Seem like just “build-in” Shadowland legandaries/heart of Azeroth thing, to me. Come one, its 20 year old game, can we finally get something worth waiting for? Druid has 4 specs already. So just add new sub-spec/prestige class for mages based around battle-mages/arcane warriors or arcane trickster. Something new and fresh. Like unironically, if you add Arcane Trickster (mage with rogue sneak, and spells doing double damage out sneak) sub-spec for mages, but to unlock it you need to complete Pathfinder-like achievements but multiplied by 2 in difficulty and time investment - that would make people hype to play new expansion.
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That’s all they are. Same system just new window dressing. I am honestly very skeptical about the promise to make them “evergreen” as well. I don’t see how they can build on this system going forward or we will end up with an overall talent structure that is way too bloated and needlessly complicated. In fact, I would argue we’re already there with three separate and distinct talent trees (class, spec, hero) per spec. Time will tell.
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Adding new specs for every class, while awesome, would be a balancing nightmare that we’d absolutely regret lol. (Every tuning patch would just be dealing with the new specs instead of the “originals.” ) Unfortunately this is probably the best we could feasibly get - even just adding new talents to every tree would mean certain specs would get access to (even existing) talent combinations that would make them insane to balance when we’re already at 39 specs.
Personally I’d want to see DH get a 3rd spec that’s a support spec if we’re going in that direction (make it some sort of “essence drain” / wc3 spellbreaker theme) so we don’t have exactly one experimental bard-esque class for the foreseeable future…
Who cares about “balance”? SOD and Remix is unbalanced, and that what makes its fun.
Uh uh, ok yeah… This is where I stop taking you seriously at all~
Sorry you don’t like the new “talenets”
if you not part of a dev team, then this message have 0 meaning.
Didn’t they sorta add a bunch of new “specs” with the hero trees? Each hero tree is shared between 2 specs. Each spec has 2 options to choose from.
Instead of adding a 4th mage spec that needs to be balanced, they basically removed 3 specs and added 6. Each spec/hero combination needs to be balanced in its own right, but also needs to keep the fundamentals similar enough on both sides that it doesn’t feel completely different.
In my opinion, what they did is more difficult than just adding 1 new spec to each class (from a balancing perspective).
Talents are just copy and paste of what is meta. There’s no meaningful choice. Wow will never be that complicated. Something is either good or not.
I absolutely agree. By making the hero trees act as bridges between two specs they essentially boxed themselves in a corner and severely limited their ability to customize individual talent nodes while at the same time complicated the overall talent interface way more than it needed to be.
Well that’s certainly how some people approach it. However, just copy and pasting the meta build isn’t going to magically make you perform well if you don’t understand what’s going on. That said, for the most part there really is no choice, the just the illusion of choice.
Which is why the talent interface doesn’t need to be so complicated and disjointed between 3 separate trees for each spec. Especially when a good 80% of all talents are just passive buffs or otherwise things that were previous baseline and baked into the abilities that individual talent nodes now modify separately.
The whole thing is just an exercise in futility that screams “let me move things around a bit and add some more buttons to make it seem like I did something so I can justify my paycheck.” It honestly seems like the entire talent tree revamp was done just so they had something to put up on a nice infographic to show investors and shareholders who understand absolutely nothing about this game or gaming in general and tell them “see what we did, please give us some more money so we can keep doing all this hard work!”
At this point I don’t think that adding a new spec to most classes would be any more difficult than what they’re planning to do here plus the revamped talent trees.
Hell, even allowing multi-classing would be something more interesting, and if they actually bothered with testing, rather than sacking their QA staff, they could come up with things that arent too bad.
Add to that a massive reduction in the number of talents (because 90% of them are passive and/or garbage anyway), bring that down to say 10 talents for the class and spec trees, and suddenly it’s much easier to work on things that might end up broken.
I’m torn on that. While the idea of support specs seems like a good idea, the abomination that is evoker seems to indicate that it would either be broken strong, or too weak to bother with. The core game was never designed for support classes, and they dont seem to be in any rush to move away from a tank-heal-dps style with M+ and raiding.
Not really, because the 3 specs still play exactly as they did previously. The difference is some shiny new talents and visuals. The new talents could literally have been added to the existing abortion-of-a-tree and no one would have noticed.
Yes, give mage class a new spec, which drastically changes game-play, not just “new” rotation. Like all 3 specs is essentially the same, you just pressing buttons and multicolored BS hits the target. Arcane - purple, fire - yellow, frost - blue. Why? The only real deference is that frost can root, and each spec have almost identical “big boom” button with different CD for each spec. (yeyeyeye different defensive make is soooooooo not the same with different color, sure) I’d say scrap frost and fire into one spec - frostfire, and then add new spec for rogue/mage, figher/mage.
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You’re not wrong that most talents are just filler but then as I recall no one was particularly fond of the Diablo 3 model of choose one of three every 15 levels either, which is basically what you’re asking for. I think they realize (and have even tacitly admitted) that the main goal of the new talent trees was to give us something to click every level because that “feels better” to most players.
Problem being every time you raise the level cap you have to come up with stuff to add to the tree, and honestly that’s all the hero talents are as you point out.
I don’t know which way is better. I only know that all the colorful language you’re using to describe the current trees, the D3 style talents received in equal measure.
Nah, i might misheard, but im pretty sure that Nathan (the dude with somehow sad face, with “what sword meme”, or what his name?), said that node-based type of talents is easier to balance, rather that “row” style talents. Probably, because it easier to apply “effectiveness budget” approach to this type of talents. Take notice, that in current talents you often need to spend some talent point on “filler” nodes, before you can take actually good ones. You “paying” extra points, for “effective” talents.
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Oh, absolutely. The Cata talents, while I still think were better than what we have now, were far from perfect. Their main issue was that most of them were boring, too spaced apart, and so utterly poorly balanced. That said, there could be a nice little ‘middle ground’ between what we now have (60+ talents) and what we used to have (5 talents).
Maybe something along the lines of 10 for the class tree, 10 for the spec, with more ‘choice nodes’. Fewer talents in theory means easier balance, and players still get a talent to pop in every 3 levels. Remove the majority of passive talents from our current trees and they might almost be semi-ok. Don’t forget, the original trees were buried because most of it was passives and felt bad (1% mana reduction on spell X, or 1% increased damage on spell Y etc).