Mate, I’m specifically looking at the forest, here. Many of those trees have seen reduced maximum effect one can get in the direction of those former two-point nodes or have seen reduced balance and choice across them.
You aren’t, though. Their powers were typically reduced, usually to about a 1.5 point’s worth now being the max they can get.
A fixation on “no two-point nodes” is, in itself, just as likely to result in “You’re not allowed to spend more than X talents towards a specific type of customization” as “We’ve raised the value-per-point of certain talents”. And even the latter is itself only a good thing if the talents were previously undertuned or specifically meant to be obligatory anyways.
Nor does it remotely matter, since you’re balanced around the product of baselines x augmentations, not just the augmentations themselves. The only thing worth desiring is that our talent trees give significant, satisfying customization opportunities. Which is a lot harder to do if you flagrantly ignore balance just to hype up some tag-line without looking at the whole of its actual impacts.
Flap is something all druid specs can use, and druid has normally used the 3 yard talent that used to give them moonkin form at the same time. Before dragonflight that is. - this is since I started playing.
Mate, you are not taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. If in DF I spend two points on X/X% damage to one ability, but in TWW that is just a 1pt node that I get for X% damage, that’s an entire free talent point I get to spend on anything else.
I seriously cannot believe you are trying to argue for 2pt nodes. That’s insane.
And you get a new talent point to spend on something else.
You seem to be acting like this isn’t something they’re moving towards and have moved towards.
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Why do you think people don’t like having two point nodes? Why do you think every talent update removes them? Why do you think all the 3pt nodes got removed over the course of DF?
expensive nodes (especially when there are so many of them on a talent tree) limit choice and options, it limits feelycrafters, it limits fun builds to think about, it makes leveling less fun, and when you look at your tree next to a tree like windwalkers or ret or demo or havoc or XYZ cheap tree youre just left thinking why is there such a difference?
No matter what the “end value” of a 2-point or 3-point node is, the fact of the matter is that the requirement to “fully invest” in that node before you can branch from it makes talent trees feel extremely clogged.
Blizzard is slowly moving toward “every talent being a 1-point talent”, but they’re not quite there yet. That model is significantly more fun for players to engage with.
Guardian’s can’t go boomkin in TWW. The talent doesn’t exist bro. So put away your ACTYUALLY glasses for a second and stop arguing for the sake of arguing.
I didn’t say “won’t use” I said “can’t use” because the spec’s weapons do not allow the ability to be used. We have to get a weapon that only drops for different specs to use it. Secondly, you’re arguing that a talent that they removed from guardian druids wasn’t usable by guardian druids and therefore survival’s is perfectly okay to keep theirs. To which I ask then, why don’t guardian druids still have that one?
Let’s say you can currently devote 7 points towards some skill… Kill Shot or what have you. From those talents you get, say…
*AoE bleed for X% of original damage,
the ability to use it before execute period via random procs,
an earlier execute period,
increased critical strike chance (synergetic with on-crit effects elsewhere), and
a second charge and lower cooldown.
Let’s say that each is roughly balanced against each other and against other talents in terms of value (damage contribution per talent point spent).
But, those 5 effects are, again, split across 7 talents, breaking from this “all must be 1-point nodes” rule of yours. What then?
You can either make the former 2-pointers overpowered by increasing their value (in this case, by decreasing their cost), or you can simply --im effect-- remove the option to take the second point.
The first reduces customization by reducing balance. The second reduces customization by decreasing the extent to which one can focus on this or that capacity or its theme. Neither is necessarily good, let alone better.
Again, rather than obsessing over no-context guidelines, it is better simply to focus on maximizing freedom of satisfying customization, which in turn tends to come from…
Improving pathing (including by allowing players to path through any node after a single point spent, even if that node allows further points),
Baselining non-choices where they would otherwise feel overly expensive (such as per group-helping situational utility, especially where not strictly unique), and
Trimming dull effects (those taken for throughput but which carry no gameplay customization) except where specifically offered as means of opting out of greater complexity at low throughput cost.
None of those require removing the ability to pack multiple choices into a single node without their being mutually exclusive with one another.
why do you think players by and large dont like expensive trees?
why do you think blizzard is moving away from it?
why do you think all 3 pters were removed?
this isn’t MY rule. it’s what blizzard is very observably moving towards.
your kill shot example is fine to look at in a vacuum.
an EARLY DF tree would have 5 nodes each at 2 pts for the following effects
X/2X % chance for early proc
X/2X % earlier execute threshold
X/2X% increased crit chance
X/2x second lower cooldown + 1 extra charge (the charge is static)
X / 2X % of KS damage is AoE
that is 5 nodes but 10 points of cost.
a TWW tree would have those same nodes, but only for 1 pt, and each is the same power as an early DF 2pt node.
This gives you many more points to spend. You could even get the entire kill shot suite for 5 points instead of having to pick and choose
you CAN use barrage as survival? literally nothing is stopping you from equipping a bow.
you can swap weapons in combat. nothing is stopping you.
You are so annoying. So you are arguing for a DF tree for hunter but using the TWW druid tree to make your point? How is that consistent at all? You’re saying I’m arguing for the sake of arguing but you’re juggling moving goal posts to prove your point that isn’t even accurate. You do know there is a talent update next week right?
If you want to look at the TWW for druid, do you think a bear is going to cast Starfire in the middle of tanking? Do you think a bear is going to cast Maim? Cyclone? Rip? Wild Growth? No? You think that’s not going to happen while they’re actively tanking?
Gosh that’s a lot of nodes the bear won’t use if they’re concerned about optimal play. sure of a lot more nodes they “Can’t” use because they’ll immediately die.
Except this doesn’t make any sense since most 2 pointers that have been squashed have just had their 2nd point baked in.
Asking for 2 pointers to stay so there’s “more power” or whatever is a fallacy - a majority, if not all, specs that are getting 2 pointers squashed are getting that extra power baked into the single point.
Monks crane kick is 20% on 1 point instead of 2 for 10. Frost DK Whelps is 8% mastery flat instead of 4% per point. I’m sure if you dig hard enough you’ll find an edge case scenario to support your belief but right now it’s pretty clear that 2 pointers get squashed to full power in most situations, leaving only extra room for new, interesting talents to be added & taken.
Another thing to note is that Blizzard currently leverages lazy “passive aura” modifiers for each of the class specs, which necessarily need to account for gains acquired by the most commonly picked talents.
So lackluster talent bonuses are nullified on arrival, due to the passive aura modifiers.
Until you swap back to using a spear because you can do that in combat. Barrage is a bad talent. It’s weak and pointless. It’s on a choice node so you never have to pick it. I know I don’t.
But to pretend it’s the only class talent in the game that XYZ spec doesnt want to use is or worse and say that you can’t ever use it doesn’t benefit anybody.
I truly hope in the talent update next week it’s removed.
Done responding after this, clearly you think swapping weapons in combat is something RETAIL players should be doing to use a talent they can’t otherwise use. Barrage shouldn’t be locked to bow only when there is a spec that can take it that doesn’t use bows.
I did earlier ITT. Bear druids can spend points (in DF) on Moonkin form and (in DF/TWW) on starfire, wild growth, etc. Using these while you are tanking will kill you…so you wont want to use these talents or spend points into getting them. Much like Barrage. It’s suboptimal and makes your character worse. Thankfully, it’s a choice node, it’s not mandatory, nor is it required for any pathing.
Even on our own class tree, the entire bottom left is pretty much as “can’t” take for MM as barrage is for SV, and like I said the latter is a choice node so it’s not even a huge problem.
realistically MM is not going to take beast master, imp KC, or AP/KI; just like realistically SV isn’t going to take barrage, or bear isnt going to take wild growth
Barrage shouldn’t exist because it is a bad talent that has no purpose.
Please continue to put words in my mouth. I said they can I didn’t say they should
