a notable power differential between the two.

Customization talents: Upper left: A (1-4-1-1), lower left: B (1-4-2-2), upper right (1-6-2-1): C; lower right: D (2-3/3-1-1).

Additional remarks:

• It's not mandatory that only one list type is used for all skills - different skills might get differently-sized lists. Which would actually be closer to how things have always been considering that every class always had more and less important skills, with the more important ones (usually) also getting more different boosts via talents or other mechanics (glyphs, sets, legendaries, artifact skills).
• The talent lists should include customization options which are roughly on par with one another. If different talent choices for the same skill are vastly different when it comes to power, this might necessitate the use of two different lists (i.e. the use of option D above).
• Additional non-essential lists for cosmetic talents are also an option - this would necessitate using the D-list as well. In practice, they would work like cosmetic glyphs do.

 Floating talent points

The general idea is that all skill points a character has are tied to specific skills; floating talent points (or "floaters" for short) would be a deviation from that system. Since a generous or even exclusive use of floaters would make a class nigh-impossible to balance, this should be used sparingly and also be limited to be dispersed between comparable skills.

·         Floaters should ideally be used when there are a fewer floating points than talents to be used.

·         It might be feasible to restrict the use of floaters to 1 point per talent if more would be too powerful (see above).

·         Floaters should only be shared between talents that are comparable and roughly equal in power.

Synergy talents and floating talent points.

Synergy talents

These are talents that increase the efficiency of one or two skills if they're used in conjunction with one another. A very prevalent form of this is the synergy between a buff/debuff and a direct daMage skill, with the direct daMage skill becoming far more efficient (cheaper, more daMage, higher crit rate etc.) if the buff/debuff is active.

Skill talents

The other way talents are used in the existing system: the three talents on a given tier all offer a different on-use-skill or a passive ability. This is basically the same as things currently are; however, these talents could also include additional customization lists of their own. Skill talents are practically floaters by default.

Skill talents.

Combat style talents

These talents change how the class performs across the board, by affecting its stats, baseline daMage, resource usage, passive skills etc.

Mastery and combat style talents.

Mastery talent

A variant of the general style talents, the mastery talent enable a character to choose what the mastery stat means for his class. This shouldn't be half as difficult as it sounds considering that the impact of mastery has been changed multiple times over the course of the game, which means that there are still a lot of possible tested options for the game.

Talent profiles/presets

The finalization of the talent change-mechanic. Instead of being limited to two or three sets of talents like it has been before, every player gets as many different talent profiles as necessary (or at least a dozen) to allow the players to carefully customize their characters for different situations without having to respec everything from scratch.

Talents via itemization

The entire system could be extended to also include items; because essentially that's what already happens with set bonuses and legendary item perks. The following options are available:

• Normal items (rare/epic) could offer additional talent points for a minor talent list of a specific skill, or new additional perks that are roughly on par with talents from a minor talent list.
• Legendary items could offer additional talent points for a major talent list of a specific skill, or new additional perks that are roughly on par with talents from a majort talent list. Or both at once.
• Set bonuses would operate like legendary items (power-wise), except that the second bonus would usually be notably stronger than the first. For all intents and purposes they would be like one-and-a-half or two legendaries in that regard power-wise.

 Possible objections/questions:

• Isn't this too complicated? Arguable. Even if that's the case, the most baseline form of the talent system (A) should be pretty easy to deal with; and it's not mandatory that every single skill gets the customization list.
• Won't this be difficult to balance? If some options might lead to a skill getting out of hand, there's always the possibility to nerf the skill and introduce a skill option that brings it back to its baseline strength. Which means that the player can either use the skill as he's used to or has a variant that's weaker but offers something else to compensate. Another option would be to keep the bonuses more moderate than indicated in the pictures; by sticking to bonuses in the range of 5% or 10% for most skills.
• Isn't this pretty similar to the old pre-MoP system? Not really - the problem with the old talent system was that the skill trees usually didn't really leave much choice because half of the talent slots were pretty weak, but a max level character had enough talent points to pick up all useful talents anyway - leading to highly streamlined cookie cutter builds practically everyone had to take. This system would actually be more like the post-MoP system, only with (considerably) more customization options. Also, talent customization might, in a tuned down version, just as well be used alongside the MoP talent matrix.