Warcraft Legacy Talents: A revision on Legendaries, Azerite, Artifacts, Tier, and Talents.

TL:DR - Lets take a look at a bigger subject than Azerite, Legendaries, or Artifacts alone, it's time to look at something larger.Over the years, we've had Talent Point Trees, Talent Swap Grids, Tier Sets, Legendary Quest Items, Artifacts, Legendary Items, and now Azerite gear. All of those perks, traits, and effects represent the same thing: A dynamic change to play style, rotation or power. We've had many "dynamic systems" that we could very easily consolidate. As we've seen with Artifact abilities going into BfA, some of these various perks can be translated easily into talents. While we've carried some favorites through from Legion to BfA, lets look at how we've changed over the years.Blizzard initially stepped away from Talent Trees because they contained too many low-impact or boring traits (+1% crit, +1% armor, etc.). This was probably a good decision, that while making it harder to see gradual process, made that progress more meaningful. It has however started returning with the first wave of Azerite traits (raw dmg procs, etc.)Tier sets provided a relatively stable way to make each content tier feel unique. Ask some longer running WoW veterans about their favorite Tier Set Bonus and you'll hear which sets defined a raid tier experience. Over time, as players have strayed from Raiding (due to M+ and other reasons), Tier sets can no longer be as reliable for the wide variety of game play elements.Despite the difficulty in acquiring a "specific" Legendary, many of the Legendaries we saw in Legion were interesting and dynamically changed gameplay. Tuning was required, and it felt bad to be limited by RNG, but was insanely rewarding to use an Effect you liked in a situation where it shined.We've seen an organic evolution in system design, that while attempting to keep pace with game changes, unfortunately paves over away some favorites with the new innovations. Looking at consolidating perks, a game system overhaul might be worth serious consideration. One that allows for the dynamic decision making Blizzard wants, while remaining stable through multiple content patches and expansions.With that in mind, here is an example of what a future-proofed perk/talent structure could look like for the Prot Paladin spec.The Biggest Change: Instead of new Azerite, or Artifacts, or Legendaries, or whatever old-god themed progression we expect next expansion, everything is a talent. Similar to current Honor Talents, you pick several talents from an available pool. 3 Separate pools per row, highlighting 3 major categories:Silver Talents for utility pools - players choose 1 of 4 talents that give non-throughput applications. Run Faster! CC Better! Help Friends!Gold Circles are throughput or regular talents - players would choose 3 of 5?, 7?, 10?! Instead of new trait bonuses per Raid Tier, Blizzard can add new talent options for raid tiers, or completing milestone quest content. All of these talents would increase your Damage, Healing, or Survivability. Inevitably there will always be Star-Talents for a given encounter, giving additional choices would increase variety/flexibility. In min-maxing circumstances, there would always be a top 1 or 2 talents per encounter, but the differences between other traits would be lessened.Ultimate Talents - players would eventually choose 1 of 3, starting off with only 1 option, gaining more as content develops. These would be big, spec defining abilities akin to Artifact abilities from Legion.Breaking down this model further, we see a number up top, and several numbers on the bottom row. The number up top represents Artifact Power. Love it or hate it, this is a mechanic that has settled nicely into WoW's endgame design. It offers significant advantages to people who push early, while not overly punishing late-comers. Using AP as endgame progression, we can allow each Artifact Power level to grant you one point to spend on this expansion's traits.Spending points on talents? We've seen that before Pre-MoP, and recently with Artifacts/Relics. True, now here's what they would look like on Legendaries and other traits. As a base talent, they would start out weaker than we saw with Legion Legendary items. Over time, through player choices and effort, they would become just as strong! or stronger!All of this could play out well in the following ways:Small increases are still gradual progression, but provide dynamically scaling effects to maintain excitement.Swap talents at rested locations or with tomes. Reset talent points at set locations, with a cost like old talents. Talents are still flexible, talent points are still significant choices.If a talent is amazing for only 1 piece of content, but you otherwise don't want the talent, it's easier to just rely on the base talent without bonus points than deliberately farming an entire set of Azerite traits.The really cool class designs that change your gameplay are no longer gated behind RNG or Tier set priorities. Let player choices determine how you play, and gear determine how well you perform.Come the end of an expansion, all points are drained by plot device (or giant Sargeras sword), reducing them to base talent level effectiveness. (This offsets the tuning nightmare, in that the most recent expansions traits would tend to weigh more significantly on performance)Plot-wise our characters are developing through adventures and dungeons, picking up skills along the way. As players we get to try out all the new content Blizzard designers can think up. Let us take our skills, feats, and progress with us as we move onto new adventuresEach expansion gets it's own row. As players level through content, they can unlock additional talents for in each rows' pool, providing new ability unlocks for low level characters. As the next expansion approaches, 1 more row is added on bottom, and eventually the previous row is drained of points.The structure is in place for new expansions, allowing more experimentation on gear or other systems. We've honestly had so many core system changes that have now blended seamlessly into base WoW (dual spec, vehicles, phasing, scenarios, world quests, etc.), maybe its time to establish a core progression framework that isn't as subject to changes?Ultimately, this kind of system presents a way to move WoW through expansions without reinventing the wheel every 2 years. Each expansion can still bring new, flashy, themed abilities but requires fewer risks on deliver methods to players. This kind of system would not be without faults, but could stop the biennial community change aversion.