Upcoming hero talents for The War Within seem to have one MAJOR flaw.
It presents with class fantasy tied with player power.
This is the same issue that Shadowlands encountered with Covenants. Player choice of aesthetic tied to player power. It ended up with situations where players had to switch to a covenant that they did not like the aesthetic because that covenant was the best choice for the highest DPS.
Hero talents are bound to encounter the same drawback…
Blizzard should address this issue with the ties between Player Power and Aesthetics. This class fantasy should be some sort of Prestige or Patron system that is simply Aesthetic and not player-power-based. To make a hunter a DARK RANGER it should be based through Transmog both in Armor and Power Cosmetics.
Player class fantasy/aesthetics should be a cosmetic system to change player transmog and power effects to match the class fantasy.
The player power system should be separate, provide Buffs and augment core class powers. Say provide core powers to become “Empowered” abilities that utilize the Evoker Empower spell system or simply buff core class powers to allow for choice between Single Target vs Aoe/Cleve to a power.
Blizzard, please dont tie a Class Aesthetic to player power, it will become a major issue as we progress down this “Hero talent system”
Keep Class Aesthetic as cosmetic, put it into cosmetic transmog and power visual changes.
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I think you’re overestimating exactly how much the hero talents are going to change cosmetics. At best, a couple abilities are going to have some thematic spillover from the other spec shared by the hero talent tree. Like frostfire mages getting frostfire bolt back
This isn’t like Covenants where you have 4 wildly different aesthetics that aren’t tied to your class aesthetic at all.
With this it’s just smashing two of your specs together thematically, and most classes don’t have hugely different aesthetics between specs.
You, for example, are a paladin, so i don’t know what you’re afraid of because all of your specs have the same theme.
Is some streamer going around spouting this crap? This like the 3rd thread in less than a day with this silly idea.
Players liked covenants, it was the inability to change them as we needed to we didn’t like. That’s what we complain about. We didn’t care that there was player power tied to them. We just wanted to be able to min/max the covenant powers with whatever content we were going to do at that time. Since we’re able to play around with our talents whenever we feel we need to (unless we’re in an active key) it’s probably a safe assumption that we’ll be able to do the same with hero talents.
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There was already a post discussing hero talents and people making connections to Covenants — and multiple people shooting down the thought.
Did we need another one?
I don’t see the point of giving up on DF talents and moving straight to Hero talents. That kind of defeats the point of the DF talents if they are not improved upon because it will make balancing Hero talents harder.
Same problem happened with covenants while the MoP talent system was heavily neglected.
If the DF talent system is going to be evergreen it needs to be improved upon and not thrown away just to rush out HERO talents which I think may end up gimmicky but possibly something they can build on. So it can go either way!

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Odeargodinheaven talent points are NOT Covenants.
At all.
Whatsoever.
Hero Talents are meant to add enough damage or healing throughput to be significant without being so important that these new talents overshadow your current class and spec tree talents. Most Hero Talent trees add new visual effects to classes, both to communicate what they’re doing and bring their class fantasies to life. However, these are not complete visual reworks – your class and spec are still the same at their core, and that will continue to come through.
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I’m starting to think we need to start posting this in like multiple languages…like there seems to be some kind of language barrier going on here.
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It’s not like their adding a suite of cosmetics for each hero talent and then locking them to that spec.
Even if they do add cosmetics, it’s not going to be locked to your talents.
Comparing this to covenants is a poor comparison. It’s just a new row of talents in its own UI.
No, that issue was the stubbornness of Blizzard to make it as frustrating as possible to switch from one Covenant to another; Hero Specializations and their talents can be swapped around whenever out of combat.
We did have a system that actually worked for aesthetics and it has since been dumpstered. Glyphs. Haven’t seen an update to the glyph system for several expansions and even some glyphs have been removed from the game entirely.
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I would assume Blizzard’s thinking here, that it would be confusing to see Dark ranger hero talents from something that looks like your ordinary survival hunter… but that’s just a theory.
Honestly don’t know why we need hero talents. Can’t they just make… regular talents, improving the one we already have? or allow us to use dual spec talents at the same time to mix what we create?
The only reason i can think of is hype tauren poop. “LOOK LLOOK GUYS! WE CREATED A WHOOOOOOOLE NEW UI FOR THE 38 TALENTS WE CUT OFF!! IT’S DIFFERENT GUYS!!”
Yeah, and Azertie is totally different from Artifacts guys. 
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I miss glyphs. They were amazing. They were fun. They added nifty flavor. We need more.
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