Everyone seems to be worried about the 2-pt nodes (9 of them). Before complaining, imagine what it would be like without them. As an elementalist I use 7. If these were eliminated, I’d have seven more points to spend… what would I get? The capstone talents and all the supporting talents, and three of the physical build talents (mostly to generate more Mealstrom).
More likely, someone would come up with a new optimal build, and we would end up with one playable build instead of two. One build with all capstones required. I don’t think that’s better than what we have now.
what a ridiculous argument. many DPS have less than 4 2pt nodes and a handful have 0. there is no need to have expensive talent trees and to argue in favor of them is silly
You have to remember that you have to spend a certain amount of points in each section so its not like you’re just able to grab all of the Pwave leaf and the DRE leaf.
Not a great argument here. You ignore the fact that they could put in new talents for us to spend points on. Even if they don’t, one of the major problems with the shaman tree is that even when you have 1-2 free points you can just put them anywhere because a lot of talents require several other talents to be good. Like windfury weapon while elementalist build for example. Putting 1 point into Forceful winds doesn’t do much because you lack the points in Unruly winds and storm’s wrath. So extra free points would actually allow us to pick up things we normally wouldn’t because we couldn’t afford all the connected talents to make it useful.
That’s actually the point. A change like removing the 2-point talents would be VERY large. Ensuring that the changes would be balanced, playable, and fun would be a LOT of work. Bliz hasn’t shown any interest in investing that level of effort in making Enhance Shaman changes.
So, back to the original proposition. Do we fix what we have, or completely redesign the spec (by eliminating all the 2-point nodes)?
Honestly, I like the way Enhance plays now. We could use some minor fixes (e.g. survivability), but I’d rather they don’t break things.
I find it ridiculous that you think removing a few two point talents and making them one point talents would break anything. How would it do this? By letting storm builds fully invest in ghost wolves and have better cleave? By letting elementalist actually use Crash Lightning again or maybe make use of Windfury Weapon? This would break nothing and make both builds feel better, more importantly, it would make it so we can build for Totemic.
Op is actually correct, get 7 more points and we wind up with clutter. I dont want doom winds and deeply rooted elements in my elemental build and i dont want the elementalist stuff in storm build.
Unless they split the 2pt talents and pad the tree out with 7 more 1pt talents that dont affect gameplay the spec will lose 2 distict playstyles in favor of one convoluted playstyle with resource overload…
Less fun more plates to spin but yay no 2 pt nodes.
The talent system isnt just what you get to take but what you choose not to take.
I think the only problem with this point is that you assume trimming the 2-point nodes would be the only change to the spec tree. Trimming the 2-point nodes would be fine, but it would also require them to move talents around and create new talents so that Enhance could continue to use a physical or elemental build as they do now. They’ve already done this with elemental and restoration, so I think it’s fair to assume they will eventually do the same with enhance.
I haven’t played enhance for a while, but I remember you only really wanted to use Ascendance in Physical builds for windstrike and then you had elemental builds that were more AoE and CDR focused. Having different styles of damage would be fine, and would open up enhance to have less 2-point nodes and allow flexibility between what styles you’re able to play.
If they want to do “light touch”, then Improved MSW and Molten Assault have to be 1 point node and add pathing from Flurry to Elemental Weapons. Improved MSW and Molten Assault are the main things restricting the talent options to make builds. I tried to create builds for Elementalists (ST, AoE and Totemic) and Storm (ST and AoE). They ended to the same builds for each situations.
Totemic highlights many issues that the Enhancement tree has, it’s very boring and borderline unplayable (gameplay, resources etc).
You never pick Ascendence because it’s a really bad talent and DRE is a better talent. However, DRE is one of the biggest problems in Enhancement tree.
even if you never pick ascendance, I’d still expect Blizzard to make some large talent changes to enhance if they were to trim the 2-point nodes down. For ele, they made it easier to take Ascendance by removing it from a choice node shared with DRE, so they could do the same for Enhance.
With how large the ele changes were, I’d expect more from the enhance changes too. But, to be fair, ele was one of the few specs where you never really thought of bringing it because it was so outclassed by Enhance and Resto.