Why? What’s the point of something that goes from 2% to 10%? I don’t want to try to ride the success of RoP’s removal too far, but why can’t this also be removed? It provides absolutely nothing to any of the three mage specs in any content except “I do slightly more damage sometimes”
It’s a talent that exists for the sole purpose of providing some RNG to our numbers. Please, do the smart thing and either get rid of it as a talent or make it baseline so we don’t have to feel bad about the fact that, despite its low numbers, we will need to spend the point in it because it’s technically throughput.
Without Rune of Power there is no reason for this talent to exist anymore. There already is enough randomness baked into the game via spell damage variance and random procs.
Let’s just remove, probably makes balancing mages easier in the long run.
Good by and so long to Incanters Flow, get rid of it.
I completely agree that it needs to go but to be fair the vast majority of all talent nodes amount to little more than “you do slightly more damage if you take this” IF just does this in a particularly asinine way which is why it stands out so much.
As far as I am concerned, all talent trees need to be pruned of these incremental damage or defense % nodes and slimed down to only include truly impactful and meaningful nodes. There is no need to earn and spend 1 point every time you level and as far as I can tell this is the ONLY reason why the current trees look the way they do which is crazy to me.
The removal of IF has always been added to the dozens and dozens of threads about ROP. It existed purely as an ‘alternative’ to ROP, and it was stated in every thread that with the removal of ROP there was no reason for IF to exist either.
At its core it is nothing more than a passive means to buff all damage. With the change to a 2-10% flux, it is now what an average 6%? Why not just delete the talent entirely and passively buff the damage aura for all 3 Mage specs. The net result is the same, except we get a talent point freed up. It literally adds nothing to gameplay and provides nothing to the spec that couldn’t be baked in baseline auras which are already being buffed due to the loss of ROP.
The reason is that Blizzard wants players to get that little ‘ding’ of dopamine when they hit a new level. “Oh yes, a new point, that makes brain produce happy chemical!”
The reality is that existing players don’t care and with how fast leveling is likely don’t notice or it’s just a hinderance. New players are far and few between (based on declining sub numbers for a decade) and these little dings aren’t enough to keep them interested.
What’s more, is that 95% of the content exists at max level so for most players what happens before that is irrelevant. The 1 point every level thing doesn’t appeal to us and the whole purpose around the revamp in Cata was that so many of the talents were bland, boring and did nothing for gameplay. That said, the Cata-SL tree with only 6 points also didn’t work.
However, why not a happy middle ground? Rather than try to come up with talents to spend 120+ points across 3 specs, why not have a ‘class’ tree with say 10 points and a spec tree with another 10? Streamline the stuff that’s in there, bake what you can in at base level (for example core rotational spells) and have the talents that do exist offer a little more in terms of gameplay rather than gains. Create more utility-talents, talents that you can tailor to your playstyle that don’t affect output, more options that don’t boil down to “take this because 2% damage”.
Exactly. In fact, everything that needs to be done with talent trees can be summarized with a single word: “streamline.”
And there really needs to be some way to set aside points just for utility talents because no one is ever taking them if they compete with throughput nodes, however minuscule the gains from them might be. Not having a dedicated utility row is the one thing that is an objective downgrade from a tier to tree system.
There are a number of ways to achieve that within the confines of a tree system like putting all or most of the utilities in the class tree and either making spec specific utilities (such as Chronoshift) baseline or otherwise position them as mandatory picks for advancing deeper into the tree.
The fact that details like this fell through the cracks or, worse still, weren’t even considered in the first place is yet another major red flag that highlights how little effort was put into the designing of these trees and the entire talent revamp. It was simply an afterthought and that’s painfully obvious.
Still, there is hope given that they have demonstrated that they can do better with the Retribution rework but replicating that success at scale is proving problematic. If you ask me the chief culprit there is the lack of dedicated class and even individual spec devs that are familiar with the inner workings and actually play them. This is also why it takes so much for them to listen to player feedback i.e. the devs processing the feedback don’t have the background knowledge to understand why we’re asking for specific changes.
They also need to engage with us more. They told us why they removed RoP but haven’t said anything about their reasoning for leaving things like IF in and not changing others. Is it because they haven’t seen our feedback? Do they disagree with it? Are there other concerns that we as the players aren’t aware of? Or are they just ignoring us. If they don’t say anything it’s really hard not to be cynical and think it’s the latter especially on such clear cut issues like the continued existence of IF.
I don’t really get this change. It makes the SKB and Unleashed Infernal basically the same thing. Except one will be easier to play than the other (beit slightly). SKB already gets comb to around 1 min. So whats the real difference? One has whopping hardcast pyro and a few mini combs the other just does more overall damage during comb and (at least on paper) seems to be easier to play. Thats about it. Not much variation. Would be nice to have at least 1 big smacking 2min comb option so we wouldn’t have to hope and pray there’s a decent use trink with a min-1.5min cd on it every tier.
They removed rune of power because people couldnt figure out how to stand still by making us go IF, then they nerf IF even though it was an inferior talent already. Honestly pooping the bed here as usual.