Yeah I’ll confess that seeing “substantial reworks” to the Shaman tree while we got a single talent shuffled around made me a bit miffed.
Like, I do think that moving SI to where it is now makes for a better tree but I was kind of expecting… significantly more. And I’m not convinced that Blizzard actually knows what the problem is given that they are refusing to talk to us.
I’m sure that’ll help Feral, at least I hope.
What I find the most annoying right now is the overall points we get versus the points needed to just get to a place where we are right now, which mind you is behind the curve relative to most other tanks if you think of it in terms of SL.
The DF toolkit for Guardian starts out at an immediate deficit by comparison to now. We are pigeonholed into going down a specific tree to get certain talents but then we have to give up something in the process. And I’m referring to abilities we’ve had in our toolkit together for years and haven’t been mutually exclusive.
You then look at the talent load out for other specs like Resto or Balance and you find they don’t suffer this problem at all because of the placement of the abilities in the tree, and I just cannot grok how this wasn’t spotted, or at the very least acknowledged as a problem by the designers yet. It’s one thing to give up something you have now to gain something you don’t, but to give up something you have to get something you have just doesn’t settle well.
I’ve personally come to the grueling conclusion that frankly, the designers wish to give all the class fantasy and utility to Balance and Restoration without penalty. I don’t agree with it, I don’t understand it, and it only does nothing but hurt Guardian/Feral in the process.
It feels like a good portion of the feral tree is still early placeholder, and the stuff that was pulled over from Shadowlands is kind of just there with not enough logical flow or progression path of what you want to accomplish with your build.
Apparently today when they released the Warrior talents, they also significantly redesigned the Devastation Evoker talent tree and that is the new class with nothing else other than feedback given by those testing it on Alpha. We can only hope that the Druid feedback is heard and taken to heart, just a blue response would be awesome.
I have 2 major problems with the Druid Class tree:
It feels terrible to have to put in 3 points into the Killer Instinct node before you can access Skull Bash. Other classes like Paladin and Shaman can easily access their interrupt ability without a huge sink into previous nodes. A possible way to solve this would be having Skull Bash swap places with Ironfur.
Why is Soothe in this tree? It feels really bad to have to spec into this if you want to go down the middle path towards Heart of the Wild. Hibernate is optional, but Soothe is mandatory to progress down the tree. It just feels like a wasted point on an ability that you will rarely use. Please make Soothe optional or replace it completely.
Lol… the general warrior talent tree gets “Spear of Bastion”, a covenant ability and not even a cap stone. Druids get Furor or HotW.
19 days since the druid class was added to alpha and devs have yet to respond or even to show any interest with druids (specifically feral). Every xpac is the same thing, disappointment and disheartening.
They bloated with too many % nodes.
Make those nodes count for more and have less of them for the same effect.
The number of nodes that have minimal impact make the trees seem very very bland.
I have little hope that a dev actually plays druid enough to realize this and will fix it, so I’m down to hoping they don’t ruin the monk trees in the same way.
So much potential wasted on bloat at this point. They have time to change it, but WILL they?
HotW can go away as far as I’m concerned or be valued much less. It’s a situational ability that you either don’t use all that often or have to contrive situations in order to take advantage of it.
That’s my experience anyway, and I am far from top tier.
They’ve already had a few weeks to change it, so im not holding my breath.
HotW is one of my least favorite abilities
It’s usage is rare outside of Mythic+ but given that many mobs tend to have some flavor of enrage effects (at least in SL and I suspect this theme will carry forward), it’s not as rare of a use case as you might think.
I think it’s far more rare that druids actually use their Soothe in current content when it actually has a purpose than the rarity of when it can be used.
I do think that there’s some merit to the idea that Soothe’s placement could be better. I think that talent trees are at their most interesting when you’re able to make different choices depending on the content you’re running. It’s why I actually support Skull Bash being a talent. I also disagree with Rindy that it feels bad to have to get the phys attack buff before picking it up because what Feral or Guardian in their right mind is skipping that node? That’s not exactly a dead talent. So Skull Bash will never be more than 1 talent point off from any Feral/Guardian build that makes sense.
Soothe’s placement however makes it a mandatory pick in all builds despite being one of the most emblematic pieces of situational utility. I’d rather see it shifted off to the side with something else put in its current place.
I take back all my copium in this thread from the other day.
The SI/IW swap is sad.
I feel like a resto druid or an avid pvper designed the druid tree.
All three all-spec bottom tier talents are useful to healer druids that want to put out some damage or to arena druids.
None of the three are good pickups for maximizing damage. It 100% fits the hybrid fantasy, true. But it’s gonna feel bad for dps mains to ignore those capstone talents.
we’re literally losing rake stun, which is one of the most fun playstyle in 2v2 for resto druid though
They’ve tried to spread Feral and other specs too thin to fill in their node count on the trees. It makes them feel cheap and just plain bad. BrS should be a side choice, there needs to be a lot more links letting you spread throughout the tree. Druid’s are based around using multiple abilities in any given scenario, for them to limit it as it is and in the selection choices they’ve given, it just feels horribly half baked.
Maybe they need to add good stuff in place of these % based talents that are obviously designed solely to eat up talent points.
I want it back as a PvP talent that keeps anyone from vanishing/going invis etc for a short duration and be undispellable.
Is this confirmed or a tooltip error not listing effect from stealth?
well feral specifically has a talent to cause rake to stun so I’m pretty confident guardian/resto/moonkin dont just magically get their rake stun for free.
I must have missed that. That sucks then 
I noticed that too, but i play guardian affinity in 2s and was more upset at having to choose between bash and roar