To start, Love the idea of making choice nodes with easier options then tuning the more complicated difficult ones to be stronger, more access to a class is great.
Pros:
- Arcane familiar not being a button anymore just tied in with AI, awesome
- Arcane’s best tier set from this tier is in the talent tree now, perfect
- I don’t see nether tempest anywhere, thank you for removing that
Cons:
- Dear god, this talent tree is bad. like really bad. Like this looks like a talent tree in DRAGONFLIGHT alpha that got changed to our current one.
- Improved Arcane Missiles, a two point talent that is optionally taken currently, is a chokepoint node for the aoe side of the tree? why? We made such good progress with arcane’s M+ viability in the last tree update and this one has annihilated any hope of that.
- After Arcane missiles lets you into the aoe side of the tree, the capstone and pre-capstone of the aoe side are single target talents. Huh? Why is a nether precision buff right next to arcane barrage and orb barrage?
- There are 44 possible skill points to use in the new tree, the old tree has 38. Unlike the other reworks you do not get the feeling of “i have everything i want, and i have more points to spend still” like monk and fire got, you run out of points in the new tree and go “wait, i have like two thirds of what I need to function” and a large part of that is the arcane missiles cutting off circulation to the aoe talents
- Nether Munitions as a captstone. We already had a tier set for a damage amp after your cooldowns, please stop trying to bring that back.
- Aether Atunement Oh our tier set is back! wait, it consumes our 10% constant damage amp? Why? This is the talent equivalent of running just 2 set because 4 set is a downgrade.
- Unless I missed something, Reverberate is just gone? one of the key talents in making arcane feel good in aoe?
Summary:
We took a big step forwards with the last iteration of the talent tree, then did a triple backflip backwards with the new one. A couple of quality of life improvements and some accessibility improvements are far outweighed by the egregious tree pathing, and unfortunately it feels like once again we don’t really know what arcane does or how it works, I can’t see a reason why arcane missiles, a two point optional talent, is now forced to be taken in aoe situations. With just a little adjustment on the pathing and some more points this could be a fantastic tree, but right now you feel like a level 60 playing a level 70 game.