Resto Shaman Talents -> Too much fluff and unused talents

Classes Shaman
1

Hello, I just wanted to talk about what i think needs to be looked at in regards to the resto talent tree.

First off i wanted to talk about the number of pure dps nodes we have in a healing tree:

  • Stormkeeper → The 2 instant cast lightings that deal 100% increased damage
  • Acid rain → Makes healing rain do damage
  • Lava surge → Instant cast lava bursts procs

I do like these talents and dont want them removed but i do feel like we have alot of pure dps nodes compared to most other healers, which leads us to need to spend 3 points to do competitive damage to other healers in keys. I feel like stormkeeper could easily be moved to the class tree and lava surge should be baseline with lava burst.

In addition, there is quite a few nodes that have seen little to no play in really any content throughout the expansion. There may be some very niche cases where some of these could be valuable but the vast majority of builds dont use them:

  • Flash Flood → Consuming tidal waves reduces the cast speed of next ability
  • Both nodes buffing healing tide (ive seen some very occasional uses in raid for the cdr node for better cd timings)
  • Resonant Waters → increases mana tide by 4 seconds and increases yardage (even in mythic raid prog this goes untaken for the most part)
  • Improved earthliving weapon → hps buff to earthliving weapon
  • Downpour → Big aoe splash that has a higher cd the more people it hits
  • Refreshing waters → 25% more healing surge healing on you
  • Wellspring → Big cone heal. (After they nerfed it in season 1 it has seen very little play)
  • Trumbling Waves → 30% chance for prim wave to not go on cd

Like I said before, there are probably cases where some of these are run with good success or are liked by certain areas of the community but I feel like when looking at popular builds for all content, these talents arent really used and havent been used the majority of the expansion. Some of these i feel like could have great potential if either they were buffed or had their point cost reduced but imo its kind of a shame that most of these flew under the radar without tweaks for most of the expansion. My fear is that blizzard will not either tune these or rework these going into TWW and we will be stuck using the same builds as we have the whole expansion with no innovation.

7 Likes
2

As far as healers spending points to increase damage, I think that’s pretty normal. All the healers I play have a few pure dps nodes.

Shaman specifically I think feels starved for talent points to pick up things that feel mandatory though.

I think something like lava surge should be baseline for ele and resto.

3

I just looked at the current most popular build for druid in keys and unless I am missing something, they actually dont have any pure dps in their build for their spec tree. They may have some that are primarily for dps (like circle of life and death and adaptive swarm) but any dps related node I see also affects healing in some way unless I am missing something. Seems like rdruids dps buttons come primarily from the class tree

4

The major issue to me is the bottom of the trees. Top and mid portion of the tree is decent, bottom left and bottom right is just plan bad, probably the worst in the game. I was gonna post about this as well, may still.

5

Is good for using healing wave in pvp, cause healing surge cost too much mana

1 Like
6

Yep. Chain healing is even worse. Makes Shaman feel more limited healing wise cuz you’re afraid to cast chain heals and healing surges. Basically relying on Riptides, Healing Tides, and Healing Waves. Throwing in the occasional surge in a pinch.

7

Ifeel like resto doesnt really have any capstone talent like other class. like that do we have :slight_smile:

too much point on dumb prim wave.
A choice between what is always taken and never. Its a good riptide buff but doesnt deserve a capstone that for sure.
Ascendence who’s ugly and is a 15sec for a 3min cooldown with no buff to it. Why not put it in middle and have added effect like some other classes.
Random luck of ascendence which is ok. And a usless choice cause its been nerfed to the ground.

Our tree really need a good change

8

Too many points spent to bring yourself to the point of viability.

I think a major problem is the main Shaman class tree has so much “utility” bloat that normal shaman things like Echo or Lava Surge, Storm Keeper have to go into Resto tree even though those are shared. Otherwise the shaman class tree would be too big.

Also I think tidal wave sucks as a core gameplay mechanic for resto, its just so vanilla feeling now.

9

They won’t listen. I’m pretty sure players from every spec of Shaman have asked for a talent tree rework since DF launch and they would rather rework paladin, priest and mage 3~4 times than taking a deep look at Shaman’s talent tree. I think at least everyone would agree that Primordial wave should belong to the class tree and not every single spec tree. If they’d at least do that there will be many talent points freed from PW and it should allow them to put more unique talents to each shaman spec tree.

10

Another problem is balance. You cant have stormkeeper or lava surge go into the class tree because then enhancement could pick those up and that would probably hurt the balance and design of enhancement.

I feel other classes don’t have this problem. Like druid, any of the 4 specs can get Maim, or Rip if they want. Any of the 4 specs can get moonkin and Astral Range, any 4 druid specs can pick up Wild Growth… pretty early on too.

11

A lot of issues can be fixed by making certain talents baseline.

It’s a problem Blizzard has with every healer in making way too many talents filler and taking away what we had before to make them talents.

SLT should be baseline, Flash Flood, Overflowing Shores should be baked into Healing Rain, Earthliving Weapon should be baseline. The PW buff talents are almost never taken in my experience.

The list goes on and on.

12

No.

Throughput is not supposed to be in class trees, because as soon as it’s in there, it becomes mandatory and defeats the intended purpose of having utility-based class trees.

The fact that virtually every class tree fails at this promise is not a reason for ours to fail at it, too.

Not really, since Enhancement’s Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst don’t do more than tickle without MSW, anyway. At most, they’d be two dead talents we never give a second thought to.

Druid is the poster child for garbage class trees, as at least half of the tree is completely useless to any given spec. What good is picking up Wild Growth as a Guardian druid, who will be knocked out of bear form by trying to cast it, and has no Intelligence to make it do more healing than Leech enchants?

That’s a problem born entirely from going back to talent trees. The only way they could deliver enough nodes to fill out 60 points with of class and spec trees was to hack classes to the bone, consequently filling trees with mandatory abilities while calling them “choices.”

The entire DF talent system was a mistake made as a PR saving throw after the back to back disasters of BFA and SL in a cheap nostalgia appeal.

13

I wouldn’t call the entire tree a mistake. We definitely did get an upgrade versus the 3 choice node every 15 levels.

However the number of fillers 100 percent is a problem to the point of annoyance to outrageous depending on the spec/class.

1 Like
15

Your missing the point of the DF class tree. It’s an improvement over reinventing the wheel every expansion. Legion Artifacts, Heart of Azeroth. Covenants and Soulbinds. All of these endgame power systems required a lot of development and thought and effort from the dev team just to be thrown away next xpac.

Now with the DF talent tress, new class power can be introduced in an evergreen fashion as new talents replacing old unpopular talents. With the previous talent system it was impossible. Those were carefully balanced tight-rope balancing acts.

We are seeing this with Hero Talents.

DF Talent tree is great, it just needs iteration which it will get. Older xpacs were just thrown away, never really iterated. This is the first expansion with the new trees. Lets not throw the baby out with the bath water.

1 Like
16

I can’t agree. The MoP talent system was 6 choices between 3 abilities. When you break down the DF trees, most are actually giving fewer choices than that, especially for DPS. Despite the number of things a player clicks on in the process of making their build, the majority of those selections are mandatory picks that used to be baseline because they’re crucial to making the spec function, period, or forced pathing selections on the way to more impactful talents. For most specs, the sum total of their “choices” in the DF talent trees is ST vs AoE, which isn’t a choice, it’s the ability to count.

This problem will not be solved, either, because it is very much intentional. It is already hard enough to balance 39 specs to have just one viable build each, trying to balance the game for every spec to also have multiple variants that are all roughly equal is even harder, and borderline impossible if players have too much freedom of choice in their builds. The DF talent system is carefully structured to restrict player freedom into building each spec according to one or, if they’re lucky, two cookie cutters while obfuscating that this is what the devs are doing behind the illusion of dozens of things to click on in the process.

The irony is that the MoP system was actually better structured for allowing build variety because its more restrictive nature made it far easier to balance competing talents against each other. It’s much easier to balance three mutually exclusive choices that the player is guaranteed to take one of, than it is to balance even just two talents that players can potentially take either, both, or neither of.

17

Hero talents are exactly the same expansion-by-expansion system creep as everything you listed above, and themselves prove that the DF talent system is not a sustainable model. The DF trees are so complex to design and balance that the devs are preferring to create an entirely separate power system for the very next expansion after introducing them rather than expand the DF trees themselves, because adding more talent rows to the DF trees would make them even more unwieldy.

The irony is that the MoP talent system was also better designed to deal with expansion creep. Adding a single new row at the new max level in the MoP system was far easier than the prospect of adding a new tier to the DF talent trees, because each talent row in the MoP system was self-contained. Adding a new one didn’t run the risk of allowing players to break things by using their new talent points in previous rows of the tree, unlike the prospect of adding a tier to the DF trees requiring a total rebalance of the trees to account for players now having the option to spend their new points in the lower tiers.

18

You were shoehorned into an ability too many times too count in that tree as well and some specs were unfortunate enough where there choices were not balanced for entire expansions.

Yes, a lot of it is filler but ultimately we gained more than we lost. It just needs further fixing but the tree is superior. If Blizzard wasn’t so lazy it could be considerably better though.

1 Like
19

The difference there is that shoehorned talent selections in the MoP system were down to two things: poor talent balancing, and layered power systems.

To be blunt, the devs got lazy with baseline talent balance when they started playing with borrowed power systems. Absurd talent situations like the joke that Ice Strike was in SL or Slice and Dice being a dps loss from not having a talent at all in that row on Outlaw rogues in BFA were cases of the devs just not doing their jobs well, which is just as applicable an issue to any talent system as it was to the MoP one.

But far more than that, the biggest offender to shoehorned talents in the MoP system were the various borrowed power systems the devs started layering on top of talents in Legion and beyond. The addition of these power systems threw the balancing of talents in the base system completely out of whack as anywhere that power could be stacked on the same ability through multiple power systems inevitably tipped the scales on those talents to the breaking point.

If a talent row offers a choice between buffing Ability A, Ability B, or Ability C…
And artifact boons offer a choice between buffing Ability A, Ability D, or Ability E…
And armor powers trigger off a choice of Ability A, Ability B, or Ability E…
And covenant powers add synergies to a choice of Ability A, Ability C, or Ability D…

…it doesn’t matter how balanced the talent choice between A, B, and C is, you’re taking talent A because A is getting 4 layers of power stacked on top of it while the other options all top out at 2.

These stacked power systems were not something required by the MoP talent system, either, and thus not something we had to switch to the DF trees to get rid of. We had the MoP talent system without these additional power systems stacked on top of it through both MoP itself and WoD without issue. Borrowed power systems didn’t get tacked on top of the baseline MoP talent system until Legion, and there’s no reason they would have to be again.

Heck, the DF trees are already doing it again by adding Hero talents as a second power system. Just look at how many complaints there are across all of the previewed trees about being forced into certain talents. It’s exactly the same problem that borrowed power systems created, just wearing a pine tree-colored coat.

1 Like
20

completely respectfully disagree. I think hero talents are going to be evergreen and add more to theme and fantasy then old power systems. Is there going to be power differences, sure of course. I’m hopeful

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21

Hero talents will be evergreen. If anyone has played guild wars 2, hero talents will be similar to elite specializations in that game. They allow blizz to add more hero specs over time so they can still add new stuff to the game, but the old stuff doesn’t go away, you just have more choices.