All in all, pretty stoked for 10.0 based on what I see on this new talent tree. I mostly play Balance, so my observations and opinions will mainly come from the lens of Boomie.
What I like:
The buff to Celestial Alignment
The return of several legendary effects, like BoAT and Primordial Arcanic Pulsar
The return of Goldrinn & Convoke - the former of which I haven’t experienced, but I hear is fun
The concept of the class tree. We now have options to talent into abilities from other specs. At first glance, it seems like players will have enough tools to carry a rotation in an offspec form. This should allow for some flexibility when “weaving” in and out of different forms.
What I don’t like:
3 min CDs for all specs must be talented into
Certain spells that are core to spec rotation/identity have been made talents on either the spec or class tree, e.g. Starfall (Balance), Ironfur (Guardian), Sunfire (Balance), Innervate (Balance/Restoration)
Questions & Feedback: Syzygy
How much damage will a proc of Syzygy do? At face value, it seems like a cool ability. However, the damage burst would have to be pretty high to make it compete in the same slot as Pulsar - particularly with the proposed multidot buff to CA.
How would we “select” an area when we press Celestial Alignment/Incarn - will it be similar to Havoc DHs jump into an area when they proc meta? As the ability reads now, it seems like it might be kind of clunky. Maybe try an area of effect or a frontal cone?
Will the astral damage that we deal from this proc generate astral power?
Convoke
Will you consider buffing/reworking convoke? What makes convoke strong now is the large mastery buff that we get from the Niya soulbind.
What will be the CD? If convoke goes live at 2 min, Balance and Feral druids will have syncing issues with Berserk/CA.
Starfall
Should be baseline for the Balance kit.
In its current form, Starfall has some core interaction issues with the Balance AP generation and spending mechanic. These ideas aren’t new, but consider making Starfall stackable.
Stellar Drift
Remove the Stellar Drift CD. It feels clunky in it’s current form, but has to be played in 99% of situations because of the utility/flexibility that it allows. The nerf in 9.0 felt pretty reactionary based on the community uproar from logs on a single fight in Nathria. If you want to apply penalties to us for moving while casting, I think that there are other avenues that you could address to making high uptime more challenging. For example, you could apply haste penalties to moving while casting or increase AP cost for Starfall when talenting Stellar Drift.
I think that they should centralize innervate to make it easier for feral to talent into on the class tree. Maybe they could bring back Faerie Fire as well?
Played with a talent calculator, tried to make different builds for Feral (mostly for arena) and have a couple of bad news.
Pros:
We may have Circle of Life and Death , Draught and Adaptive Swarm at the same time. We sacrifice most of Berserk talents to take them, but it’s fine because it is useless for feral without tier set anyways.
Rejuvenation + Swiftmend
Cons:
We lose 2 of our CC abilities: Incapacitating Roar and Hibernate.
Looks like we can’t take Feline Swiftness and Primal Fury talents because there are way more important ones down the line - Well-Honed Instincts (auto-proc of frenzied regeneration) and Ursine Vigor (hp increase after shifting to a bear). Lose of a move speed sounds really bad on paper.
Conclusion:
We lost 1/3 of our toolkit and didn’t get anything new or something that wasn’t available to us before except of Circle + Draught at the same time.
I didn’t see any new combinations that weren’t available to us before due to how talent trees are structured. 90% of talents are auto-locked and you may tweak only the bottom 3 at the end of a tree (convoke/bers or bleeds).
I was hoping that some cool old school combos will be available once again like HoTW + Tranquility but nope, nothing “new” that we can play with.
We get lots of useless talents for pvp like Soothe just to get what we need. Don’t like these arrows idea that connect to talents.
Still no reason to take feral over other druid specs in M+. We don’t provide any unique utility or anything valuable. Leader of the Pack is still a pvp only talent for some reason.
Adaptive Swarm should go for feral, bring back Mangle. Adaptive swarm can be dispelled and just annoying.
TLDR; didn’t get anything new, lost 1/3 of our toolkit, another spec prune.
I will certainly agree with you on the “unique” part (where is Feral’s version of Force of Nature or Solar Beam?), but to say Vortex, Typhoon, Innervate, Incap, and Nature’s Vigil aren’t valuable is very strange.
I meant this Still no reason to take feral over other druid specs in M+, boomie obviously is just better in keys due to a large amount of aoe and can have all of these that you listed.
Correct, this allows druid specs that care about dash/charge a quick way to gain access to Soothe without having to take the Guardian talents on the left side or resto talents on the right to gain access to it.
Personally, I think it would have been nice for this node to allow access to things like Hibernate and Remove Corruption as well.
Also it seemed like there was no limit on the amounts of builds you could save.
Can probs make 1 build for each dungeon and 1 for each raid boss…and optional builds for when you will need to cc and when you wont need to cc in dungeons…
Admittedly, not a lot. That’s why I was recommending bringing back something like Faerie Fire. It probably would have to be reworked to be competitive, but I think that having a sunder-like mechanic could be really useful in M+ for priority mobs. Giving Feral Faerie Fire and easier access to Innervate could help bridge the gap between Boomie and Feral utility.
Maybe there are other abilities that they could buff or bring back as well? I feel like having something akin to Primordial Arcanic Pulsar for Balance would help out Feral immensely. Having more berserk uptime means more dmg and more flexibility between pulls. Cooldown reduction mechanics are huge when you have 3+ min CD.
Also be affected by haste, so it scales through the expac. Whithout haste and stackign it will msot likely be OP at start of expac and worthless at the end…like now.
Balance prioritizes haste so much that its a bit off that our big aoe finisher is not actually affected by it.
A lot of people are iffy but the way i see it, interrupts arent as big as people sre making them out to be. Theyre rarely used in raids and even in pvp theyre not so prevalent unless youre actually going against casters. That leaves M+, but even then not every dungeon needs a lot of them especially considering most spells can be interrupted using something other than a kick.
The benefit with not picking the interrupt is you get to pick some other utility in its place whether its simply movement speed for raids, or maybe a DR that lets you mitigate damage or even extra CC (which would simultaneously work as an interrupt for the majority of M+ mobs)
I used the mythic trap talent trees to try and mock up my resto druid as it exists today (talents, covenant, soul binds, legendaries) to see what I gain/lose with the new talents
Here are my choices for class tree and why I took them
Rake - for feral affinity (my lvl 30 talent)
Thrash - prereq feral affinity abilities
Rip - for feral affinity
Swipe - for feral affinity
Maim - for feral affinity
Feline Swiftness x2 - for feral affinity
Improved Barkskin x2 - to match current Barkskin duration
Remove Corruption - to match toolkit
Increased Healing and Magic Damage x3 - prereq
Cyclone - to match toolkit
Increased Healing and Healing Taken x2 - prereq
Sunfire - to match toolkit
Improved Sunfire - to match toolkit
Sooth - to match toolkit
Wild Growth - to match toolkit
Ursols Vortex - to match toolkit
Stampeding Roar - to match toolkit
Innervate - to match toolkit
Tiger Dash - my lvl 25 talent
Improved Rejuv - to match current rejuv duration
Lycaras Teaching x3 - prereq
Improved Stampeding Roar - prereq
HOTW - my lvl 35 talent
Here are my choices for the spec tree and why i took them
Lifebloom - to match toolkit
Natures Swiftness- to match toolkit
Efflorescence - to match toolkit
Omen of Clarity - to match toolkit
Ironbark - to match toolkit
Improved Regrwoth - to match toolkit
Improved Lifebloom x2 - prereq
improved Wild Growth - to match toolkit
Tranquility - to match toolkit
Yseras Giftx2 - to match toolkit
Unstoppable Growth x2 - this covers one of my conduit choices
Soul Of The Forest - my lvl 40 talent
Cenarion Ward - my lvl 15 talent
Improved Tranq and Wild Growth - prereq
Stonebark x2 - to match toolkit
Spring Blossom - my lvl 45 talent
Germination - prereq
Circle of Life and Death - legendary
Adaptive Swarm - cov ability
Invigorate - prereq
Improved Innervate - to match toolkit
Flourish - lvl 50 talent
I am able to get all of my current talents, 1/2 of my legendary powers, 1/2 of my cov abilities, and 1/6 of my conduits. I was left with 1 remaining class point and 3 spec points to play around with
Overall Gains
Thrash
Lyceras Teaching - 3% haste
potentially 60 seconds off stampeding roar cooldown, depends on base cooldown of move
Increased Healing and Magic Damage x3 - passive healing, hard to judge if its a gain based on how spells scale in expansion, boring points overall
Increased Healing and Healing Taken x2 - passive healing, hard to judge if its a gain based on how spells scale in expansion, boring points overall
Improved Lifebloom x2 - just more raw healing, but a cool idea overall. hard to judge if its a gain based on how spells scale in expansion
Improved Tranq and Wild Growth - just more raw healing, hard to judge if its a gain based on how spells scale in expansion. It does add more healing at lower levels which is nice.
Yseras gift heals for 1% more than live, small gain
Invigorate or Memory of the Mother Tree - this was a prereq to Flourish, overall gain even though im not to interested in either move
Germination - this was a prereq to adaptive swarm, overall gain of an additional lvl 50 talent.
1 extra point in class tree
3 extra points in spec tree.
Overall Loses
Its not clear if we are getting the 35% energy regeneration that feral affinity provides
Its not clear if rake will stun in stealth and shred gains bonus dmg and crit. that is a talent in the feral tree (improved prowl)
Hibernate
Current base adaptive swarm is stronger than the talent in the tree, lose out on the conduit and the legendary to make it way stronger
Fleshcraft - this was a given, but just added for completeness
All Soulbind moves - this was a given, but just added for completeness
5 out of 6 conduits were not able to be retrieved.
born of the wild - doesn’t exist in any form, but we don’t know the cooldown of hotw in 10.0
well honed instincts - exists in the class tree, but cant get with current setup
condensed anima sphere - doesn’t exist in the class tree
evolved swarm - doesn’t exist
ursine vigor - I can put my last class point into this if I wanted for a slightly weaker version of this.
I did not include tier sets because we will lose them in 10.0 but gain new ones from new content. so those are a wash.
Overall, with this current build, I would say I gained more than I lost. Especially with the 3 remaining points I have in the spec tree.
My overall likes.
I like that I will still feel powerful at lvl 70, compared to being stripped of my previous power like previous expansions.
I look forward to seeing how they add to this in 10.1, 10.2, etc… will it be a new type of tree to spend points? will we get more points? how are we gaining power in those patches?
Some of the combos you can make will be pretty powerful and fun. With my current build, I can have all 3 of the lvl 50 talents at once and still have 2 more points left over.
My overall dislikes
The lack of ‘new’ moves. everything is pretty much recycled at this point
I don’t like that I have to spend 7 class points to get a weaker feral affinity
I don’t like that I have to spend 6 class points to get balance affinity
I don’t like having the spend multiple points to get a baseline ability we have today. im fine spending 1 though. examples would be 2 points for sunfire, 2 points for innervate, 3 points for ironbark.
I don’t like some of the prereqs. Improved innervate to get flourish? what if I don’t pick innervate in class tree? Ironbark to get yseras gift? sooth to get wild charge/tigers dash?
All points should be meaningful. 5 points for a total of 12% increased healing is going to be mandatory for resto, these are boring and not meaningful.
you can spec into improved wild growth and even unstoppable growth before you can even select wild growth…
The trees are too restrictive, if I’m going for balance affinity type build, I have to spend a lot of points that I don’t want just to get skull bash . just seems unforgiving going across the trees.
My overall thoughts are that I think the system is on the right track, but there is still a lot of things that need to be cleaned up. Should be fun to see how it all plays out
I honestly don’t know how I feel about the Pulsar nerf. I feel like the buff to CA may warrant it, but this will depend on whether they implement a target cap, the AP generation from SF/MF, etc.
Based on the live version of Pulsar, people can proc pulsar every ~1min at 15%+ haste. I want Boomie to be healthy and competitive, but 300AP for Pulsar may be too much with the new toys that they’re thinking of giving us.
Yeah, Tettles discussed this at length on his stream. All in all, Starfall needs some love. It’s basically our only real answer to AoE encounters. I’d like it to be in a healthier state.
I disagree, in the PvP or Pve (Raid) field, as you say, “Kicks / Interrupts” are rarely used, however that utility or ability to interrupt a spell falls mostly on M + which today is something mandatory and even that use “Stuns” or “knockbacks” can favor or harm. Why? On the subject of stuns, it is quite useful to cancel any nearby ability of the enemy, be it physical or magical, however there are some details:
1st the enemy must be vulnerable to stuns as well as knockbacks, so if he is invulnerable you only have kicks / interrupts left and if you don’t have it, it is likely that there will be a wipe or they are about to die.
2nd the enemy must be affected for the first time or at least to the point where he can continue to be affected by the stun, since it is to a certain point after that he becomes immune to stuns for a few seconds.
And in the case of knockbacks, it is very similar to what has already been mentioned, only that there are certain enemies that, even if you push them back, continue to cast certain spells and not to mention in sanguine week.
So it’s very important to have both stuns and knockbacks as well as kicks/interrupts, take SOA example with goliaths.
Core Abilities
As mentioned in my earlier post, there are some abilities that have been moved to talents despite being cornerstones of spec identity, like Sunfire for Balance or Ironfur for Guardian. Abilties like these that are currently on the class tree should remain on the class tree, just make them free for their associated spec. Ironfur should cost zero on the class tree for a Guardian Druid, but require a Feral Druid or Balance Druid to spend a class talent point to spec into. I have read similar instances in the Death Knight concept tree, but I lack the class knowledge to comment on them properly. I don’t think that doing this will create any real balancing issues - particularly if you take this approach with all classes/specs.