No, they arent.
I think some may be fairing better than others. Blood has to spend 5 points to get back a 50% stamina boost, while they have 60% on live. That’s nearly 10% of all the points you’ll get, just to get something back in a weaker state. There are other similar issues, so maybe the trees work better for some, but for others they’re not really doing anything.
Don’t forget the 3 points we need just to make death stike “improved” (actually functions like normal live like a boss)
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This is true, however, Blood will also be able to end up have access to, just for example, Empowered Rune Weapon and Soul Reaper.
The lower tier talents are just there to offer some variety in how you build your character.
Well still end up with everything we have now plus other abilities, some of them brand new.
Im not saying I dont jave some complaints. Like, for example, overall losing 10% total Stamina from what we have now. That should likely be added vack into the talent tree.
I also have some other minor gripes and complaints but overall the Dragonflight talent tree is looking pretty exciting.
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I still think the fact that some spells and passives are going to be largely mandatory make this talent trees bad.
With the direction enemy and encounter design have taken it is 100x harder to implement a character building system with lots of agency and still have the core gameplay feel good and balanced. If you offer a player 10 different ways to build there character the easy and normal difficulties should allow all of those builds to proceed without a large amount of challenge.
The problem is Blizzard seems to want it both ways. They want to let players to get creative and use non meta builds but then they have tightly tuned encounters or mechanically demanding fights that require use of utility and strong throughput. Like covenants I see these trees to be one of those conflicting ideologies. Blizzard wants these two different things together but they just don’t go together.
If Blizzard wants to see more creativity and variety in mid to high end content then they need to reduced the difficulty curb as a whole. Like wise if they want to create even more difficulty and involved encounters classes will need a better baseline to work from so the encounter can test player skill rather then just character building.
I see Blizzard trying to force conflicting game structures together to create the new WoW. My gut tells me this talent system will once again leave the devs disappointed when the majority of the player base builds uses the same 3 builds for each spec based on the content. I like many have experienced the transition in to WoD, BFA, and SL. I am tired of feeling like I am going backwards and I am tired of Blizzard failing to implement there perfectly balanced player choice system.
To be clear I am not angry just apathetic at this point. Any trust I had for Blizzard to balance and player choice system was lost in BFA (SL didn’t really help ether)
Weather or not you or other people choose to once again give Blizz the benefit of the doubt is entirely up to you but right now with what I have seen I am leaning towards no. That is just my 2 cents.
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They’re just unpruning a couple of traits from Legion and BfA and pretending they’re giving you something new for a new expansion you paid for.
When the xpac hype wears out, DF will be another BfA/SL, not a Legion which actually added new spec specific abilities and traits, on top of spec specific mounts, multiple class/spec themed weapons+skins, etc.
Class/spec fantasy is dead, Blizzard doesn’t want to repeat the amount of work they did in Legion.
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Yea I was kinda disappointed with it aswell 
You can’t tell me blood in legion was balanced with a straight face. Fun, subjectively, sure I’ll agree with you on that. Balanced wasn’t it though.
Legion is what made me leave the game for my longest hiatus ever because the initial legendary system was 1) abysmal and felt terrible when you had no drops or a poor drop and 2) gated me from content in a way I was never gated before. Even if I was clearing content as time rolled on I was getting declines for not having my top 1-2 legendaries on certain specs.
10% stm loss doesn’t materially impact me unless I’m pushing above 23s. As is I can already stand still in mechanics and sleepwalk my way to 12-13mm raw healing in m+ today.
Besides, we would have gladly given up some baseline abilities for threat in s1 during SL. Seems like y’all are fotm blood or you forgot how terrible our aoe threat was to the point where we needed to take super strain and still relied on misdirect mechanics in higher end content for that first season. Kiting was also the norm.
We don’t need more survival if they get s1 DF tuning correct on being meat shields, we need damage to keep threat. The threat bump we saw across the board recently was nice, but it looks like they don’t like adding per class threat modifiers, but rather blanket modifier to the tanking role. Much easier for balancing I would think if that is the case, I don’t know.
10% stamina is really whatever, health pool wasn’t what was holding me back in the early season. It was threat and haste imho.
I’ve been super critical of blood’s scaling before though, so if we see purgatory become mandatory because we’re getting globaled S1 in DF I will complain about this, I promise you. Right now, I think it’s fine for live and raiding.
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Link the tree where you have everything we have now and then some as you claim. You can’t even get everything we have now on those trees as is.
The problem with the trees as it currently stands is the pathing for death knights looks nothing like the pathing for druids. Go look at balance druids, there’s only at most a 2 mandatory talents (sometimes 3 points total) between talents. Whereas DKs have upwards of 4 or 5 talent points mandatory to reach some talents, that’s 4 or 5 talent points that you have no choice on if you want a select ability. Want Blood Tap? You have to spend 1 on heart strike, 1 on marrowrend, 1 on foul bulwark, 2 on improved boneshield, before you can reach blood tap. Find any kind of path with that level of requirement for balance druids. That’s 5 mandatory points with no choices before reaching your ability of choice.
Compare that to improved starsurge, same place on the tree for balance. You have to choose eclipse, but immediately you now have a choice that blood doesn’t have. Left side improved eclipse, right side improved moonfire/sunfire, then you take nature’s balance or if you took improved eclipse you can again make another choice to take force of nature. So yes, with that kind of pathing you have a lot more options, there’s a lot more cross traversing, but the DK trees are far to linearly oriented.
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If you want Blood Tap you have to spend 8 points. You want Solar Beam… 8 points as well… minimum. You want Pillar of frost? 8 points minimum. It also has 11 points total to spend in the first 4 rows just like balance. The pathing doesnt matter at that point.
8 points spent is 8 points spent no matter the class or spec. They all have that requirement to get to where you want to go. Its the same amount of points to get to Improved Starsurge as it is to get to Improved Obliterate. The same amount of points to get to Deaths Caress, the same amount of points to get to Tooth and Claw, the same amount of points to get to Tranquility, the same amount of points to get to Dark Transformation. Its all 8 points spent no matter what since its past the 8 point requirement.
It literally doesnt make a bit of difference.
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The path has a certain amount of points out of the 8 required to get to that part of the tree. The set required points for one is greater than the other, so yes, it does matter. I’m not talking about required points to get there, I’m talking about the length of the required path thus removing choice along the path more greatly from one tree versus the other.
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No, it doesnt matter because you have to spend 8 points no matter what.
If one tree let you spend 8 points anywhere so nothing was connected and the other forced you to spend 8 in a straight line to get that talent, you’d say those two trees are completely balanced? I’d say you’re wrong, one opens up way more options assuming there’s more than just 8 talent options.
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But thats not what the trees are now are they? And yes I would also say its balanced because its 8 points to get to it no matter what. Quit with the hyperbolic nonsense. Its been going on too long and 99.9999% of it doesnt matter or is ill-informed.
From people for asking things to replace something that is already into the spec to people saying this only takes 2 points to get to while it takes 5 to get to it on this other one. You still cant pick it because you havent spent 8 points SO IT DOESNT MATTER.
Frost takes 4 points to get to Improved Obliterate but you still have to spend another 4 so it doesnt matter. It takes 4 points spend t o get Improved Rime… but guess what it doesnt matter because you still have to spend another 4 points. Its like complaining that to access Icy Talons you first had to spend 3 points in Improved Icy Touch, but for Balance to get Nature’s Splendor or Nature’s Grace you only have to spend 2… ignoring the fact to get to the next talent row you had to spend 5 points in it making it a moot point.
The 8 point requirement is there for a reason.
Its a non-issue. Everyone is going to be spending 8 points to get any of the talents that you said were unfair for some reason.
I used hyperbolic example so you could extrapolate what I’m saying, but alas you cannot comprehend it. There is a difference, sorry that you don’t understand pathing well enough to see it. The route to get a talent is just as important as the number of steps it takes to get there. The more different routes a person can take to get to a given talent, the more choice is incorporated in the tree. The less routes one can take, the more stagnant a tree will be. If you don’t get that, then it’s your opinion that is ill-informed, not mine.
You’re getting hung up on the 8 point artificial breakpoint. Go look one step up and see how many routes you can take to get to improved boneshield, versus how many routes you can take (and thus different choices along the way) to get starfall.
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The 8 isnt an artificial breakpoint, its an official breakpoint. Why did you choose a talent that requires 8 points with it being the 9th point and the other you only need 4.
How about Improved Boneshield and Improved Starsurge. You have to take Starfall for it so it doesnt matter how you get to starfall, and you still have to spend 8 points with it being the 9th. You are making a mountain out of air at this point, its not even an issue at all.
You don’t get it and that’s okay. There’s a difference both mathematically and philosophically. One tree allows for more permutations than the other. Permutations = choices.
P.s. artificial doesn’t mean unofficial.
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Oh I get it, and it still doesnt matter at all, not to mention that balance is funneled into 2 talents within the first 4 rows while blood has 4 talents to go into if they so please. Depends on how you look at it doesnt it. So you might have different ways to get to those 2 talents, but the choice is limited there isnt it? While blood has more options on that same row.
Yes artificial doesnt mean unofficial, but you are trying to make it sound like something that it isnt. Its a requirement that everyone is going to have, everything about the talent trees are artificial.
Hey look, all the fanbois, white knighters, streamers, and 1%ers showed up to defend blizz with everything they have and are willing to die on this hill. Who knew? Lmfao
Blizz completely missed the mark on these trees. Period. Thats the clearest, frankest, and most direct way of looking at it. How so? Let me explain.
- Blizz’s assumptions that we want classic style talent trees is wrong, they had massive issues of their own, however, blizz thinks that we a return to that and most retail players hate that. We didnt want the garbo talents that SL gave us, either. They were completely dry, boring, unbalanced, and never enhanced the playstyles.
- We want trees that hit the middle ground between classic trees and SL talents. No, we do not want the garbo bloat in the flat dmg/sec stat increases. No, we also dont want a massive amount of active talents either where we need 3 action bars to manage.
- Bake it in! If its a %, flat, sec stat, dmg inc, dur inc, cd red, or anyrhing else that will be up 100% of the time: bake it in! Those are not fun, no matter how you look at it. Ferocious roar, for example from the druid tree is a prime example. Just bake in the dmg increase and call it a day.
- We want exciting picks. No, gaining 4% crit from 2 points is NOT exciting. Thats bloat, and its garbo. Enhancing our spells to do different things is exciting, giving us our base toolkit as a filler is not exciting.
- Forcing us to take an entire side of a tree thats for 1 spell is garbo. This isnt a tree issue, rather a talent placement issue. We know that blizz’s number 1 focus when copy/pasting into the tree is making sure players canNOT create stacking builds. For example: building a full rot build for unholy. They know people want it, but they would have to actually create something that hasnt been managed yet which means they couldnt take their 3 month long vacas after release and actually have to balance specs.
- The one thing they should have kept from the classic trees is making the strongest spells at the very bottom of the tree. The apex of the build. Instead, already, many if not most do not even take the talents from the very end of the tree. Instead, you take other talents that provide more dps increase. Imo, no talent should do more dmg then the apex spells of the tree.
As already seen by the trees, blizz has an extremely long way to go. In most cases, to actually make the trees a positive, they will have to break away from their copy/paste mentality, quit reinventing the wheel that we ALL are aware they have been doing for a decade, and actually present new, exciting choices, choices that allow for stacking, and choices that allow for different builds.
Right meow, all we are getting is pre-confirmed cookie cutter builds so blizz doesnt have to balance.
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There is absolutely no way for Blizzard to balance 10 different ways to play a single spec. They cant even balance 3, and they have trouble balancing specs with other specs.
There are plenty of things to criticize, but people have been asking for classic style talent trees. There isnt much bloat in these new trees either. Are there some? Yeah, but I wouldnt consider the 4% crit to be bloat. Its not as important to unholy or blood as it is for frost, but everyone is going to take it just because of where it is.
What a lot of people are absolutely failing to understand that this system is also for leveling, it acts as class trainers as well without actually having to go back to a class trainer, and it doesnt stick you into this rigid having to get these abilities at this time and you have some freedom of when you get what abilities or passives to a certain point.
This is not a borrowed power system, this is not an only end game system, this is a game system that is trying to give players more choice than they would otherwise have. Some of it is an illusion of choice, and most of it isnt as bad as people are suggesting it is.
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