New specialization screen

#1 - April 10, 2012, 2:05 a.m.

The recent change to the specialization UI where it displays the skills associated with choosing the spec is not helpful. It is far too simplistic and it is impossible to know what you are going to get for choosing the specialization prior to selecting. It was nice having the passive and active skills in one easy to read place so that a person could easily reference things or figure out what they need to do with a new class.

Granted it is less important when you know what you are doing but it seems like simplifying the UI there is not going to be helpful to new players. Holy on the paladin tells you your core spells WoG, Holy Radiance, holy shock and beacon. Well if some one takes that at face value, you are going to have a problem. To continue with the pally the Ret screen shows art of war but not Exorcism which makes no sense.

You cannot see the bulk of what a given spec gets. Lets say I level up ret, I may understand ret ok but I switch to prot and I do not even know half the stuff the spec has. I much preferred the complete list with the levels the spell is learned to this.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#8 - April 10, 2012, 6:08 a.m.

We are going to show you all the spells you get (for each spec) in the spellbook. If you are a priest, you can compare the full Holy spellbook (meaning class + spec spells) to the full Disc and Shadow spellbook whenever you'd like.

The problem we had with the previous specialization UI is that it was overwhelming with so many icons scrolling on to multiple pages, many of which you might not get until many levels later. You couldn't get a snapshot of what a given spec was about. It made what was supposed to be a fun choice at level 10 feel like homework as you had to analyze a dozen or more spells and then compare them to the other specs. Players' leveling experiences were grinding to a halt as they were asked to make this important decision based on tons of information that needed to be processed.

We also found that we were making class design decisions solely to clean up the spec UI, which isn't a great reason to make design decisions.

Furthermore, some of the core abilities (PW: Shield for Disc for example) weren't listed at all because they are class-wide spells not spec spells.

By comparison think about how little information the game offers you when you pick a class for the first time. It doesn't tell you what ability warriors will get at level 60. Yet plenty of players still try out warriors and all other classes based on some hints and some assumptions about how the various classes will work.

And if you really, really need to see all the available spells to make your decision, they will be there, but in the spellbook instead. In that situation you are going looking for the information rather than it being poured onto you.

TLDR: The spec page is intended to be representational while the spellbook is informational.