I really need to know what the Shaman Ancestor is going to look like. If it’s an ancestor, will it look like a mirror image of your chosen race?
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Crossposting from the Farseer thread on the Shaman forum:
On the theming front, Farseer is a huge win. It’s felt for a long time like Blizzard has forgotten that ancestral spirits were supposed to be a cornerstone of the class’s fantasy, so I love that this path is built around them.
But good grief, what a letdown mechanically. My first thought upon reading this was that it’s basically just giving Ele and Resto a second version of Elemental Overload with different graphics, but upon further reflection it’s actually just Holy priests’ Divine Image with higher uptime.
At best, this tree is a big fat meh that just sort of passively increases the output of everything you were already doing. At worst, it’s forcing a bunch of talent picks in the process, and likely an entire build pick on Elemental.
This coming out while there’s also an ongoing thread on the shaman subforum about Elemental desperately needing a spec rework also raises a pretty serious issue with hero talents in my mind, which is that hero talents by virtue of being designed to be shared across two different specs could seriously disincentivize the devs from undertaking spec reworks, no matter how desperately needed, because doing so has the potential to also require reworks of both their hero paths, which would then knock on to effecting the performance of the other two specs that didn’t need reworks. So do the devs undertake the rework, potentially creating a lot more work for themselves in the course of needing to fix what the rework breaks about the hero paths and the other specs attached to them? Or do they just let the broken spec languish?
I know where I’d bet my money.
The deeper we get into hero talents, the more I’m convinced this is not a system worth following through on.
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its not a bad word. The maw is basically hell and people typed it a lot in reference back in SL. Also depends on intent/phrasing. Using it as an insult is ofc offensable but otherwise its fine.
I know this is probably an unpopular opinion but Aldrachi reaver looks like exactly what I expected and I can’t wait to use it.
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Indeed that is an unpopular opinion…the talents are clearly made by someone who plays dh on a basic level and wasnt very creative.
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That is your opinion and you are very welcome to be wrong. Hope you have a great day.
Making a mental note that either my panda lock or vulpera lock who wields affliction will be doing Heckcaller… wonder what being corrupted looks like. Do we become a satyr for the duration? Also riders DK is about what I thought it’d be…we get aided by the horsemen but idk it’d be wicked if it could change our acherus charger to one like the horsemen use even if that’s just a glyph later like the paladin chargers can be glyphed to be the legion pally horses. Real excited to see warriors get the Bladestorm spell back, now if only we had the ability to combo with it where every time our blade(s) slice into a foe we carve a deep bleeding wound into them as I’d probably never stop playing my Slayer Warrior at that point. Although…Slayer sounds like a DH thing more than warrior
Slayer is the “Warrior is rock” part of that old meme video is it?
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I’ll give it a shot, but after looking at it, I can understand why some are complaining already.
Pack Leader feels kind of like they designed it with just BM in mind and went “just line it up with whatever” for Survival.
Cull the Herd, for example, looks like it’ll be a bit inconsistent with Survival because it’ll rely on Wildfire Bomb deciding to pick Shrapnel when you’ve got Kill Shot lined up, compared to BM’s main interaction with it which is Barbed Shot. I guess it’s supposed to balance out with Survival getting access to a few Kill Shots during Coordinated Assault (usually 6-9 over the course of a boss encounter), but then a big part of Cull is also kind of just the same thing we already get when Coordinated Assault is active?
Also really sucks that it’ll make CS 100% required, I liked that you could play with any two of the three prongs at the end of Survival’s tree.
Really hoping Sentinel is better.
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I will be slightly cross is Sentinel enforces lone wolf
Should say pestilence and death
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Preach. Justice for Templar
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Now only if Templar Paladins could join in on this same level of fun!
I have played WoW since Vanilla. I have played WW and BM Monk since Legion. I was the most excited about the Shado Pan hero talents. I thought, finally, a little ninja flavor on my Monk! Maybe we will get a type of vanish or cloak of shadows or something cool! What do we get? If you cast flurry of blows a lot, you will get an uber flurry of blows after awhile. What the actual Blizz? This is the best you could come up with when Shado Pan has such a cool theme and aesthetic? This is actually pathetic. You have too many resources as a company to put this trite, bland, lackluster effort out and think it would get a good response.
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I might be in the minority on this, but I really don’t like Fury getting Bladestorm again. I like fury and all, so I’m not complaining about the extra power, but Fury already has better health and healing, better sustained AoE, and better single target. All Arms has is 2-target cleave from SS and burst AoE/CC resistance from Bladestorm; with Bladestorm given to both specs, there’s even less reason to play that spec.
I’m really hoping whatever rework is clearly happening to Warriors can give useful yet unique utility and damage profiles to both Arms and Fury.
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Feedback on arcane spellslinger (i mainly play arcane, not enough knowledge to provide insight on frost):
“Spellslinger” before reveal made me think of slinging spells (i know) but it looks like we will be slinging splinters instead. Not an issue however it’s just you know, oh okay.
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Splintering Sorcery: main question here I guess is passives interraction. does splinter impact trigger touch of the magi, does it benefit from winters chill in any way. Other thing thats personal is that since it’s a long dot I’m afraid of scenarios shadow priests, affli and general dot specs have where in certain times stuff just dies before anything could happen. Rest of the nodes solve this kind of, but not in single target scenarios as far as I can understand. what is the spliter dot? bleed or magic or what
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Augury Abounds: Wording on this is a bit confusing for me, probably because of a language barrier but i don’t really know how the additonal spliter works. It says conjuring “a splinter” makes another one, we don’t know if this is +1 to the +8 from surge, is it +8 to the +8 surge, or doesn’t even happen because surge technically generates its splinters before the effect is in place. additionally, specifically stating that it has a chance (100%) to happen makes me assume this is here to make the preview better and realistically gonna be a tuning thing, more like 20-30%ish like it usually is with these kind of nodes
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Look Again: does the created mirror image give full damage reduction from mirror image or how does it work?
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Shifting Shards: big painpoint for me. this looks like something that could potentially promote degenerate gameplay, like forcing out a shifting power when surge and totm is up just to generate 16 splinters. it says “over its duration” so i assume every splinter counts as a separate splinter generated to trigger the +1 from Augury Abounds
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Controlled Instincts: the Nether precision proccing splinter will probably make you want to have tempest up even on ST. right now tempest is so bad on ST, the only reason we use it is to enhance touch of the magi. being unlucky with nether precision could make it fall off, which would probably prompt us to apply it again and it just feels bad because its in the ballpark of living bomb level of weakness on ST
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Reactive Barrier: waiting to drop below a treshold doesnt sound very reactive to me. expected damage is not really an issue right now, but constant ticking is. if its “reactive” it would make sense to me to have something like taking damage has a low chance to proc barrier. it would probably cause mass shield not getting a massive nerf just because of this node.
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Spellfrost Teachings: a low chance like 5% in the preview looks very not fun. since we generate splinters on set events, it would make me happier to see it proc just like the comet/frostbolt stuff. make it happen on every 16 splinter hits or something. we dont know how the class changes in general but right now arcane is extremely scripted. having a 6% damage gain randomly not happen during a big burn would make this node feel very bad at times.
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Splintering Orbs: i might be reading this incorrectly but does this mean that having a bowling combo with barrage/orbs would cause this potentially proc 90 splinters (180 during surge from Augury Abounds) during 9 GCDs at a 10mob pull? aoe implications are kinda wild, single target ones are a bit grim. if there is a way, id love this have infinite cap on boss classified enemies so it just doesnt turn off on a single target boss fight.
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Volatile Magic: this feels like the right place to solve 16sec dot issue on single target. is it possible to change this to “splinters just explode for their remaining damage if it hits a target with lower healt than 3%” or something like that? heck, call it Splinter Instability or something cool
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Unerring Proficiency: hard to say anything about this. supernova is just not used at all outside of pvp. it looks like this is meant to be a choice node between ST and AoE but if Volatile Magic is aoe only, then having this would cause the spec to lock in supernova, regardless of how it feels to play with just because it gets a 540% damage increase. im not a big fan of hardlocking talent “choices” because of passives, and lets be real the entire spellslinger tree is passives because gameplay below max level is completely irrelevant. please dont make us force take supernova on single target.
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Force of Will: just for the flavour of the spec, id love to see this one give crit stats based on the splinter count on the target rather than a boring flat number
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Splinterstorm: what is the travel speed of splinters and can you recall splinters that havent reached the target yet? this is too mechanically strange to say based off just the text here. another “depends on how the spec is tuned” thing. clearcasting missiles right now are so weak you interrupt the missiles cast unless you have a set proc or running low on mana. having the same balance would make the capstone kinda boring from the clearcasting standpoint. you probably have statistics on this from number of times where Cascading Power is taken in builds that have Conjure Mana Gem. im just gonna assume its closer to 0% than 1%. clearcasting is not in a good state to get excited about this one. sources say that this happens after every 8th splinter. requires testing on beta but from text, clearcasting proc doesnt look exciting
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this is just me pleading for Beast Masters to have a viable one pet build again. I always enjoyed the beast master as “me and my fur buddy vs the world”, not a zookeeper. We’ve been three characters wide since Legion.
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Honestly I’m getting less excited the more we see.
Why do some specs have so much class fantasy and flavor and others get bland passives that won’t actually change anything?
It’s obvious there’s different designers for these talents and some put in significantly more effort than others.
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pretty sure you answered your own question.
Maybe now that a few teams have work on view for everyone to see the remaining teams will do better and others will submit reworks.
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