In my opinion would be MUCH better suited for Season of Discovery, rather than retail…
I’m calling it now, blizzard will fail to make retail Hero Specs balanced AND fun to play.
It’s just another pile of multipliers upon multipliers of bloat and complexity that’s been plaguing retail for so long.
SoD (and vanilla) feels great in that you have a base class like priest, mage, lock and selecting a single row feels like that’s your hero talent like the frost tree is the hero talent tree and holy is the hero talent tree which is why dual spec was never needed and why those versions feel great. Rider of the Apocalypse sounds insanely good but they just seem like class skins and even then, its just giving a name to something that could have just been a new talent row but made to seem cool by slapping a fancy name on it.
I think if they make them cool, they will be unbalanced. And if they make them balanced, it’ll fail to make it fun to play and unique.
As always with retail and sod/classic, I will play and enjoy all versions for different reasons but I agree just feels like another talent row with a shiny coat of paint.
Agreed 
At this point, retail needs a straight up reset.
Because any small changes affects so many other things. This is due to all the content overload/bloating.
Retail would need to replace regular specs/talent trees with these Hero Specs to be more “daring” and do something cool.
It’s just going be a super underwhelming experience, like you said, probably just a “class skin”
If they go daring - people doing casual content still pick what’s meta for a +25 and complain about a lack of true build options.
If they go casual then there’s be complaints about no meaningful options.
Let’s be real even if they nail what you want for the game, forums will be filled with people dissatisfied.
At best they can hope for ‘alright this expansion is better than [insert previous expansion here].
I mean you cant tell what others will find fun , fun does not fit all, some will find it fun some will not
This is a very common, room-temperature-IQ take.
It’s just a contained system for providing player power. It’s not that deep.
It’s in fact anti-complexity and anti-bloat because guess what! They can continue to add more and you only ever have to keep track of one set of hero talents. And most of them are just “Your execute is blue and does 5% extra damage!”
Fun to play is subjective, so that will be different for everyone…
But you are correct, they will not be balanced. There will always be a mathematically superior option and most people will play whatever WoWhead recommends. That’s the way this game has always worked…even in vanilla. Except back then we relied on theory crafters and different websites instead of sims and WoWhead
So good job on calling something that is guaranteed to be true, I guess
I think if they’d just given them a less grandiose name people wouldn’t be feeling so underwhelmed by them. “Hero Talents” to me sounds like something on the level of the artifact weapons in legion. And sure, maybe there’s a comparison to be made between the artifact powers we unlocked and the hero talent trees. But without everything around it like the weapon itself, its increasing power throughout the expansion, the connection to the lore, and of course the many appearances, hero talents just feel completely bland.
I’d rather they try something new and fail than try nothing.
I’m just blown away by how passive the Hero talents are. Look at the Keeper of the Grove tree, that might be the most boring, passive, nothing tree I’ve ever seen.
Literally nothing in the Keeper tree is actively doing anything, the only active thing are the Dream Petals and they are completely passive. I guess you can have trees Moonfire?
It’s even worse when you realize you can only path a certain side of it, I’m just looking at it like no, I don’t want any of it, what is the point? You could just drink a potion that said, “healing increased by 50%” and you would have the Keeper of the Grove tree, minus the instant roots cast, but who is really caring about that? Who is spamming roots in this game, 0.00001 of players?
Agreed. And I think that would have been the way to the hero talents trees. Instead of fluff trees with essentially one defining talent…the trees should have thematically change all of our current talents and added a few signature abilities that fulfill the lore expectations of the hero talent tree theme.
Honestly, it feels like they should just make the talent tree more customizable instead of offering, what seems to be, a separate system from that.
Like… idk, allow us to allocate points into 3 talents trees, 2 specs of our liking and 1 general. Wouldn’t that be fancy so i can have my frostfire mage from vanilla to here. 
And who knows, maybe some new spells passives that can be exclusively tied between two specs, like the frostfire bolt. Well i say new, new and returning…
I personally am excited for hero talents. But I’ll wait to make final judgements till I can actually see them in game during testing.
I always wanted the alpha talent system that they scrapped, it would’ve been so interesting. Basically you were just given a pool of everything and got to cherry pick from it. A polished version of that concept would be very interesting.
This for sure! My initial reaction when I saw the name Keeper of the Grove was excitement at the notion of getting my actual nature spells back for balance. Rather than all those cosmic spells. I just automatically assumed that’s what it meant. Based on nothing really. That was just the impression it gave.
I mean, what will pack leader let me do that I can’t now. Tame druids in forms? Summon my entire stable?
So far hero talents don’t seem to impact complexity. They more augment your current skills.
I’ve seen Survival Hunters and Feral Druids top DPS meters the “Meta” doesn’t matter as much as people think lol like your actual skill matters a lot more like playing a “meta” class with all the “meta” gear and talents is pointless if your awful at playing it.
Instead of adding new classes they are giving existing classes a few new flavours/themes. I like the idea a lot. I can play my favourite character AND try something new without rerolling and starting over.
It’s just a bit of fun and flair. People are overthinking this.
Idk man, Frostfire Mage is looking like it’ll be rad as hell.
I miss my FFB insta-casts from ye olden days.