You can post your feedback on a public forum and I am allowed to respond with how your ‘feedback’ is presented. You are not exempt from public interaction on a forum when that forum is open to the playerbase. I understand your concerns about your experience as a raider. But making a comparison to two very different systems is always going to be weird to me. You say I haven’t offered a compelling argument but to me none of the arguments comparing them to covenants is in any way shape or form compelling. It’s a matter of perspective and neither of us is going to convince the other. So please, do not tell me to ‘leave off’. I’ve just as much right to post as you do.
They aren’t really different though? Instead of four choices, I’m given two. Two choices with different strong themes and different additional abilities and buffs.
The idea of a thematic choice is nice, as it was in SL with covenants, but there will be a correct answer for purposes of game performance - Blizzard is simply just not that good at balancing things - and that answer will be the only thing that matters unless you are a person who doesn’t care about bringing your best to any group you play with. That’s the bottom line. I don’t understand how you don’t see that this is a real concern.
Meanwhile, instead of making a single set of well-tailored additional talents for each spec designed to enhance the play experience and feeling of power progression, they are trying to come up with sets of abilities that work for in some cases vastly different roles and specs where in almost every case that I’ve examined, at least one of those specs loses out. Never mind problems that Blizzard always has had when any hybrid spec drifts too far into the other lane!
They are barely managing to balance their existing bloated system as-is - just within my own experience, I know that there are real problems in the druid and DK trees, and I’m certain their are others - and rather than publishing their awareness of it and their intensions for improving it, they’re adding complexity. It doesn’t inspire confidence.
Again, this is an argument neither of us are going to get anywhere with. I have already listed my reasoning many times in this thread, You’ve listed yours. You aren’t going to change my mind. I’m not going to change yours. I don’t hold anything against you. I honestly hope you have a good day. Take care.
herald allows ret’s to more off-heal while dpsing, which is something I enjoy.
Templar don’t match the theme, I’d rename it to zealot if your going to keep it that way, or redesign the tree to something that actually suit the name templar.
Both paladin hero talents for ret requires wake, which goes against what Ion said about hero talents, they need to be redesigned with a different activator, or put wake on the top 3 rows of the ret tree to make sure everyone get’s wake.
Templar needs to not feel to close to DK’s avalanche talent, with things dropping from the sky and placing a debuff when a condition is met. Paladins is meant to be the opposite of DK’s.
I don’t have a strong enough intuition about how bonuses and combos turn into rotations to give much feedback. But I am mildly concerned that some of these trees are building around buttons I don’t use at all currently.
Will our existing talent trees be modified to make some of the currently-optional talents baseline if they are being used heavily in a hero tree?
(I guess this touches on my still-open question about what is “evergreen” about this system - is the design space envisioned about adding more tree choices in the future, rotating in new trees each expansion or adding more layers of hero trees)
Hero talents and general class design worry me. Alot of specs already have a problem with both mechanical and button bloat. This coupled with the wast amount of random procs and noise that exists in the classes right now is making their classes worse. Aimed shot for example will procs bleeds, artic bola, serpent sting and wind arrows. This is a result of trying to fit 3-5 itterations of each spec into the talents trees.
Alot of the Hero Talent trees seems to lack the class flavour that they are sold as while adding on to the above problems. Just adding procs and mechanics onto already bloated class design will not improve the game. And while we have not gotten a look yet at the base classes for The War Within it seems like very little will change. Slice and Dice will remain, rend will remain and now we will just get more things added on top.
I really wish blizzard had learned from the ret reowrk that sometimes less is more. New things are exciting but you can not just continue adding it on top of each other. The flavour of the classes are lessening as more hodgepodge mechanics are added and all that remains is just a series of obstacles to overcome to do damage that keeps increasing with every expansion.
I’m anxious to see what they come up with for Priests. But given what I’ve seen thus far for other DPS classes, I suspect it will likely make PvP even more frustrating. Literally all I ask for is better mobility and a little less hard casting/channeling for main abilities. Stuff like spectral guise (or some variation of that), increase the damage mitigation of fade, a flat physical damage reduction while in shadow form or something like holy form or talent for disc/holy that includes some sort of CC mitigation.
I dunno, not going to pretend that I can see the bigger picture here or that I know what will make this better, I just want something to escape/deal with the train. It’s getting to the point where its just not fun to be so immobile.
That said, I am happy to see this as it seems to give a lot more variation in overall abilities one can choose. Makes it a little more difficult to be hard countered by being so predictable given that most specs use the same builds due to only certain builds being viable for pvp. I hope that these talents are balanced around the idea that each hybrid spec so to speak is unique/useful enough to make a big difference one way or the other. Although I just am not seeing how this whole scheme is going to work with priests. How do you combine shadow and disc? Or even more nuanced, disc and holy? I can see how this works, and I like the idea for most melee classes, but priest basically having two healing trees is def the odd one.
This is a terrible metric to use for I think pretty obvious reasons.
I could beat Dark Souls with a Broken Sword Hilt, but it would take much longer and be a lot more challenging than using a Black Knight Halberd. These sorts of choices are fine and interesting in a single player game or a lower impact multiplayer game, like Diablo.
In an MMO though, the decisions I make with regard to how I play my character have a much more direct effect on outcomes for the groups I participate in.
There is always some balance to maintain between players’ individual desires to play a certain way and aggregate performance in a group, and people have different tolerances for it. Most of our choices can however be measured, and there is often a best answer. For me, preferencing something that I enjoy more, for whatever reason, over an option I know will be easier and result in more DPS and/or healing and thus, better and faster success for the groups I participate in is really not a choice.
There’s effectively no achievement in this game for doing something less than optimally, and any time I decide to do so, I know it’s increasing the burden on my teammates. I don’t like doing that to my friends or to strangers I join in the groupfinder.
Obviously that’s fine if it’s the standard you’re holding yourself too, but you don’t need an achievement in game to have a better group experience with people playing their class fantasy that they enjoy more, (even with a slight disadvantage in output,) when all your in-game goals are still able to be met without it being crazy difficult.
If being the absolute most optimal is the only way you can have fun, you’d be fotm rerolling and miserable without your full bis kit anyway, so is the cosmetics even a blip on the radar at that point?
Perhaps you are correct, but it definitely sucks out any fun that there is to be had with this new system for me, and I would really rather they spend the time making what we have now better balanced and more fun. There is a limited amount of development time and resources for their team, and using them for this, to this extent, does come at the cost of work on other character features.
I do get wanting things to be balanced, honestly Dragonflight has had more Balance than the last three expansions. But if the devoted their time solely to the balance of the classes and did nothing new for leveling progression and customization for The War Within, by the time we got a month into the expansion people would be raging at blizzard for giving them nothing new, and how stagnant the game is. Hero Talents fill that need for progression, customization, and new features, while allowing them to work on balancing during the expansion. I do get what you want. But It would cost Blizzard more in the end than doing something new.
The button bloat does concern me as well. Although it seems like a lot of the hero talents are passives that buff other abilities. I think if they stick with that it will be better in the long run. Just gives us more flexibility to tune our existing talents around our preferred play styles.
These developers work on other stuff, their work is not just tied to class development. You need to educate yourself on how game development works. These resources could be used in better places instead of adding ARPG systems into WoW.
I think that Lightsmith is not good and clearly inferior to Herald of the Sun for Holy Paladin. Herald brings back Eternal Flame - YAY! Why isn’t this in the talent tree now??? - but it also locks you into taking Holy Prism, which is a pretty meh/weird talent mechanically that I would prefer to avoid using.
With regard to Trickster, I think making Feint into a short offensive CD is a bad decision. Assassination already has to contend with not having Shiv ready for its utility purpose, and there’s been a lot of feedback about that. This is in the same lane, but worse, as Feint is a very important, iconic defensive that is vital to have available when needed. It seems the opposite of heroic to have to compromise the availability of an important ability’s intended use.
Regarding the Tricks of the Trade talent, I’m assuming the one hour duration is just to keep the triggering buff from falling off within any significant span of time, rather than “all threat is transferred to the target for one hour,” because I cannot see the latter going live, ever.
Templar seems like an obnoxious number of hammers.
Right. In essence we are coerced by honor/respect/courtesy or whatever to playing at least two different ways. Solo mode and group mode. Thankfully this is at least possible but it still sucks when that group mode version doesn’t reflect the “you” that you want it too.
It’s very similar to having work clothes and behavior versus non work lifestyle. Problem is, wow in groups isn’t supposed to be work. But that’s what it has become.
This is a wild take. You’re basically saying just put something in the game to stop people from raging, even if it’s clearly not well thought out and balanced??
I’m also not sure how long you’ve been playing WoW…but you saying these talents will buy time for Blizz to balance is hilarious. Blizz has struggled to balance the game since its inception and these are only adding more complexity, making balance even more unattainable. This is only going to hurt the game long term if left in its current form.
This is a new system just like azerite armor, corruption, and covenants- and as we’ve seen from years of actual (not theoretical) data… players choose power over anything else. Every. Single. Time.