Since Legion, the largest design failure of an xpac has been glaringly obvious as a car crash in slow motion during Alpha/Beta.
In Legion, it was obvious legendary acquisition would be a huge issue, compounded by lack of communication in the 4 leggo soft lock.
In BFA Azerite gear looked like a nightmare waiting to happen, which it happened.
In Shadowlands, compounding systems with limited ability to change sounded like a terrible design philosophy and ever harder to attempt to balance, which it was.
In Dragonflight, Class Design looks abhorrent. I’m happy to see Talent Trees make a comeback and I think that’s vastly superior to spreading talents out across multiple systems 100%.
But the design of these trees is carrying over the same mentality of the previous systems in their restriction of gameplay. Talents sharing a branch almost exclusively show ZERO relation to each other having no progression through a branch, EVERYTHING is on a branch, and though there is a necessity for some boring talents, there are many scenarios forcing unwanted talents, for basic necessity talents.
Classes/specs have had a lot of garbage thrown on them since the “don’t prune me” feedback was actually heard and honestly in many cases it was too late by that point. The apex of many specs has come and gone with little regard for what made them great in their heyday. WoD Sub, end of Legion Feral, late Cata Arms(for me) come to mind as being far superior to current iterations.
I think many classes do with a once/twice over of removing talents or redundant abilities, and removal of hard aoe vs st choices via aoe talents exclusively towards the top of the trees and on choice nodes vs ONLY other aoe talents. Same with cooldowns which should maybe be exclusively on the bottom of trees and compete only against each other instead of spread out thrown where ever on some trees.
To be clear, Class Design is shaping up to be a major failure in Dragonflight, and I would suspect most people will flock to classes with the least bad designs vs what they thematically want to play.
Class design is fine the issue is that blizzard hands out all the tool kits of every class to every other class but gives it another name.
Worst case of this is warriors. Warriors have almost no unique abilities, and our tool kit is handed out to pretty much everyone. Warriors have like…lets see…shattering throw…and…what? like what else do warriors have as an ability that nothing else has? Mortal strike? Nope lots of classes have that.
For class design to be really good we need frequent balance changes and communication. Unfortunately both those things have been very inconsistent during alpha. A few special classes get blue posts every day while others still don’t have talent trees. If we don’t get Monk and DH talents in this last phase we’ll have gone through alpha without 1/3 of the tank specs being able to provide feedback. If the November release is for real, Blizz isn’t leaving much time to finish and balance all of the specs.
Off the top of my head, there’s a lot of potential to be forced into shadow dance, other abilities I personally never wanted with outlaw, also shadowstep? Why have two movement buttons, vs just making hook better, 2 charges?
Other things like that, where I actually want less crossover from the other specs in the general tree.
More movement is definitely not bad, especially for Outlaw which I would say has the least movement out of rogue specs? But hook should be replacing step for outlaw (as a second charge) on that tree if not also reducing its cd and retract time.
There’s no reason for there to be 2 movement buttons doing something so similar is more my argument.
The trees are getting updated constantly, yes things like putting AoE talents behind a single target is bad, abd they have been working on it. A lot of classes have had most of their boring 2/3 nodes replaced.
I just think it’s boring. The middle track is mostly near mandatory and there’s not a lot of options for cross over between left to right sides. Basically everyone is going to go at least 80% of the way down center, 100% down left or right, then a few points thrown on the opposing side.
Meanwhile Shaman and Warlock have so many criss-crossing paths that you’re constantly dealing with interesting choices,
Yep I’m quite aware. It’s still opinion and it depends what class as well. Some are quite good.
Also iteration will happen after release for stuff that’s horrible . It’s not us forcing the release schedule it’s blizzard. Why worry about stuff you can’t control? Especially low important stuff like a computer game?