From what they’ve shown so far it appears to be an additional and separate layer of the talent tree system that tries to bridge the gap between the class and spec trees. At a first glance it seems like a good idea, certainly better than just giving us 10 more talent points and calling it a day. However, it appears to function and certainly looks exactly like the Shadowlands Covenant Soulbinds interface and that is a major red flag for me because that system was terrible. I realize it’s still very early days and change is almost inevitable at this stage but it’s something that needs to be looked at now if we’re to offer constructive feedback in time.
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New system is curious, especially since it likely modifies concrete specialization with some theme or even abilities of other specialization. For example, I suspect Fire + Frost spec could be something like Frostfire allowing to potentially return some of the old removed abilities and play as a dual element Mage spec.
However, I sincerely hope that alongside bringing hero talents they will bring order to existing talent trees. Talents like Mass Polymorph, Rigid Ice, Improved Frost Nova and likewise severely need boosts or replacements.
I don’t anticipate this going well for mages - at least on the first pass.
If I’m not mistaken, these hero talents are supposed to be more akin to the Legion Artifact Weapons than Covenant Soulbinds - the phrase that specifically needs attention is “ultimately you’re going to unlock the whole tree.” So in that regard, I’m not too concerned.
The reason I’m skeptical is because of an inherent flaw with mages: the three specs are so wildly different that we don’t share a lot of interesting skills or mechanics. My fear is that Blizzard will take this opportunity to take existing talents away from us and put them in the Hero Tree (as they have often done in the past). However, this time around, it’s possible that the talent or ability you’re losing is going to be in the tree that your spec doesn’t get access to.
If they’re better than that and don’t take anything away from us, it’s going to be a challenge for them to come up with talents that are going to feel worthy of being a “hero” talent and be desired by 2 specs at the same time.
This whole concept feels like they realized that they couldn’t effectively scale our talent trees, so they simply added another one. I’m curious as to how they’ll iterate as we move into the next expansion. Does the hero tree get bigger? Do we get another one? Do we lose the existing one altogether and have a new one replaced?
That’s exactly it and frankly it should have been something that they considered well in advance of ever deciding to make the switch from talent tiers to trees.
I honestly have no clue which way they will go on this and frankly don’t have a good answer myself. No MMO I’ve ever played has handled this well. The very notion of anything remotely like a talent system is inherently in conflict with a game model that constantly increases the level cap.
As a developer you either have to continuously expand the tree/tier/whatever which causes a whole host of balancing issues or abandon the increasing level cap model altogether and replace it with some kind of paragon system which is often very bland and makes engaging with new content feel unrewarding.
This might be exactly what’s happening with bubbles right now. Archmage in WC3 could have 3 elementals out at once, if they give us a tree that does that, the precursor to doing that would be removing bubbles from the orignal frost tree. Which is what the mostly did. This probably means bubbles will be taken out of IV if that’s the direction they’re headed.
My biggest concern is mastery scaling. In general it’s been garbage for mages and only barely fixed. if they’re mixing elements I’ll be concerned unless they’re reworking the masteries as well.
It took me your entire post to understand what you were talking about.
I want to make this as clear as I possibly can:
I don’t care if the water elemental comes back. But if it does come back, I do not want to see it on my arcane mage. I’m not opposed to adding additional elements to the kit, I just don’t want to deal with a pet.
Isn’t mastery technically the best stat (by a small margin) for 2 of the three specs? It looks like mastery scaling is only bad for fire. For the other two specs, it’s good, just not something that you want to stack without other secondaries. I feel like that balance between stats is exactly what it should be.
Unless you’re referring to the fact that mastery doesn’t scale cross-element, which is something they’d surely have to address. One route they could go is to make our 3 hero trees representative of the three specs - but only share the tree with the other two specs (that way they could balance the talents without having to consider whether or not it’s buffed by mastery).
So as Arcane, my tree options would be Fire or Frost. As Frost my choices would be Arcane or Fire. As Fire my choices would be Arcane or Frost. Then they could put things that already exist for one spec into the hero tree for the other two.
It’s not necessarily a good idea (nor am I sure I’d be happy with that), but it would be an option they could take.
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3 trees per class, 2 available to each spec, you can only have 1 active at a time. This should be an easy wish to grant if they made one that was elemental based. I’m fine with it not being on every mage either, and it should be an option given how heavily water elemental has featured in our lore.
I was specifically referring to pre df with the past tense there. Ice lance damage didn’t scale with mastery since legion until df. Fo didn’t scale until bfa, blizzard didn’t at all until df… In bfa mastery was garbage for arcane. I didn’t mess with arcane a ton since.
You guys need to stop hijacking forum threads to beg for a useless pet to return.
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Here’s hoping Spellbreaker will be one
You’re amazingly wrong. The system was a massive success once the friction of swapping was removed. This same sentiment is shared among virtually any person you can ask.
So long as we don’t sacrifice our class/spec talents to see them moves into hero talents I will be happy to see a new evergreen system.
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And you are spectacularly incorrect, lol. There, done. 
What about the soulbinds and conduits was fun or engaging for you? They were all boring, passive buffs that almost never interacted with or impacted your rotation and amounted to little more than 1-5% damage increase. And the fact that you could unlock all of them just took choice out of the equation not to mention the added hassle of having to take the time to swap between them, or worse forgetting to.
Idk who you are speaking to but I have yet to talk to anyone in-game who feels the covenant system or anything related to it was a success. But I guess self-contained echo chambers can do that, haha.
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If the system is supppose to be based on arch types, does this is just based on lore? Like Murading/mountain king for warriors.
Mages are just mages/archmages with more knowledge in a specific school of magic.
A part of me is hoping those hero talents don’t modify damage, because it will be a mess to balance lol, but that would be a bit boring.
A suggestion for frost tree could be, a change for mirror images, summon 3 water elementals instead of an image of the mage.
Update: hero trees names are Sunfury, Frostfire and Spellslinger.
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Are we still talking about Conduits? One of the arcane conduits would on average reduce our major cooldown by 30 seconds. One of them for sure also became a talent in Dragonflight. Considering 8 of those old conduits for mages became talents in Dragonflight (and several might just be new iterations with different names) I’d hardly call them failures or non-impactful.
There were fundamental flaws with Covenants, largely the “once you make a choice it’s hard to change it” problem. But the conduit system itself just needed some better balance. From my perspective, there was almost never any reason to change the conduits. They were decent abilities that had an impact on my rotation, but there were a few that were simply better than the rest.
On a different note, the three Hero trees they provided in the deep dive are:
- Sunfury
- Frostfire
- Spellslinger
They provided no other information for mages. However, if I had to guess, I’d wager that Arcane will see Sunfury and Spellslinger, Fire will see Sunfury and Frostfire, and Frost will see Frostfire and Spellslinger.
If they don’t modify damage, then what’s the point?
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Interesting. Good chance we’ll see the return of Frostfire Bolt. I imagine that would be well received.
Sunfury makes me think of Kael’thas, thinking that will be mostly Fire based. Not sure what Spellslinger does but the name feels Arcaney.
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I just saw that, I am SHOOK! This could be HUGE!
Yeah I know. I saw the druid talents they modify damage and healing.
This is the exactly combination I was thinking off.
Frostfire bolt coming back can be interesting depending on how they implement it.
O you’re right. Asking for a major part of our lore back that’s been available for over a decade is absolutely insane.
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OMG Can I PLEASE see a mage thread where some casual player DOESN’T try to turn it into a cry for the cursed, well-dead Water Elemental?
And calling it Bubbles is now cringe-worthy. It had no name … proving again it’s worthlessness.
But congrats: I’m sure OP is elated that his thread has been hijacked.
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Looks like I guessed at least 1 hero spec correctly XD
If there could be additional gameplay tweaks alongside simply adding new talents, these could be:
Frostfire - dual element spec
Sunfury - battlemage spec which could make use of Fire’s damaging barrier if it were buffed and tuned correctly
Spellslinger - as name suggests, fully ranged with decent amount of mobility and instants (to support mobility, since Ice Floes and Shimmer charges are limited).
So I’ve been getting ready to go out and only half paying attention to all the reveals from this afternoon but now that I am looking at it in more detail from the car I am not thrilled.
First of all, why have three of these Hero Trees but let each spec only have access to two of them and lock them out of the third? That’s inherently flawed and is sure to piss people off.
Second, looking at what little they revealed of the Druid Hero Trees it looks to be more of the same right along the lines of the SL soulbinds. Some people may be fine with that but for me it’s a huge lost opportunity.
We needed these trees to let us tap into the full potential of our class and gain access to amazing abilities like what Jaina and Khadgar do with merging the different elements into devastating and visually stunning spells.
I may be setting the bar too high and have unrealistic expectations but anything short of what I just described will leave me disappointed. This ties back to my biggest gripe with the game which is locking players away from all of these amazing assets that every new expansion brings and wasting them on NPCs that we’re never even going to see again after clearing the content they feature in.