here to ask about non-optimal talent builds and how to make diff builds work. I enjoy the optimal talent set-up and don’t mind playing it but sometimes it’s fun to switch some talents around for open world, dungeons, even raids if I’m not worried about being top dps.
that being said, I’ve been trying out serpent sting (i think it’s a cool aesthetic and interesting to have a DoT for MM) but I just can’t seem to make it fit into the general playstyle.
it eats globals and focus, and without the free arcane shots from the other talent, its even worse. taking the steady shot talent to theoretically boost the needed steady shot spam doesn’t seem effective, as then you’re just using so many globals you cap Aimed Shot or can’t keep SS up. Streamlined doesn’t add enough focus regen to RF to make it effective either.
the talent that gives arcane shot a chance to reduce the cooldown on RF doesn’t fit well, because arcane shots aren’t ever free when taking SS, so it kinda defeats the purpose.
Am I missing something or is there just no way to make a Serpent Sting build feel okay?
No you not missing anything. Most of the MM talent are basically place holder due to the Blizzard bad design. I think the high GCD had made any more active spell in the MM will not work smoothly with just a 100 focus cap. Maybe if they lower the GCD and increase our max focus to 120+ than it will work.
This is my biggest complaint with this game now days. Build diversity is quite literally zero. There is each builds cookie cutter and everything else is thousands of dps lost. From a PvE perspective anyway.
It’s basically the worst of talent trees and talent tiers combined. I understand the motivation of having different talents for each specs but Blizzard has proven to be utterly unable to handle it properly, ultimately making a spec design that depends on specific talent choices not just for viability but for the playstyle to function correctly at all. A big part of this is formerly baseline skills now being talents (people don’t remember that Careful Aim used to be baseline and is now a mandatory talent) but it’s not just limited to those.
It’s popular to trashtalk the talent tier system but I really think at its core it’s a better system than talent trees. Done well, it can provide actual, meaningful gameplay choice, which talent trees by and large failed to do. We saw this in MoP and even WoD to some extent, but since then it has not been done well at all.
Yes this is what I’m feeling. Kinda bewildered at the MM talents.
Why is careful aim against two aoe talents? And barrage is against mostly single target talents? It doesn’t feel like there’s any real aoe tier at all, and as you said a lot of the talents either are needed to make the spec feel “normal” to play or just flat out don’t work with the rest of the baseline kit, like Serpent Sting.
Funny how my two favorite specs, Marksmanship and Arcane mage have the aoe against single target talent rows Blizz said they didn’t wanna force people into. Lol.
I agree with you that the talent tiers are not inherently bad, but it feels bad when there are silly choices or no choice to make at all, especially when it’s seemingly easy to avoid that.
The only active thing you pick as MM is double tap, and the button press itself doesn’t have any effect. It affects other skills. So pretty much everything you pick as MM is passive just to make the 4 buttons you do press work better together. Kinda sad, it feels like an entire spec’s talents is wasted potential.
In both Vanilla and TBC there was absolutely variation in the talent trees. There was cookie cutter for raids sure. There was even cookie cutter for arena in TBC with respect to the x1 talents (11, 21, 31, etc.), but there was a ton of minor variation even in the “optimal cookie” builds. There were also many viable and fun hybrid builds as well. There were even a few in WoiLK, though that suffered from too much strength in the 51 point talent. Once you make the last talent mandatory for the spec to even function you lose all possibility of hybrid builds. That wasn’t the case for all talent trees, but it was true for too many to really have the richness the previous iterations had. Cata put the final nail in that coffin by not even giving the option to make alternate builds.
I do agree that MoP and WoD (which was almost identical to MoP) were well done though, and I am not suggesting the larger tree is “better,” but the statement quoted above is not historically accurate.
That’s the core problem, though; the spare points you could shift around were only going to go towards exceedingly minor, passive differences. To support hybrids, as you pointed out, you would need to have end talents that weren’t as impactful, and the result of that is specs that are less distinct.
Passive yes, but I didn’t mean to imply minor meant no impact, rather just not as much of an impact as the non-passives. These optional talents could have a rather large impact on gameplay. For example, in my favorite build as a Fire/Frost hybrid mage, I put points into reducing the cast time of both Fire AND Frost spells. I didn’t use the frost for dps and took no other frost damage increasing talents, but I loved the hell out of my 1s rank 1 Frostbolt in PvP.
These “minor” talents also gave a sense of agency, regardless of their mathematical impact, thus they were far from “cookie cutter” even if they had less impact than the active abilities. You are underplaying the richness of what was. You may not have appreciated it, but that doesn’t mean that (many, MANY) other’s didn’t.
The point of my post was that didn’t really happen until WotLK. Prior to that you would see all kinds of variation in 31/20, 21/30, 11/31/9, etc., etc.
In WotLK you STILL had that kind of variation, even though it was substantially reduced. I had an SL/SL/SL Warlock build that was really fun. It wasn’t optimal, but it was still fun and I kept it as my off-spec for PvP fun every once in a while.
The point is, the bigger trees don’t have to be worse and have positives to them that make them better by some measures. There are trade-offs between the styles and I can’t say definitively which I liked better. I think the ultimate would be a larger tree (1 talent point per level) where each tier was reasonably balanced (so 11 is as strong as 21, is as strong as 31, etc.). This would give all kinds of variation, and tremendous richness and a feeling of agency in our classes.
On a related note I will say I absolutely prefer 12 classes with specializations (what the old talent trees encourage) to the current 36 classes.
It’s the same with a lot of classes. A lot of the abilities feel great to use and sometimes it’s more fun to take some extra active abilities rather than passives so you feel like you “do more”. Unfortunately the people that design these abilities seemingly have no numerical data on them as often times one is head and shoulders above the rest in all situations. They stripped most of the utility from dps ages ago so the best thing to do is go full out best numerical dps.
They seem to still be under the illusion that people are happy to take a few thousand less dps to have a particular playstyle and most serious players aren’t.
I like serpent sting personally, it reminds me of older hunter days. What they COULD do is buff the damage or remove the focus cost (maybe add a focus gain per tick, capped to one application) to make up for the large focus loss not taking the other talent incurs, but they won’t.
And while they’re at it, remove all these “using x reduces the cooldown of y” talents and just reduce that ability’s cooldown baseline. They’re not fun talents to use but they’re almost always good from a damage over time standpoint. I hate having to take them personally.
Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE melee survival, it’s my mains spec and I don’t want it gone. BUT I do want a 4th spec for my dear old ranged survival. That’d be the best compromise for me personally!
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