I do not feel the talent trees are like the covenants.
In fact I really miss the whole covenant aspect of the game. I love when there are systems in place to further detail your character and modify their attacks. I found that whole “mini game” very fun.
It’s something I immediately missed in DF and would love to see it come back again.
The only thing that made Covenants “Covenants” was the inability to swap until way late game. Anything else talent related is just standard RPG build your character stuff.
I’m not trying to derail your train, because I agree covenant locking was awful, but I’m pretty positive they made this change in 9.1.5.
Probably, but you could also just play what you want to play.
Hopefully there will be newish acting and looking stuff to have fun with.
I guess if we’re arguing semantics it was closer to the middle compared to being closer to the end. It wasn’t soon enough though.
Yeah man, they should’ve launched unlocked, 100% agreed. I’m just saying that at least they realized their error halfway through, rather than right at the end.
If you feel forced to choose the best talent builds to get the best performance, then yes you will feel forced to choose the best new talents to get the best performance, obviously.
Hero talents are talents. They aren’t sub classes, they aren’t soulbinds or covenants. They are talents, that is all. One talent build will be meta, as always.
This is very easy to answer…
If this is player power, there will ABSOLUTELY be a min max optimal choice. It doesn’t matter if we have 10 talents or 1000. There will ALWAYS be an optimized cookie cutter build that spreadsheet dorks will math out and lay out for the sheeple masses to blindly follow.
And like typical balancing, even if it’s 0.000000001% difference, you will be considered bad if you pick the “wrong” choices despite the fact that the content will be clearable no matter what choices you actually pick.
The entire idea behind Hero talents goes as far back as the beta for WoW where every class was said to eventually specialize into unique hero talents. This would play into a certain playstyle that was unique to the class and involves I believe mastering some aspect of how it works.
It’s meant to be a more evergreen extension of the game it seems playing into this concept. It probably will be fairly well balanced but likely have a variation that works better for aoe than single target with various specs.
The difference between this and covenants was that covenants were massive talent trees blended with conduits (that had to be upgraded) that you were locked into until they changed this. This is simpler and you can freely switch.
We have two healer specs and a DPS spec that is completely opposed to them thematically that they haven’t been able to get right design-wise for nearly a decade. They can come up with some really cool ideas on paper but my faith in their ability to get them right in a way that makes sense for Shadow gameplay-wise is at rock bottom and descending by the day.
Anyway, to answer OP’s question: they’re Covenant abilities if Covenant abilities weren’t designed to be as cumbersome to swap between as they were. Which basically means that they are not, in fact, Covenants all over again, because like 90% of Covenants’ identities prior to 9.1.5 were that they felt carefully designed to make you hate playing this game.
its going to be covenants but without the negatives such as anima grind, reset restrictions etc
How are they anything close to covenants when covenants were closed off and some abilities were in different ones? That’s not even remotely close to hero talents. Hero talents are like talents. You don’t have to earn renown with anyone to change them if you decide to respec.
If you want to be a meta slave, no talent system provides you choice. You just follow guides.
Make like legion the artifact weapon system. LOL if you want to swap to a different spec/hero talent got to grind from the beginning.
Man that’s was so painful memory when you want to change spec you have to start at 0 all over again.
im hoping it will mostly be a cosmetic feature.
This is no different than when Path of Exile added a branching node for each class archetype at a certain section of the talent tree. It’s class fantasy, and it’s player power. It is also a way to add 10 levels of progression without having to mess with the current base talent trees.
It’s actually necessary or otherwise they need to even further deepen the talent tree or we’re all gonna be rocking all of our capstones otherwise. They’ll always keep designing themselves into a hole wanting to cater to the classic andys/andreas and keeping to this stupid talent tree instead of adopting temporary power systems and letting them fall away expansion by expansion.
No conduits, no conduit energy, easy to chose something else . . . how exactly are they covenants?
By virtue of being a collection of borrowed power upgrades handled in a deterministic fashion (rather than chance-based borrowed power, such as BFA azerite gear needing to drop and be won on roll). I would compare them not only to Covenants, but also to Legion artifact weapons. Though, they are to Legion artifact weapons what MoP talent trees are to DF and pre-cata talent trees.