Would hero specs be much better as a cross class trait?
Like a hunter that seeks such a mastery over pets they cross into druidism or a shaman that wants to incorporate a little light.
The hero traits are already sparse and mostly lackluster. If nearly every race can be any class, then any class that can adopt a fraction of a totally different class can definitely be done.
Lastly I’d like to point out that pallidens were priests that learned more combat and martial traits to become what they are. Thrall’s mother was a warrior that learned rogue techniques in Shadowlands, so there are examples of cross class adoptions.
Multi-classing is cool thematically but it would be a nightmare logistically, look at D&D for example. As much as people gripe about “balance” in the game Blizzard makes an attempt to try. But you’re adding a recipe for trauma asking for people to design around classes that weren’t intended to be complimented or combined altogether.
What’s the point of strengths and weaknesses if I can just talent out of them? Hero talents may not be as exciting to most but I can see the value in their decision to go that route.
I would have preferred 4th specs to this little extra tree we’re getting. I think additional specs could have encompassed the “class fantasy” of the hero trees a bit better and could have pulled from out of left field to accomplish what you’re saying as well.
Now the dream of additional specs is dead for a while IMO, where tossing Shaman a tank spec in retail rather than classic + while giving a few support specs and a few “hero specs” would have covered so much for the player base.
Given the design intent of this or any MMO has never been pure balance, it would be fine. When you’re clearly designing for a seasonal meta it’s even more fine.
I don’t think it would be too hard to balance. It looks like it’s only a few moves, passive affects, and attribute value increases on this new thing. Maybe efficient use of hero traits is reduced by being of a different class.
PvP is the area which to my mind has the only real need to have balance in. That might be a problem because there would be a specific build that would rule them all.
I’ve banged on this drum for a while now, but Neverwinter Nights Online had a brilliant system that worked fantastically for making every expansion feel fulfilling, no matter what order you tackled them in.
You had your Character Level/Feat Tree, and then you had the Expansion Feat Tree. Depending upon your class, race, and preferences, you had a different talent tree for each class that was only active in that particular expansion, so being max level made the expansion easier, but without filling out this, for lack of a better term, Sideways Power Tree, was what gave you the edge the surpass the challenges of that specific expansion.
Balance wise, each Expansion Feat Tree would deactivate when not in the zones relevant to that specific expansion, which meant that the Game Devs didn’t have to deal with Gamer Gremlins creating the most broken frankenstein of cracked-out talent trees to produce hilariously unbalanced builds, and it allowed the active character level to remain static without needing a re-work every 2 years.
I’d love to see Blizzard start using Expansion-Specific Talent Trees in the same vein as this ‘Hero Talents’ because it means we can stay at X level, but its filling out those new Hero Talents to build new ways off our existing Talents rather than continuing to have to re-invent the wheel.
That said, I adore the concept of giving us those ‘Hero’ Classes that we’ve been clamoring for for decades now come to us as talent builds unique to specific classes, and I cannot wait to see how this plays out.
Yeah but then you set yourself in a trap of if it’s not dynamically more powerful or shapes the gameplay of a class significantly then it’s not worth picking or doing in the first place. And if it is tuned where you notice and feel a decent gameplay shift, the rest of the meta needs to compensate for that.
You also need to balance for more than just PvP because there is always that trickle down attitude of casual or even slightly upper tier raiders feeling as if they need to mimic the top 1% to get any results. One class(combination) gets too strong and they’ll stack it for an encounter at the exclusion of everyone else–then further raids needs to be built with the assumption of those multi-classes in mind, etc. Like imagining devs having to assuming that on a particular encounter, every class is going to take points in Paladin for their bubble to skip massive raid wide damage mechanic.
Those were good attempts but they tied too heavily into the Talent Trees of their Expansions. Furthermore, they were clunky, convoluted and full of hurry-up-and-wait content that forced players to rush for content only to be starved for it because the system was built around end-game competitive Raiding and PvP that only the top 10 or 5 percent would see any true mechanical benefit from grinding their faces into mush against the screen to achieve.
I mean fully independent from the leveling system and the talent tree, stand-alone ‘sideways’ talent trees that built upon the flavor and concepts of that expansion alone, QoL improvements for various zones and enemies you’d face more than ‘do X% more damage with lasers made from the crystalized blood of the planet’. Talent trees that might allow you to speak with neutral or even unfriendly factions, allow you to use specific class abilities like enslave Undead/banish Elemental/Shackle Undead to in new ways that might, in turn, expose more of the lore of the setting, and that particular expansion, even give the players access to hidden factions and vendors.
The problem is that Blizzard always has to tie every single new gimmick into the “MORE POWER, MORE POWER, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!” trope, rather than letting the gimmicks be QoL improvements to that expansion and letting the players gain power in more traditional ways. That’s why Legion, Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands all left a universal bad taste in peoples’ mouths.
Not the story, though that was an issue for all three. Not the content, although that was an issue for all three. No, it was that the players had come to depend upon the powers they had gained and cultivated and then the next expansion rolls around and all our shiny new toys get taken away and nerfed into the the bedrock. When the next expansion rolled around, we felt weaker than ever before and all the cool stuff we could do was taken away without so much as an apology.
If the ‘Hero Talent’ system will be a bold new step in the right direction, or yet more Abandonware and Bloat Mechanics that’ll be tossed to the wayside as soon as the War Within is finished is something we’re just gonna have to wait and see.
The system didn’t force any player. The mistake was an in-game culture that suggested if you weren’t maxing out your AP gains you weren’t viable for even casual content. And when people were literally going up against the large incremental scales per level to discourage that kind of behavior- people complained that they felt like there was nothing to look forward to.(Because the system was intended to last the entire expansion and not be completed in a patch).
They even said the extra rows on artifacts we got, the attack power/spell power multiplier at the end of that row, and the light/darkness tree at Argus was a band-aid for not anticipating how much people would try to bulldoze through the Artifact system.
I don’t think that deserves a talent tree because the current idea for talents are stuff that stays with your character “evergreen” and not expansion or thematic specific skills. But I do like how Season of Discovery is doing for WoW classic where you go around in-game learning new skills and even new roles for your class through quests that dial into your existing class flavor rather than multiclassing. In reality they’re just digging up the old Spellbook system, where in classic you had to get the final ranks of certain skills from mobs or dungeon/raid bosses.
Legion is often rated right behind Wrath as among the best expansions in WoW. It may not be everyone’s flavor for sure, but they’re in the minority.
Ion said that Hero Talents were their solution to adding a new permanent addition to the talent tree system without having to add new rows to the already complicated but fairly manageable class/spec talent system we have now.
It’s still a borrowed power system even if it’s not giving you actual power for the “numerical” parts of the game. You’re getting a suite of things that are later not used by most. The big difference being that the majority of the playerbase aren’t RPers and would ignore most of it.
The original borrowed power still exists every major patch – tier sets. I think the backlash against borrowed power mostly came from having too much of it in BfA. That was just ridiculous, as was the entire expac, due to them merging 3 expac’s worth of concepts (and borrowed power) into one… and doing none of it well.
All that said, I’d love those sideways talents, even as a lone RPer on a normal OCE server these days.