Yeah, this isn’t going away after the war within. I suspect that for Midnight, the hero talent trees will grow a bit. For the next 3 expacs at least, this is the expac-level character prog rather than the main trees growing.
Maybe they did it like this because the main trees are already big and adding more tiers/nodes would be annoying for players. A new little tree, that will take 3 expansions to be a mid-size tree, might their band aid.
The balance is fine because right now, the game is at its most transparent in terms of shifting balance. We’re on a seasonal meta where it all gets a minor (or not so minor) shake up with each major patch. This is the design intent and keeps an MMO interesting so don’t ever expect actual balance.
There are a few classes the devs seemingly don’t know what to do with.
Addendum:
Upon revisiting Hero Talents, I can’t help but think building them all as quasi-hybrids of the existing specs and their themes is inherently folly. Using mage as an example, Frostfire seems interesting and fitting enough, at least on the surface, but I find myself rather dubious about the other two. What is Sunfury even supposed to be; or Paladin’s Lightsmith? I’m not a huge fan of the concept of support specs but what if instead of Spellslinger, Mage got a support spec based on the school of Illusion, or that Chronomacy healing spec everyone and their dog thinks of in situations like this?
Trickster isn’t great IMO. I don’t even like the name or whatever “class fantasy” they’re going for with it.
I think if they reverted outlaw to be more like combat and made some Pirate hero spec between Outlaw and Assassination, and put roll the bones there, it would have been a better thing.
I’m a long-time rogue, with at least 1 rogue of every race and 3 at 70. Yet I didn’t main it for a single season this expac.
Deathstalker, trickster, fatebound. Horrible.
Deathstalker should be some Forsaken-only class skin for rogues.
Where the hell is Trickster and Fatebound fitting in?
This is the easiest class to do this for and they messed it up.
Outlaw-Assassination – Pirate
Sub-Assassination – Some ninja type of thing
Outlaw - Sub – who cares, but maybe some more tanky thing for world content or whatever, if I wasn’t so exhausted with this game and life atm I’d probably have an idea here lmao
edit: Actually, just revert it to Combat and make the Combat-Sub one “outlaw”
Sin rogue since 2009. Through good, bad, horrible, disastrous, catastrophic, okay, hang on everyone while I finish my opener which takes 20 minutes to ramp up DPS to mediocre.
If they wanted to blow me out of the water, put some talent in the hero tree which lets me stab people with something other than a dagger.
My guess is that it will be yet another thing I ignore and entirely forget, only to discover halfway through the expac that it exists, I’m playing the game wrong and that’s why everything is so much more difficult than it should be.
You can only be honest with your opinions. I swing between hopium and optimism to shaking my head over this.
For the 20th WoW and 30th WC milestones, we needed a bangin’ expac with some real cool new stuff that many have wanted for years.
Even if they announce a “block”, the first one of the block/next one we hit needs to be SUPER exciting.
We needed a few more specs IMO, e.g. Demo Form Tank for Warlock, Earthy tank for Shaman… stuff they put in SoD.
We needed the foundation of player housing to be in.
We needed some of these “class fantasies” to be “class skins”. Dark Ranger for elf and human, Deathstalker for Forsaken. Necromancer for Demonology lock. Stuff like that.
Instead we’re going to have mechagnome dark rangers and lightforged dranei death stalkers…wut.
I remain befuddled that we’re approaching 20 years of WoW and we are not living in an entire year of GUYS THANKS FOR COMING WITH US ON THIS JOURNEY HERE IS COOL STUFF FOR YOU ON A WEEKLY (MONTHLY?) BASIS FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR.
I don’t even know what to think at this point about this.
I think Hero Talents are gonna work well, but we have to understand the fundamental flaw within them is the naming conventions and ‘themes’ behind the abilities.
Dark Ranger, Mountain King, all great, all fun, but they’re locked to specific races and factions in the lore, which can make them awkward fits for anything outside of that scheme. Mechanically, I’m sure they’re going to be just fine, they’ll work out great, need a few tweaks here and there as is the normal for Blizzard content, there’ll be FOTM classes and Hero Talent combinations, but eh.
But we’re Role Players. We’re the nerds that stick around and make content for ourselves while Blizzard’s devs were busy humping the walls and drooling all over themselves because the leadership was a bunch of scumlords. We pay attention to this and add weight and meaning to names, to abilities and how they function and look outside of just ‘Numbers get bigger make PP grow’.
And I’m also aware that, for a large amount of players, this game is older than they are. Its is old code that Blizzard actually lose the source-codes for and had to get it back off of pirated vanilla servers, the game has been around and active for that long, the employees who came in did not have access to the old source code from Vanilla and BC because the employees from Vanilla and BC had left or been fired and the information they had was now lost to Acti-Blizz. That the game is still functioning at all is something of a modern miracle given the age and the amount of updates that’ve been welded onto the Frankencode.
