I’m super excited for Dragonflight, and I’m really enjoying looking at the new talent trees. I see so much potential for this new system. Here are a few thoughts, with the hope that they will be useful to the team as they iterate through alpha and beta.
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Classes that are all-DPS (rogue, mage, lock, hunter) should have class trees that are entirely - or almost entirely - utility. Any throughput talents should all be at the top of the tree where they’re easy to grab. Or maybe make a line of them down part of the tree so they can all be picked up easily by running down that line. Anyone is going to grab all those throughput talents first, in any build, no question. You can use that as a way to soak up talent points. If you don’t have good ideas for 30 points worth of utility talents in the class tree, and everyone is going to take all the DPS talents, put an easy line of, I don’t know, 15 points worth of throughput talents in the tree in an obvious area, and then you’re playing a game around distributing the other 15 points through misc utility.
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For classes that have multiple roles, putting a decent amount of core talents in the class tree is good because it gives people more opportunity to explore hybrid options. I’ve spent a lot of time with the druid trees (since I might main resto druid) and I’ve had a LOT of fun playing around with the class tree. I find myself skipping as much utility as I can in order to try to hybrid into different roles. If I want to catweave as resto, how much damage can I reasonably get? What if I want to weave boomie? For some prog raiding, survivability is key; how tanky can I get? That’s super fun. Lean into that.
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I mostly heal, and I really like what I’ve seen so far out of the priest and druid spec trees. There’s lots of different builds, and so long as they’re roughly balanced in terms of HPS, I don’t need to optimize, since healing isn’t about topping meters (“winning game 2”), it’s about keeping your team alive. In raiding, that usually involves finding your niche within a healing team, and having spec trees that allow you to move into different niches is a super fun idea. Lean into this more! Is this a healer that does a substantial contribution to damage? A healer that takes care of raid rot with HOTs? Mitigation? Reactive spot healing? We can now make it so that every healer CAN do all of those things based on talent choices. So do that!
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Balancing DPS trees seems a hard task. Here’s the problem (as I’m sure everyone is aware): Everyone wants to top meters. Assassination rogues just want to do the most damage to the boss they can. The question of which talent loadout will do most damage to the boss is a harder problem to solve with a huge array of talents to choose from. But the theorycrafters will, eventually, solve it, the solution will be posted on WoWHead, and everyone will copypaste it. Single target is different from multi target, so one way to (kind of try to) solve this problem would be to mix up single target and multi target talents throughout the tree. This would not solve the problem. There will still be an optimal solution for single target and an optimal solution for multi target. That solution will be found and copypasted. And it will feel bad to have to take a bunch of multi target talents to unlock the things you need for your optimal single target rotation.
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The better solution is to use talents to make it so that different loadouts specialize in different kinds of fight, with a lot more fine-tuning around “different kinds of fight” than just single target vs multi target. There are already classes and talent loadouts that specialize in 1-target, 2-target, 5-target, and 5±target situations. Lean into that more! What would a good 3-target talent look like? 4-target? Etc. Similarly, even on single-target fights, there’s lots of tweaking you can do around use of cooldowns and size and frequency of damage spikes. How about a talent that makes your major CD come up twice as often but be half as effective when it does? Or one that makes a minor CD come up half as often but be twice as effective? Maybe you can use talents to make sure that multiple CDs always line up at the same time, where taking that talent loadout will be a net DPS minus throughout the fight, but will make you a god during those burst windows? Talents that buff your DPS at the beginning of the fight? At the end of the fight? In the middle (your damage is buffed the closer the target is to 50% health, with lowest damage at 0% or 100%)? I’m just spitballing here. But approaching DPS talents in this way will be SUPER interesting for raiders, particularly at the high end. If you can customize where your damage spikes will be, and on how many targets your damage will be spiking, you can work to figure out what combination of talents will work best for the particular patterns that the boss presents. Do I want a loadout that will provide max single target damage to the boss for the whole fight? Or do I want one that will do a little less damage on net, but which will make my AoE CDs line up with the ad wave spawns? That’s meaningful choice.