Honestly, I’m not very excited for Hero Talents. More talents to keep track of. Whee. A new meta to have to spec if you want to do group content. Whee. A new thing for people to look up on Icy Veins and then ignore until the talents get reworked and reset. Whee. But you know, whatever. None of that is new or worse than what we already have.
What I really don’t like about Hero Talents is the names. So many of these names are of things we’ve wanted for years, but all we’re getting is a name. No change in customization, no change in class fantasy, no change in visuals.
Like people have wanted to play a San’layn forever. And now it’s here, and all it is is a couple of talents. People have wanted to play a Dark Ranger forever. Now it’s here and it’s just a couple of talents.
Attaching names like this to Hero Talents is a MASSIVE letdown to so many players who’ve wanted these things for so long. I think it would be a good idea to take some of these names, things that have been part of the lore and people have wanted to play, off of Hero Talents. Replace them with name made up just for Hero Talents. Because by using these names now, on just a couple talents, not only does it let players down, it also signals that these things will never be. This is it. Dark Ranger will never be a thing outside of a couple extra talents. And that’s pretty lame.
The game is around for decades and honestly even with the talent system being rework several times now is showing its age. There are also too many spec to balance and come up with ideas to give the spec a different feeling. I think that’s one of the reasons for a few expansions they (blizzard) due away with tier sets because they ran out of ideas with giving you repeats bouns from pervious tier sets.
They try to spice things up with a few class rework such as Combat/outlaw rogue and SV hunter to melee. Is meet with meh especially melee hunters.
Maybe is time blizzard to actually look at all the class and redsign them right.
I’ve never felt like this game is showing its age in the most important ways. They can configure customization and talents and whatnot however they want, but the core gameplay experience, the actual feel of it, hitting buttons, the reactivity, the feeling of presence you get is unmatched in any other MMO.
The biggest “draw” for hero talents (from a design perspective) is that they can just come up with an “infinite” number of different hero trees for each of the specs without having to grow/expand/severely modify existing talent trees.
It’s “evergreen”.
We’ll likely get new sets of Hero talents with each Worldsoul Saga expansion. Specs have access to 2, then 4, then 6 (or 2, then 3, then 4) hero talent trees each.
No power creep via additional talent points and the absurd balancing act that comes with it. Just new options to an existing system.
That’s more bad design in an mmorpg tbh. Especially in 2024. This should be precisely what the glyph system is for but it’s been forgotton.
Dark Ranger Glyphs:
Your pets now give off a shadowy aura resembling a dread beast.
Kill shot now fires a black arrow with a shadowed trail.
Binding shot now has void tentacles that reach up and grab their target when stunned.
While disengaging you turn into a shadow reforming upon landing.
etc,etc,etc
You get the point. IMO wouldve been much better time spent revamping the glyph system so you could turn you character into all these cool concepts instead of +/- 10% damage talents that really dont do much because they are just number modifiers.
Theres no need to tie customization to player power in modern era. They can be seperate systems entirely especially in wow.
There will almost certainly be power creep if they keep adding trees as they try to get people excited for the new ones making each generation of tree flashier than the previous.
I’m sort of the flip side: I strongly don’t want to be a dark ranger. I’m still not completely over what they did to my tree. In fact, I think my biggest RP issue could be solved by just changing “dark ranger” to “ranger”
(A little mental edit which I will do in my own imagination if I decide I need to take that tree for gameplay reasons)
Does Blizzard pay you to be this delusional about Hero Talents? Our current talents can be as Evergreen as we need them to be. We don’t need passive options on top of them.
If anything this crap is going to constantly shape the meta even worse than reworks do currently. Newer talents in each expansions are going to complicate that 10 fold. This is going to be a nightmare.
Correct. These are just talent points. Mostly passives. Blizzard should have never named them and they should have just been added to the bottom of the two trees already there.
As a software engineer, developer, and amateur game designer, I understand the logistics of what Blizzard has built.
Vertical progression systems help to engage WoW players with new content.
Horizontal systems are better, but they take more thought, care, and development time. M+ is a great example of how easy it is to produce “vertical” content progression (make numbers go up).
The new talent tree system (as is) can either:
Constantly add new talent points with expansion releases (balancing nightmare, eventually run out of nodes to spend talents on, etc)
Constantly add new talent nodes to spend points on (balancing nightmare, additive bloat over time (this is why they went with simpler trees in MoP), etc)
The hero system allows the devs to expand the talent trees ONCE, then effectively have an entire section of the talent tree operate as its own “choice node” (or “choice branch”, in this case).
New “choices” offered each expansion without expanding the tree or adding more talent points.
Every character unlocks the full hero talent tree, so balancing is much easier (by comparison to other options for providing “vertical” progression).
Leaning into Hero Talents long-term offers more “horizontal” progression opportunities than “vertical”.
Personally, I’m a fan of horizontal progression over vertical progression.
Make your own group or play with people who don’t care if you pull enough of your own weight in the group, then you don’t have to worry about these things.
You don’t work for them but that kickback sponsorship must be sweet. But let’s be honest, we all know they could pay someone practically nothing and they’d come in here and do their dirty work.
Just stop.
The fact that you think these trees won’t be as bad for the game as doing anything with the current trees is just absurd. Did you forget there are choice nodes? That alone creates balancing issues.
But oh no, doing anything with the old trees is out of the question. It’s like, I dunno, they aren’t the problem in the first place somehow. Now their broken state is compounded by unbalanced passives on top of it. I don’t care how much of a game dev you think you are, that alone is Blizzard telling us straight to our face they don’t care to try anymore.