Not one that I saw. But Feral has the same problem the other. I don’t think either of those bottleneck talents are good.
They really need a way to let feral and balances side connect across easier; probably by just moving the floating node so it connects to thick hide and natural recovery to unbrick the center letting all the specs reach all the branches at the end. Evoker’s does it and it works perfectly for them idk why its such a problem for them to give the same to us.
The new bottlenecks having some universal utility behind them while being pretty useless to half the specs is always a bad design even if thematic so they needto be reduced down too 1 point for sure.
1 Like
I don’t know how they achieved it, but it looks like lateral movement is somehow worse than it was previously. Resto and especially Balance seems to have most of the defensive options in the tree as well as Wild Charge and Stun/Incap Roar gate-kept below the entire left side of the tree. Feral and Guardian have most of the same gatekeeping issues on the right side of the tree except now Renewal and Fluid Form are also put there. Stampeding Roar used to require taking Soothe, now you can choose Cyclone instead which is even more niche in PVE situations. There are still a record number of dead-end nodes and the capstone talents are still either incredibly weak or incredibly niche.
This rework has to be a joke. I can’t believe that I actually prefer the previous druid class tree which was objectively the worst tree in the game.
The official threads usually come up in the alpha/beta forums that are only unlocked to the people actively testing. For the people not in, the class forums are your best bet, or finding someone who is in and asking them to share your feedback.
1 Like
Yeah i thought that when reading it. If they added skull bash then it would be HUGE for pve and pvp.
Yeah that is quite the move there, but from a balance perspective budgeting it won’t necessarily be a problem. It looks like Well-Honed Instincts will be off the table though.
Note: I don’t know anything about PvP so I don’t take that part into my considerations, I’ll leave that for others so this is just PvE perspective.
Yup, Thick Hide is something worth investing in anyway, and from there Charge is only one point away. Well-Honed Instincts is much rough having that 2 point Instincts of the Claw in the way. Though it is useful for resto M+ cat weaving. There’s definitely abilities that are more frustrating to get than Wild Charge, which are a lot better.
E.g. for raid (pretty much any spec), Stampeding Roar is a 3 point investment. With the lack of horizontal mobility still in the tree that’s a big ask. Especially considering it’s only 1 node it leads to, and how that is the first node that can be reached no matter where you start. All other nodes like that are nodes that follow that node. Additionally that one talent is also accessible 1 talent point away from Thick Hide, which already is great. That 1 point being Ursoc’s Spirit. Which also not bad for those times you have to use bear form as a defensive. Oh and the 3 node leading to it is Improved Rejuvenation, which also pretty solid for resto in raid.
Which leads to another big gripe I have with this new tree; the amount of nodes that only lead to 1 additional node. So besides the 7 dead end nodes (excl capstones ofc) it has 21 nodes that only lead to 1 deeper node. In comparison the new monk and warrior class trees have 9 and 10 respectively.
Although to be honest 2 of those, Skull Bash and Astral Influence, are dead ends for non feral, and balance druids respectively. Again except for resto in M+ using those specs’ aligned damage spells. Making it worse are the talents you need to pick to get them if you’re coming from the other half of the tree. Nurturing Instinct is fine for bear, and Killer Instinct is good for cat weaving resto. But for feral and balance, the other’s are practically dead nodes requiring 2 points on their own.
I’m all about having to make choices in these trees. But for druid, and pretty much just for druid, a bunch of the choices is really just optimizing how little useless talents I can take to get what I do want. When not playing resto I will pretty much never press Rejuvenation, but if I want to help dispel in M+, I need to get that.