It annoys me that people compare every feature they don’t personally like to Covenants.
Covenants had very specific reasons on why they were bad and not being able to easily swap was the biggest.
Like if you can swap between the hero talents, even if the feature is universally panned it’s still doing better than Covenants.
Every spec will be playing the best numerical “hero talent”. Period. Just like covenants. Even if its a .0001% difference, that will be looked at has the mandatory tree for group content.
This is the quiet part I should have said out loud. I have absolutely no faith they’ll be roughly equal.
I am unsure if they should be or not. I was hoping they’d be more class skin like but at the same time they only partially fit that idea.
I really just wish they’d double down and add class skins officially especially while they continue to do away with race/class restrictions.
Im just glad they made names for the shaman one boring so i dont have to care that they put 0 effort into this new exciting xpac feature
Is the name, which has nothing to do with gameplay, that important?
No one will know your hero talent name unless you tell them. It wont have any effect on the effort used to design the talents. It wont have any effect on anything, even RP.
If treants outperforms the elune tree, it will be required.
It’s covenants all over again. Tying aesthetic and character preference to power.
You can’t compare talents to shadowlands where you were locked in/not able to quickly change… you talk about how annoying it’ll be to have your favorite spec not be the meta yet you play arms?
Hero Talents are not really any different than the old days going from vanilla > TBC > Wrath where they just extended the talent trees. The only difference is you get the option of Theme A or Theme B for your talents.
People assumed we were getting class skins.
We’re really just getting more talents.
While the idea of class skins sounds neat, it’s actually a really big ask.
How could you make a BM hunter have 2-4 different class skins while not being mechanically different?
Making the spell names and visual effects different while remaining mechanically / numerically the same…
You gonna design 2-4 different and unique aesthetics for every single BM ability?
Now do that for every spec…
I just don’t see it happening.
It’s a magnification of the “cool vs powerful” problem.
For example, I think convoke is cooler than tree of life. But I have to use tree of life because it’s just flat better.
Covenants were an extension of that, that also covered a lot of downtime. Besides the obvious problem of having different covenants be BiS for different specs, my preferred covenant was not the strongest for my class, so my “home base” aesthetic and which quests I had available etc were all for a faction I didn’t really care for.
These talents aren’t that extreme, but they are close. It will change a lot about your character, visuals, aesthetics. Maybe even armor or quests. We don’t know all that yet. But, being strong is also fun. So if these choices down align, people will have to choose between “cool” and “powerful”. It’s just not a good choice to make.
Its hilarious to me, because that is what they have blatantly stated since day 1.
Why cant i want the names to sound cool? Yes the name doesnt impact its gameplay, none of the art in this game does beyond getting in the way of swirlies. Partly i like shaman for how it plays. But i also like the fantasy of it even if it isnt reflected well in gameplay. Idk maybe lean into the primordial and chaotic nature of shamanism or the ancestral connections that is an important part of our class as well.
Its just not very exciting or interesting to me.
It’s about the choice between character theme and power.
Like night fae for warlocks. Too powerful to NOT be night fae, but night fae didn’t really jive with how I view my warlock.
The choice between aesthetics and power doesn’t need to be tied together.
You are more than welcome to want names to sound cool. I just find “cool sounding name” an odd choice for “most important thing”. Since as you stated, if the name does not sound cool enough, then you dont care about gameplay.
I think it should be both. However … I would also like to see an expanded ability transmog system with cosmetic unlocks, via crafting, loot and content.
I havent seen the trees yet so yeah if they manage to make something cool i will be excited but judging by what i have seen so far im not that excited.
And I get that. I think people just hyped up what is coming in talent trees much more than they should have.
They were just going to be on par with current spec trees, as far as design goals. Which is what was stated day 1.
I feel that linking such strong RP themes to talent choices is a very dangerous path to go down.
Dark ranger vs sentinel doesn’t even feel like a real choice - it’s pretty much an auto-assignment on RP alone. Anything can be rationalized with enough brain-twisting, but it didn’t feel good in Shadowlands so I’m surprised to see it happening again.
It’s not just about the power balance, each tree is going to focus on different abilities and rotations, that I may or may not find fun. If sentinel turns out to focus on traps, I’m going to be in an unhappy place right off the bat.
Mhm i have pretty low expectations but i do think there is some cool stuff they could do with totemic. Doubt they’ll do any buffs as strong as id like but we’ll see. Maybe they turn totemic recall into some sorta healing/dps cd.