Blizzard should be able to identify talents where either A) effectively no one takes them, or B) practically everyone takes them, and make adjustments accordingly. Banish is not useful in 99% of the game and should just be given as part of the base kit for legacy/flavor reasons.
The devs just haven’t figured out how to design class talents in general. To use other classes as examples of even more baffling decisions, Rebuke and Skull Bash are nodes in their respective class trees. In what universe is it an interesting or desirable choice to lose your interrupt in a game balanced so heavily around being able to stop casts? The other options would have to be much more appealing than they are currently.
I get the impression that they simply ran out of ideas for how to fill 40 nodes in a tree about halfway through, so they started adding passive bonuses, mandatory abilities that we already had, and talents that no one in their right mind would take just to give us the sense that the tree is complex and interesting.
There needs to be a shift in talent design philosophy. They really need to slow down and go talent-by-talent with a magnifying glass, both for our tree and others.
I always do a double-take when I see patch notes like 11.2 “Immutable Hatred damage increased by 250%” – what on earth was it doing beforehand to necessitate that large of a change?!
Same thing with Drain Life in 11.1 being increased by 300%, and Threatening Presence in 11.2 by 550%. Sadly, those buffs didn’t really make a dent on the problems they were trying to solve, either.
The Demo kit had to be patched so many times in the past couple of years (restoring demon core generation, shortening hard cast times) that it seems like there’s no real vision currently. Whoever was working on the class this past expansion was, for some inexplicable reason, concerned that Demo being slightly more mobile would break the balance of the game, so we have things like MS costing a talent point. They actually used the phrase “skill expression” to justify the limitations on Tyrant, which in practice just means your burst can be ruined by factors outside of your control that force you to move.
If we are going to be a turret, how does that function with modern WoW pacing and encounter design? If we have low mobility, is there an upside? Or are we just mages/hunters with a penalty for no reason? I hope there are clear answers to these questions.
Definitely - in addition to IH being passive damage, I can’t even see the talent working in practice (unless reading a combat log counts), which contributes to the perception of it being an uninteresting choice.