Are Hero Talents a Failure of Concept?

Community General Discussion
1

Regarding M+:

We’re late into Season 1 and so far, a significant majority of hero talents see virtually no play at a competitive level compared to the top brass that have been egregiously overloaded in their capabilities in toolkits.

How can such vast disparities be allowed to exist? Has anyone taken a look at most rogue hero talents? Thematically and numerically awful. The same goes for Fire Mages (all hero talents), Arcane Mage (mediocre across the board numerically) and Devastation Evokers (remove from the game at this point).

Hero Talents should have been Hero Skins - a cosmetic customizable system that would allow us to get creative with beautiful class aesthetics that we could earn across content.

This system is a failure.

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There’s more to the game than what the “competitive level” is using.

I think they’re fun. Don’t really care what’s meta since I’m not playing at that level. I doubt you are either.

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3

can you give an example of a MMORPG with a talent system, where all talents are used equally at the high end competitive mode of gameplay?

the level of perfection you are asking for does not, and can not exist

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4

I love my hero talents, it makes Demo feel like a summon class and not just an imp master. Could improvements happen? Yes, there is always room but it does not make hero talents a failure.

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I never implied that there wasn’t? I’m speaking from a thematic and numeric design perspective.

Good for you.

Speak for yourself.

I am playing at a midcore level at 3K IO and it’s striking to only see certain class/spec/hero talent combos at that level.

6

Player created problem. People will always chase metas.

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So are classes UNspecing them? Seems most of them are passives. Why wouldn’t someone use passives? Skip the ability the passive is tied to?

(And, yea, I enjoy my Demo talents – save in Delves, where its just a bit too tight sometimes to have 87 demons out all at once…)

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Right.

Because you have all the answers. :roll_eyes:

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You don’t seem to have a counter-argument, so apparently I do.

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The concept was sound; the problem lay in its execution.

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11

I like the hero talents, but I expected them to be… More? Given that they were touted as a prominent feature of TWW.

More than just two sets of ten extra talent points to choose from, at least.

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12

the only way it won’t matter what talents you pick is if the content is trivial.

that isn’t a failure of the system. only acknowledging that meta has always existed.

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A counter argument to a uniformed/low-info take? Why bother?

You yourself admitted to not participating at that level, so you have an incomplete view of the bigger picture. Perhaps you should actually push at that level to have a better understanding.

By the way, it’s a developer created issue. Blizzard was the catalyst with their design decisions.

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SOME classes got amazing Hero talents like DK and Shaman.

Others, got dry passives that change very little, if any gameplay

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15

It’s just a bunch of mostly passive talents. The only reason they weren’t added to the bottom of the tree is Blizz didn’t have the time to spend to revamp the way the locks work so that everyone didn’t take all three bottom rows.

There is nothing special about regular talent points. The only mistake was the name.

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16

I thought Blizzard themselves said they didn’t want hero talents to be that big of an impact? Or was it tier sets, either way I like hero talents, can they be improved? Sure any system can always be improved, but I wouldn’t call them a failure.

17

can you give an example of when the issue did not exist?

when meta builds did not exist?

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18

Yeah, I think this is my issue. I main a Frost mage, and their meta hero talents, while very effective… Doesn’t really change anything beyond encouraging even more ice lance spam at the expense of other spells.

And the hero talents don’t add anything visually to my gameplay unlike Sunfury for Arcane. Well, I mean, you can see the spellstorm splinters fly off to your target if you really squint but uh… Yea, not very flashy.

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19

They said a few interesting things in that regard:

We are aiming for all trees to be about equal in the amount of utility and defensiveness they provide.

Hero Talents are meant to add enough damage or healing throughput to be significant without being so important that these new talents overshadow your current class and spec tree talents.

That didn’t really pan out so well. lol

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The balance for them has been really off all expansion which has pushed people into playing with thematics they don’t really enjoy.

Or worse, they get put in situations like MM hunter where they may not enjoy either hero talent thematic since they’re both super specific elf fantasies.

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