Have YOU been playing the last 15 years? Because this is pretty much historical revisionism.
Here are some examples offhand of impactful set bonuses I can remember:
Mind Flay channels and ticks faster (Shadow 4-set ICC)
Your abilities have a chance to reset the cooldown on Divine Storm (Ret 2-set ICC)*
Periodic damage of Rake can now Crit (Feral 4-sec ICC). Essentially baked in later since all bleeds can now crit.
All tanks having an additional cd in CC. Many of these through modifying a base spell, e.g. Bear had Enrage turn into a 12% DR instead of reducing your armor, Paladins had Divine Plea give 12% dodge, etc.
All tanks having additional raid cooldowns in Dragon Soul.
Ferocious Bite causes Rip to refresh on targets above 60% health (Feral Dragon Soul 2-pc)
*note: a version of this has literally appeared in every borrowed power system, and is essentially still in the game as Empyrean Power
Now of course, some of these were actual talents. But the talents involved were already the core talents of the build. They weren’t somehow being “transformed” into core ones, or altering or dictating a playstyle, just enhancing the pre-existing playstyle of the spec. It’s not like Shadow Priests in ICC were not picking Mind Flay, or Ferals in Dragon Soul were skipping Blood in the Water.
The issue is it not everyone plays the same. I play mostly to enjoy myself. I never look at “talent guides” - i don’t copy and paste builds - I don’t use addons and I am even a clicker
Often I pick talents based on playstyle, and how the class FEELS to play. How smooth it is. I hate too many buttons and such, it becomes too much.
If we got these talent trees back to be fun and full of options and different ways to play our class, they should stay that way.
I don’t play to parse high, as long as I am not bottom I am happy. I have had classes and specs ruined by this whole setup of tier being linked to spells, suddenly a class I have fun playing becomes annoying and not my playstyle anymore.
I think you should re-read the set bonus again. It doesn’t buff your trees, it buffs Nourish, and your trees just happen to also cast Nourish. If you choose to take the Nourish talent in the choice node instead of Grove Guardians, it will buff YOUR Nourish instead of the Grove Guardians’ Nourish.
2-Set - Druid Restoration 10.2 Class Set 2pc - You and your Grove Guardian’s Nourishes now heal 2 additional allies within 40 yds at 40% effectiveness.
4-Set - Druid Restoration 10.2 Class Set 4pc - Consuming Clearcasting now causes your Regrowth to also cast Nourish onto a nearby injured ally at 200% effectiveness, preferring those with your heal over time effects.
If you play a Mastery/Nourish build, it will turn your spell into a super strong BOMB heal that hits two additional targets at 40% power EVERY single time you hardcast it, and the bonus Nourish you get from consuming Clearcasting with Regrowth will be 200% stronger than that.
Personally, I LOVE that sets affect optional talents in the tree, because it gives me access to certain playstyles I would otherwise maybe not try, or consider too much work to be worth the marginal or negligible performance increase. I think the real problem isn’t that there are sets like this, but that we only have access to one set each season. If you look at Diablo or diablo-like games with sets/uniques that alter playstyle, you have access to all of them every season, it’s just a matter of farming/trading for them to get the playstyle you want. Conversely, in WoW you have a MUCH easier time putting your set together, because classes are balanced every single season around having their one set, and you are underperforming until you get that one set.
It would be neat if, in the Fated Raids season, you could choose to collect sets from all previous seasons and use what you wanted, when you wanted. It would be even cooler if Blizz could find a way to make multiple sets accessible from the beginning of an expansion so we could pursue them in particular ways to reinforce the playstyle we wanted.
if the tier set made you pick a talent which you would never choose if you didnt have the set, then thats GOOD design. I’m not up to date on rdruid meta, but the way you’re describing how the talent plays makes me think maybe you need to look up how its actually meant to be played
Problem is after the talent changes most specs only have 4 actual baseline spells and their mastery.
As a resto druid treants arent baseline but neither was wildgrowth when season 1s tier was about that, or flourish/VI season 2, or tranquility or iron bark or efflorescene or a plethora of spells that use to be baseline to the classes.
If they were to make tier about only baseline abilites resto druids tier could only affect rejuv, swiftmend, regrowth and lifebloom. Just those 4 spells for every tier til they rework talents again and itd be super boring.
Now the amount of talents required for the tier this season is a Problem. You need to use 4 total talents 3 of which are capstones to fully use the treant themed tier and thats way to many in my opinion.
Having gear as a major boost has been a nightmare from the very beginning. Balancing around particular gear which only becomes available over time is just terrible design.
It should be incremental improvements not massive jumps which end up needing nerfs or boosts.
Fix the specs, make them work, then the loot gets gradually better.
I fully agree, but they could’ve gone about it in a different way. Frost mage, for example, is very glacial spike centric. But, they could’ve modified it to work off of icicles if a particular frost mage didn’t have glacial spike talented. They could’ve even made the icicles option objectively worse, if the intent is to have people play glacial spike, but the option should still be there.
The point of the talent tree was never that every combination of talents will be equally viable. That wasn’t the point of the talent system any more than it was the point of the old talent system that we used from MoP to SL.
You’re always going to have talents that perform better and the simplest way of seeing if you can make them good is to try stuff like these tier sets or other forms of borrowed power.
Blood DK’s are a good example of this. The current playstyle is built largely on the back of a Shadowland legendary and set bonus which brought Tombstone to the consciousness of Blood DK’s since it was a pretty underwhelming ability before BDK’s got the ability to decrease DRW CD by consuming Bone Shield and the ability to rapidly generate extra Bone Shield charges due to an extra DRW spawning.
Now you could buff stuff like Dimensional Rift to make them competitive/stronger than their alternatives. But the problem with just straight up buffing stuff is that a 20% buff or whatever doesn’t have nearly the same gamechanging impact that “Immolate can now reset the cooldown of Dimensional Rift” does.
That tier set actually has a noticeable change on Destros playstyle because when you play it on a fight that Destro is supposed to excel on (2 target sustained cleave), then you end up drowning in rift charges, whereas prior you’d still be stuck with the 45s CD.
So going forward, if Blizzard wanted to make a Rift playstyle more viable they could use this information and then make a talent related to rifts that either just straight up lifted the 2p, or introduced it in a nerfed fashion (like what happened with the BDK set I talked about earlier).
GFG is a 5 point investment and is the strongest cooldown in the spec after both capstones were nerfed.
For reference, Havoc is a 4 point investment, often 6 because you’re trolling if you don’t pick up the follow up talent and most times when you actually wanna play Destro you’re grabbing the other follow up talent as well.
Being a talent doesn’t exclude it from being part of the intended gameplay loop of your spec.
But even so, the problem with the whole conversation of “Blizzard should only make tier bonuses that affect the core playstyle of your class” is that that STILL influences your build.
Demos current tier set only requires a 2 point investment, but it also massively benefits from picking up Pact of the Imp Mother and any other talents that benefit from spamming HoG because realistically speaking it doesn’t focus on DB, it focuses on HOG.
Id like to point out exhibite A.) classic wow. Where the tiers forced you into a spec. Druids? t1/2/3? Healer. Paladine t2 was the only tier where a healer got a dps tier. Every class got pigeon holed into a spec with the tiers, it wasnt tier of choice it was tier of gear choice.
The sad thing is that there have literally been tier sets that worked like this before.
The T20 4-set bonus for Arms caused either your Ravager or Bladestorm (whichever you had talented) to also cast a couple Mortal Strikes and even did different amounts depending on which one you had.
I can sort of see where they’re confused because the phrasing is gramatically off. I can read it as both your Nourish as well as your Grove Guardians’ Nourish, but the “You and …” is in the wrong tense(?). I think it’s tense, but we’re getting into high school memories. It’s easier to see what’s off if you add a comma.
A cleaner phrasing might be something like:
“Your Nourishes, or your Grove Guardians’ Nourishes”
“Nourishes cast by you, or your Grove Guardians”
But yes, to that person, the set bonus affects Nourishes cast by you. Which makes sense, since a set bonus SHOULD affect both sides of a choice talent, that way it interacts with whichever one you pick.
I think you’re confused on design a bit here. It’s understandable because the talent trees we have now are serving multiple purposes.
Dragonflight’s talent trees are combining a mix of levelling up skills and abilities that would fill out your class (stuff that might previously be in your spellbook), as well as choices and playstyles that you can opt in (stuff that might previously have been talents, or legendaries).
As far as the latter goes, yes the whole point is for those choices to viable and actual choices. Back during MoP when the original talent trees where changed to the 3-choice-per talent trees, this was explicitly called out as the purpose. By having a smaller set of things you could choose from, those 3 choices were meant to represent an actual choice, which is the same concept that went all the way to SL.
To distinguish between the two, it comes down to tree structure in a way. The talents in the former camp, that every person of that class should take and is expected to take, are generally lumped into the first gate at the top of the tree, in a way that makes picking them virtually impossible (in some cases, you COULD technically take every other point I guess, but that’d be a deliberate choice counter to the tree’s flow), or down the middle with easy connections and other important ability connections.
Take, for example, BM Hunter. While Barbed Shot is a talent, it’s placed in such a way that you literally cannot skip it while going down the tree. By contrast, while Multi-Shot is in a place where it’s heavily encouraged, and also technically skippable for content where Multi-Shot, or Beast Cleave, would be completely useless, e.g. a single target patchwerk fight.
Bestial Wrath is placed in the middle, where you can get to it from all sides, as the indicator for it being a core ability that every BM Hunter should get. A Murder of Crows and Bloodshed are in a choice talent off to the side, as an opt-in talent that you’re supposed to be able to pick if you want to.
To loop this back to the examples mentioned, Grimoire: Felguard is essentially acting in the same capacity as A Murder of Crows or Bloodsheed. It’s been in a state where through pure numbers, it’s too good to pass up, but the actual talent’s design is to be optional. By contrast, Havoc is where it is because it’s a core ability meant to be picked up. Just like Multi-Shot, however, it’s positioned in a way where it’s clearly right there to go through, but you CAN technically avoid it if you’re in a very niche situation where Havoc would simply not be of use, e.g. a pure single-target raid boss. The number of points it takes to pick them up is irrelevant.
Going back to the idea of viability in choices, that is the core point of the talent system. While yes, Blizzard has historically been very, very bad at balancing things, to the point of having dead talents, or to the point of giving up on certain talents, that doesn’t change the purpose of the design. They have, of course, had the rare success.
It’s even more crystal when you have “Choice nodes”. The literal point of a choice node is that you get to choose what you pick up in that choice node. If you come up to a choice, and the answer is that you should pick up only one of those choices because it’s the only one your set bonus affects, it’s not a choice node at all.
No, this is absurd and stupid to the extreme. The “simplest way” of seeing if you can make them good is to try out iterative designs in a Beta, or PTR environments, and adjust those iterations until you feel you’ve come somewhere close.
Putting something on a set bonus, and putting it Live, doesn’t give you meaningful information. Great, you’ve vastly removed player options, and players are picking up X because you told them they’re dum-dums if they don’t pick up X. This doesn’t mean you’ve made it good, this doesn’t mean you have information to make it comparatively viable to the other choices, etc. There’s almost nothing useful you can take going ahead, except maybe whether people happened to enjoy it while being forced to do it. That’s the actual takeaway from the Tombstone example you mentioned for Blood DK’s, or Apex Predator’s Craving for Feral,.
Okay, so don’t be a dumbass. Don’t do a 20% buff. Just do a “Immolate has a chance to refresh Dimensional Rift” on the PTR, and iterate the chance based on sims and PTR testing. Why are you acting as if designers have to be stupid here?
That is a true problem. It’s a different problem that also needs to be addressed in some capacity, but good job on identifying a problem with poorly designed set bonuses, even when they affect core abilities. Perhaps some PTR feedback might identify these issues, and lead to some ideas on how to even them out in some way. IDK, sounds like witchcraft to do actual game design though.
I definitely feel the sentence could have been worded better. Even if you cut the middle part out, it would then say, “You… nourishes,” when it should say “Your… nourishes.” I prefer your second suggestion, “Nourishes cast by you, or your Grove Guardians,” because then it properly highlights “Nourishes” as the focus of the set rather than “Grove Guardians” as the focus of the set. This is especially egregious as the Grove Guardians talent in its current form was added in the same patch as the set that buffs it, so many naturally assumed it only buffed the Guardians. I don’t hold it against anyone for misunderstanding it, though. I did for a while myself.
I don’t have an in depth knowledge of every class, but for the classes I am familiar with, this seems to be the way Blizzard has handled set bonuses and choice nodes this expansion. Last season’s resto druid set was widely considered the “Flourish” set because of how powerful it was in raid, but people forget it also buffed Verdant Infusion on the same choice node, if you chose to take that instead.
Holy Paladins’ last set bonus buffed either Holy Prism or Light’s Hammer on the same choice node. So I still understand people not liking the idea of being forced to take a node at all, but at the very least if it buffs a choice node you still have some agency in which choice to make on that node, since it always buffs both choices (at least with the classes I’m familiar with)
Druid Restoration 10.2 Class Set 2pc