I'd like to start off this discussion by introducing myself for both the community as well as any potential Blizzard employes that hopefully might view this thread. I am an NA player since late BC, I've played WotLK then took a hiatus from WoW between the Cataclysm and MoP expansions and only played the last 2-3 months of the WoD expansion. I then played all throughout Legion, BFA, Shadowlands and now Dragonflight all as an average player who enjoys Mythic+, Raids, and PvP all to a casual extent (no mythic raiding and only 2 AotC throughout all expansions).
Today I’d like to talk about and have a very honest and open discussion in regard to the upcoming hero talents coming in the War Within Expansion and how I see the system as a casual player moving forward based on the initial examples released for feedback.
Starting off, I believe that Blizzard made the right choice in not expanding upon the current talents introduced in Dragonflight as doing so would result in the same reason they were reportedly removed in the first place as it would both bloat the system causing a balancing nightmare. However, there is an issue that talent trees by their very nature present in games and that is the issue of sunk cost fallacy.
What do I mean by this? On the surface, I believe the purpose behind hero talents should be to further augment the core playstyle of a given spec so that it stands out from someone else who uses the same spec. Let’s use Unholy DK as an example, at the core of the spec it’s a playstyle that involves using undead pets, diseases, and shadow magic to deal damage and provide utility. I believe hero talents SHOULD be a system that allows a player to either further specialize into one of those core parts of the spec or at the very least change how one of those parts interact with one another. For example, perhaps a hero talent tree that further enhances the undead pet fantasy of Unholy Dk by allowing them to be somewhat of a melee Demo Lock controlling hordes of undead minions alongside them, or a tree that removes the pet in favor of augmenting your player body by turning you into an undead monstrosity, or a tree that focuses on diseases like a melee version of affliction warlock, or a tree that focuses on dealing direct damage similar to arms warrior but dealing shadow damage.
This brings us to the sunk cost fallacy I mentioned earlier, what happens when a spec doesn’t have a great core fantasy to work off of or is a spec that’s core gameplay is in need of a rework. Let’s take shadow priest as an example, if down the line shadow priest gets about 4-5 different hero talent trees to choose from, but suddenly either because the player base discovers it or Blizzard finally gets around to it after months/years of asking for it, shadow priest is up for a rework but now in order to rework shadow priest you have to also account for and possibly rework multiple hero talent trees depending on the size and scope of the changes needed. I believe this may incentivize the balance team to try to either implement new hero talent trees as a workaround to fixing the core gameplay issues of the spec or continue making clunky/sub optimal hero talents as the work and cost required to go back and fix them would be too much to deal with.
As of right now I believe Blizzard only has a few people working on all of the classes in the game and in some cases one person might be responsible for 3 or more classes at a time. This leads to a situation which we saw at the beginning of Dragonflight where multiple spec and class trees were undercooked and in need of reworks/balance shifts, sometimes multiple times, during the course of the expansion and in some cases like with hunter and shaman for example, they still need additional work done to help bring them in line with other trees. With the introduction of hero talents, unless Blizzard brings on at the very least one designer per class let alone per spec, I believe Blizzard will be significantly slower at adapting to feedback and implementing changes to the overall gameplay of the classes/specs.
Possible solutions: I think simplifying the hero talents similar to how talents worked between MoP and Shadowlands where you made a choice of one talent per row while removing all of the nodes that exist in the current trees that only buff throughput (i.e increase crit chance/damage of X ability by Y%). In other words, ensure that all choices made in a given hero talent tree either alter or replace gameplay functionality of a given spell or in rare cases add a new spell (I say rare because nobody likes playing classes/specs with bloated rotations).
Another potential solution could be to perhaps remove certain undesirable talents from the main spec trees either because they are an issue to balance alongside other choices or because it’s surrounded by too many other similar choices and instead creating hero talent trees around them. For example, single minded fury in the fury warrior spec tree, which “effectively” allows Fury to dual wield one handed weapons could be removed and instead made into a hero talent tree centered around it. The same could be said for Frost DK having a hero talent tree focused on two handed as opposed to dual wielding. This method of change would likely result in the choices that a player currently makes when filling their spec trees out on live in Dragonflight to be instead made through their choice of hero talents. In other words, less choice in spec tree, more choice in hero trees especially depending on which tree you choose. This way it’s easier to establish the core of a spec so that reworks are less likely and then the bulk of the gameplay design can be on the individual hero talents so if something goes wrong you likely only need to fix one hero talent tree vs potentially all of them.
Thoughts?