Get an Early Look at Hero Talents for Druid, Hunter, Mage, and Priest

Hey I think the Dark Ranger stuff is really cool. BUT

Could you make it to where Dark Ranger buffs the damage of Wailing Arrow in some way? Wailing arrow fits the class fantasy of dark ranger and currently Wailing isn’t viable in the MM tree - a Dark Ranger buff could tip that scale a bit! Also Wailing Arrow applies a silence that could help MM with group CC in M+, yet the silence doesn’t work in PvP - this would be cool to fix on the tooltip or add functionality to the Dark Ranger spec for PvP.

Please buff Dark Ranger’s Wailing arrow! It’d be really cool alongside some of these changes.

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Also, why are you going to give a phys dps, extra magic dmg… stop making things dumb… have it give the buff based on spec… i swear these devs are out of their minds… game is getting more s&%t with support roles, and external buffs making specs balanced around them…

No way in he// are you really asking a healer to game a cycling button in the middle of combat… like really…

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The design on premonition as a slot machine you can manually stop is really terrible. You will have to

  1. Press a button, then identify which buff it randomly selected and then if it got the right one, hit the button again within 1s.
  2. If the buff you want is next, you then just have to cool your heels for 1s while you wait for it to come up.
  3. If the buff you want is two away, you have to decide whether to waste a full GCD waiting or try to sneak in a heal while then not missing the buff you want when it comes up.
  4. Now that the one you want is available, you can finally activate it. I hope you didn’t need that 25% healing received buff two seconds ago (while your tank was still alive, this is made even worse if you had to stop healing while you waited), and hope you didn’t waste too many GCD’s waiting for the buff you wanted. God help you if you missed the buff and have to wait for it to come around again…

Try again, blizz. Cool theoretical concept, but this ain’t it.

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The Oracle tree sounds like an interesting way to introduce some kind of support gameplay to the healing priests, but I find quite a few things problematic here. The rotating buffs are conceptually OK, but we must be able to know which one is coming next through at least a trackable aura and ideally the spell tooltip updates. For many situations, we need to have this rotate without cooldown out of combat, since waiting 2 minutes to set the rotating buff to the correct one after a raid encounter seems excessive. The nature of the buffs are also a bit problematic given how so many melees deal magical damage, so a primary stat buff would be much better. Clairvoyance AOE buffing through proximity targeting seems questionable. Maybe an empowered version giving 3x the benefit or having the next Premonition be 3 charges without rotating the buff could work. Both of these fixes have their own problems though so maybe better ideas exist. Having multi-target buffs through deterministic means seems like a good gameplay choice as long as it doesn’t (1) encourage casting some of these spells many times before a raid encounter or (2) encourage the player to stop using their normal healing rotation to have it proc at the correct time (or click canceling their Grand Reveal stacks to time it). The first concern could be addressed by giving having Clairvoyance automatically after resetting a raid encounter, and the second concern is harder to address - my current idea would be an extra active button, but that also seems clunky. The small chance at the bottom of the tree seems like a problem, since a random proc lining up with the correct buff for dpsers with big 3-minute cooldowns could be too much variability for a random thing with a small chance. That variability could be alleviated by an ICD, but such an impactful thing being random at all seems ill thought out. As long as these are addressed, this could be decent additional support-oriented gameplay for healers which are already support-esque.

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Guardian of the Grove kind of reminds me of enhancement shaman wolf builds. Just keeping treants up all the time. Would be cool to work in a summoning build for Druids.

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The Blizz Twitter just posted some Nathanos fanart, so I think I kinda know why Dark Ranger got priority lol.

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I think it would be cool if, instead of just talking about it and showing us the talents in text format, there was some kind of visual aid also showcasing how these new builds are gonna work.

Also, so far, I am not very excited about the druid talents! They don’t sound like they are for me.

Are these subclasses optional or mandatory? I am guessing mandatory.

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The hunter one is real weird. How is Dark Ranger tied to BM?

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You can see the talents in an actual build in the article when you click on view whole thing. Nonetheless, they’re mandatory since they’ll be 71-80 for leveling.

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The Mage stuff is a mess. I thought this was going to be like a quick 3 choice nodes or something.

Just add things to the regular talent tree or redo the entire thing again. Do you really think adding TWO talent trees is fun or easier on people? Actually it’s 3 now, the class, spec, and now hero. You are convoluting your game.

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Hopefully Blizzard will take into consideration the feedback from here in regards to which specs get what. As I stated earlier, I do not agree with Dark Ranger being a Beast Master pick.

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I meant, instead of sharing videos of people just talking about it, I’d like to see footage of the rotations in motion (gameplay footage) to go along with the builds they are showing. It would help with a lot of the guesswork people are doing.

Plus I hate to read.

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I didn’t think they could screw up more than lightsmith, yet here we are.

I assume they are doing this so a retalent doesn’t involve talents from 70 and below so that we don’t have to do as much as 80 choices when talents are changed.

Dark Ranger is brilliant, thank you.

All of the hero classes should have flavour and class fantasy as good as the Dark Ranger stuff.

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Dark Ranger looks neither interesting or fun, and the ‘lore’ or ‘feel’ to it feels really off as well. I doubt I’ll ever consider it. MEH.

And on top of it all, where’s the fun? Cool. A bunch of black arrow nonsense. That’s literally all it’s adding. A new shot, with new mechanics build around that shot. This is Henry Ford style WoW, you can have any color as long as it’s bla…err, dark. Bleh.

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I’m IN. Dark Ranger looks awesome! More damage = more damage.

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This blizzard, please.

Druid class is so oversaturated with night elven themes even though we’ve had the Loa and other forms of druidism for years in the game. Players have been asking for class skins to represent alternate, often overlooked themes in the game’s lore, and hero talents feel like trying and missing the mark on that. Like we shouldn’t have to be stuck with only the popular choices, and we should have more options than homogenized Light or homogenized Nature abilities/spells that only further deny a visible place for the rest of the lore tied to these classes.

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I get your anxiety, because everyone looks at things differently. But Shadow and Death are part of Nature. At least that’s how I see it. But again, everyone is different.

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So are rainbows. Don’t see them showing up as a hunter theme.

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