World of Warcraft -> Diversity

[doubtful]

Hello
Which WoW expansion offers the most diversity in class build? What i mean? Which expansion offers the most choices to build your class differently, yet decent. The choices can be through items, skills etc etc.

Thanks in advance!

 

[PurgeandFire]

Vanilla probably had the most "viable" choices to choose your class differently. You'd see hybrid feral/resto druids, and weird mixes like that. There has always been one "cookie cutter" build that serves as the most appropriate for a particular spec though. In vanilla, sometimes you would skip out on the last ability in your tree just because it sucked so much. It wasn't like that as much in TBC/WotLK.

WotLK had some interesting mixes too. Choosing your off-talents made a big difference, so you could get some interesting builds (it was at least interesting PvP-wise). Class diversity was also probably at its peak, since this was before cataclysm homogenized classes by giving all of them CC and interrupts (that wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but it certainly ruined diversity).

So yeah, WotLK or vanilla. I personally prefer WotLK though. You had more abilities, and the skill cap was a lot higher than in BC and vanilla. In vanilla, some classes really didn't have any moves at all (e.g. rets), and things weren't nearly as balanced.

 

[bhusta]

I loved that a melee hunter for pvp was a viable thing in vanilla.
It's kinda sad that hunters can't wear melee weapons anymore.

 

[Chaosy]

classic by miles.

2h melee shamans, melee hunters , support classes, hybrid talents.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Classic. But depends on the patch iteration a lot. Game style changed heavily over the first content patches for classic. I think classic was at it's peak at the Anh-Qiraj patch in terms of class diversity (not neccesarily in terms of balance, though; cause Warlocks went from pretty much useless to OP as fuck in just a couple of patches). From there on, it went downhill. Yes, balancing improved big time with WotLK, but diversity suffered from that with many unique class abilities getting a non-stackable equivalent on other classes so that you could substitute f.ex. a shadowpriest with a paladin in terms of extra mana regen.

I mean... I understand that they had to do that, to make raids less painful, but it certainly removed a big part of the vanilla magic because class choices did matter back then. There were builds and classes that nobody wanted to play, but every raid needed desperately. If you played those classes, you felt like a superstar. I still remember being one of the handful of warlocks back when warlocks were underpowered and the least played class (Does anyone remember the good old Molten Core raids back when debuffs couldn't stack infinitely and only certain classes were allowed to use debuffs so that always the crucial ones were active? No? I know I do. ) and how every raid went apeshit crazy when they had a warlock with the 30% improved blood pact on imps.

 

[gorillabull]

customization was great up until mop came out although i would say it started to go downhill when blizzard removed the ammo requirements. nowadays its really lame, before they let you balance out your character a little with the huge talent tree but i guess that proved too difficult for the playerbase and now they take care of that for you and only let you choose a few talents which help your role.. most of which arent even balanced yet.

 

[PurgeandFire]

The big talent trees had cookie cutter builds. I liked them and hated them at the same time. With the new trees, there is potential for really cool choices. The only issue is that a lot of them are just clearly superior to one another, and they are mostly PvP related (which PvE'ers hate).

 

[Zwiebelchen]

The big talent trees had cookie cutter builds. I liked them and hated them at the same time. With the new trees, there is potential for really cool choices. The only issue is that a lot of them are just clearly superior to one another, and they are mostly PvP related (which PvE'ers hate).

I agree here. The old talent system was more or less just an illusion of choice. Not that there is a problem with that, but the new one is just well more rounded. But the old one definitely looked cooler and rewarded level ups more than the new. I wish they had implemented something for the player to do on level ups as a compensation. The automatic leveling feels so dull.

Call me weird, but I liked having to go to a trainer to buy new skills on level ups. It gave a certain feeling of power when you finally unlocked and bought a new skill rank. Now that everything goes automaticly behind the scenes, this feeling is completely gone.

 

[Shatterfury]

customization was great up until mop came out although i would say it started to go downhill when blizzard removed the ammo requirements. nowadays its really lame, before they let you balance out your character a little with the huge talent tree but i guess that proved too difficult for the playerbase and now they take care of that for you and only let you choose a few talents which help your role.. most of which arent even balanced yet.

As stated by others in this thread and by Blizzard themselves, each tree had a cookie cutter build thus in reality you only had a few points to spend where you wanted.

Not going with the standard, accepted, build could get you kicked out of the raid.

As it stands now you can really pick what the heck you want because the difference is very small, if at all in overall DPS.We have more choices now than we had when we had the talent trees that is for sure.

With that said, I think that TBC is the expansion that offers quite a lot of flexibility.Smite orientated Priest was competitive enough and Shockadin also.

WotLK on the other hand flushed out almost all classes much more, giving most of them more engaging rotations but some of the wanky builds were kind of phased out.

 

[doubtful]

I have read all your replies. thank you guys!