Please reconsider tying interrupts to a talent. If you have to, why not make it so interrupts all have a base cooldown of 1 minute, and the talent would instead change it to the cooldown that it is supposed to have, be it 8 seconds, 24 seconds, etc.
If there’s one thing Shadowlands taught me, Torghast in specific, interrupts need to be baseline for every spec. The ones that don’t have one right now suffer immensely in places like Torghast because they can’t interrupt spells that you have to interrupt or you die. Except now this will happen in raids and dungeons, where toxic players will kick players who don’t want to interrupt because they didn’t spec into one. It’s one thing if someone is just lazy and doesn’t interrupt, getting “yelled” at will usually make them interrupt. But if they don’t even have the option? That’s a problem.
And, the above mentioned, in content like Torghast, if you continue to make solo player stuff, not having an interrupt can literally mean the difference between it being a chore and it being fun. Doing Coldheart Interstitia as a Mistweaver right now, for instance, is literal hell. I can’t interrupt the fear. At all. Doing Layer 13+ as a healer other than shaman? Same issue. Those little Automa casters? You can’t interrupt them, they will delete you. Like, I’m talking they do 60% of your health in a second delete.
I understand you guys want us to have more choice, but the explanation you guys gave just makes it sound like you stripped power from us just to give it back as a talent, but will restrict how much we can get back, effectively making us feel weaker than before just so we can feel stronger as we level. This is how borrowed power feels, except now you’re doing it with core abilities of a class like interrupts. And on top of losing our borrowed power, we’ll also lose core abilities? It’s going to feel double bad.
The fact a new player can accidentally not spec into core spells if they don’t look it up, is going to be horrible. Likewise, this talent system is very new player unfriendly from what we’ve seen so far for the above reason. I realize you say that the class trees will start with certain talents learned for free for each spec, so I assume things like Rake for Feral, Starfall for Balance, etc.
But that won’t help new players who don’t know what’s best. They might decide “Oh hey, the these melee abilities look nice” as a guardian, and end up speccing into feral talents, and missing on 100% required spells like Ironfur. Or Balance could miss out on Starsurge, their main damaging move. (This is just guesses based on the images provided) You might think “They’ll learn through mistakes” - and yes, some might. But the more likely scenario is if a Guardian Druid doesn’t use ironfur and dies too much in a dungeon and gets yelled at and called names, they’re more likely to just stop playing - if you spend time in general discussion, you’ll see this is a very common thing, even now with a more simplified system.
If I might suggest, since you mention not using those diamond icons, why not use them, but make it so clicking them will auto-fill in a suggestion for their current spec (something you guys would have to code I know but still), and they can branch out and experiment on their own once they’re more comfortable? That way there’s a “default” spec by the game new players can use until they’re comfortable with a spec, and for people who are overwhelmed by the tree in the pre-patch or returning also have a starting point without sorting through guides who will very clearly (based on the menu of saved specs) be varied based on raid, dungeons, M+, PvP, etc. It will be overwhelming to navigate.
Having a base spec would help, and make it easier for people to explore and branch out on their own.
I am very cautious about this system because it can go very badly, as I’m sure you know. It can be great too. But it comes down to how it ends up handled, and if feedback is listened to on the alpha/beta forums once it’s out.
