What Happened With Spellslinger?

Classes Mage
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I’ve been largely out of the loop lately and it seems like I missed quite a lot in the development of Spellslinger. Obviously it started off incredibly lackluster both visually and thematically and remained that way throughout most of the Alpha stage. Then in the Beta it received some visual improvements but still failed to really excite players, mostly due to it’s completely passive nature, and of course continued to not hit the mark at all when it came to lore and class fantasy. That’s sort of where I dropped off the WoW scene and went to play other games.

Apparently Blizzard’s answer to all the criticism was not to address it directly but instead just to buff the hell out of Spellslinger in terms of raw DPS numbers output. That then caused many of the popular streamers to pick up on it and bring to everyone’s attention how overpowered it was, which in turn caused Blizzard to heavily nerf it, nerf it again, and then nerf it some more. To the point where I now don’t know what’s left of it, lol.

As I see it now, I am unlikely to pick this hero talent path because (1) thematically it’s still a flop to me and nothing has been done at all to address that; and (2) while it undoubtedly looks better visually than it did before, I continue to find it unimpressive and it just doesn’t appeal to me. Even so I would appreciate it if someone could fill me in on where things stand right now, after what at least at a glace appear to be a slew of heavy-handed nerfs, in terms of viability if nothing else.

That is if there is anyone left here because this forum looks deader than a doornail, lol. (Which is hardly surprising given that there hasn’t been any new content since November of last year.)

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Pretty much sums up TWW doesn’t it?

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While I admit that a) I haven’t really followed much of the PTR and b) I’ve been fairly critical of Blizzard over the past 4 expansions, I’ll say in their defense, it is a 20 year old game come this November. I think it’s kind of like television and movies; people are just out of ideas and grasping at straws to come up with things to reinvent the wheel.

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What you missed was a mix of bugs with arcane (clearcasting procs), bugs with splinters, and splinters themselves being a bit overtuned, and then the situation of not taking splinterstorm resulting in bigger dps increases.

So basically, a buggy spec is what happened, and now, as of this week, we can’t really test properly (the same with frostfire frost) because of changes from notes not being implemented…

It’s also why I said in another thread why you shouldn’t be worried until they fix the clearcasting bug.

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So I took the time, courtesy of the obnoxiously extended maintenance, to look at the state of the updated talent trees and some of the guides circulating around.

Well, somehow they managed to screw up the spec tree even more than before, a truly impressive feat, even for WoW devs. But I am more curious about why every guide out there seems to completely overlook Sunfury and suggests only Spellslinger for Arcane.

Is there really a clear numerical advantage or is it just the usual single digit DPS increase that always gets min maxers’ trousers in a bunch? And if so what is the cause, a bugged interaction likely to be nerfed or just screwed up balancing?

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:smile: just think How long that level 1, 2 person Cycle they had that was account wide and level 1 that was when the wheel was created i would say

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They’re not suggesting spellslinger over the other. Theres a lot of focus on spellslinger because there’s no complete apl for sunfury, yet.

Literally, everyone in discord will tell you that no one knows what’s going to be the go to for fire, frost or arcane.

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I haven’t logged into Discord for so long that if and when I try it will probably tell me to come back in 5-10 business days so it can finish all its updates. :rofl:

It’s kinda scary that the expansion is rolling out in a month’s time and no one knows :poop: yet.

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It’s almost like Blizzard has no idea what they’re doing and aren’t willing to dedicate sufficient resources to class design and development. Just like the last 5+ expansions… Don’t worry though, I’m sure they’ll fix it all in either the .15 or .25 patch.

I think you’re right here. It’s sad, but it’s absolutely true, and honestly the game has done well to get 20 years (even if realistically half of those were ‘bad’). Maybe it’s time for them to just admit that they’re out of ideas, bite the bullet, give us the 1 expansion where we defeat the void lords, and be done with it. Call it quits, no more threats to the universe. Take a few years off, and then look at the next ‘big thing’ to tackle in terms of games.

If there’s still interest in MMOs, build a new one. If not, look at other genres. Blizzard might even have enough scraps of goodwill left after their recent abortions (OW2 and D4) that they’d have a big enough fan base still to carry into a new genre of game. Who knows, but I think they need to be done with WoW if this is the quality of stuff they’re putting out.

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The running theory through my group of friends is that we’ll get The War Within, Midnight, and The Last Titan, wrap up the World Soul saga and see the end of WoW. I love this game, but no king rules forever.

We’ve got some fun theories about where to go next even. My personal favorite is that as part of The Last Titan, we (and our company of heroic friends we made along the way) will decide that, in order to protect everything we know and love, we’ll need to seal away Azeroth (the Titan) - which effectively requires us to defeat just about every cosmic force we’ve ever encountered (including and especially the Titans). We end the entire series with our favorite characters pledging their lives - or eternity - to being the watchers that keep the titan in its prison.

Then we get a new MMO implied to be set in a different universe. The last members of a semi-secret sect of “Watchers” are dying, and something terrible is going to be unleashed. The names of the watchers have been lost for a very long time, but us veterans of WoW will be swift to recognize some notable characteristics or artifacts that these watchers held onto (my specific example to my friends was “Imagine watching the intro cutscene and just going ‘Is that… Atiesh?’”

It would allow them the ability to create a new game that can be built from the ground up but can have some throwbacks to wow in way that could be really well-received (assuming they’re okay with the universe having a pre-built origin story that will aggravate veteran players if they retcon it).

But I honestly don’t see Hero Trees being terribly well received - especially not as something “evergreen” and for more than 3 expansions. I think part of the problem is that Blizzard feels they need to grasp at straws and come up with new ideas when most of us probably would have been okay with “the expansion feature is we made the trees from the last expansion better.”

These hero talents sorta make the regular talent tree feel obsolete. I’ve seen reports that in some cases something around 40% of a spellslinger-arcane’s damage was coming from hero tree talents. To me, that’s absurd (and it may be pre-nerf, since I know it was nerfed and I haven’t been doing the beta). What’s the point of introducing a talent tree in one expansion and then making a more powerful tree but with fewer options in the next?

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Agreed. It just further highlights how redundant the entire talent tree interface is and that for all of it’s visual clutter and complexity all it provides is the illusion of choice. The talent trees do not offer any meaningful choices nor the ability to truly customize and diversify a build (aside from some tangential ST vs AoE alternatives). 99% of all talent builds look the same with very little or any variation which invalidates their entire purpose beyond just giving you something to click on every time you level, something that I personally find annoying as it often disrupts the flow of combat.

Enter the hero talents which strip away all of that extraneous window dressing and leave only a handful of nodes that truly impact gameplay. Even hero talents have a few unnecessary nodes that provide minor passive bonuses and are very clearly only there to make the tree-shaped interface neat and symmetrical (and to once again give you something to click every time you level). Idk, maybe I am simply getting jaded in my old age but it all seems completely pointless, existing solely so that the devs have something to point at in order to justify their paychecks and say: “See here? This is what we’ve been working on all this time!”

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This is probably more meant for those surveys we get, but after playing through The War Within in its entirety, I’ve accumulated enough knowledge to provide my 2 cents:

The introduction of Hero Talents was a step in the right direction to help fulfill class fantasies as the devs originally intended, but some feel either underwhelming or straight uninspiring. I primarily speak of the Mage Hero Talents - namely Spellslinger.

Rewinding a bit: being a hardcore lover of Winter and Frost purist, there was no shot in hell I was going to play Fire, and I especially wasn’t going to marry that element with Frost, which is apparently the Hero Talent I consider as the “unique” spec - which is what I call a certain Hero Talent that makes the most sense for a given spec. Sunfury essentially turns you into Kael’thas Sunstrider at home; Frostfire is self-explanatory, and was probably just an excuse to bring back Frostfire Bolt…

… But then we have Spellslinger, " Masters of the inherently unstable nature of magic who splinter their magic, creating powerful and volatile new effects." While that sounds awesome on paper… It’s lackluster. There is so much that could’ve been done with this thematically - especially for the Frost tree. I mean, the whole damn Hero Talent got reworked at least three times throughout this expansion which affected our rotation. You basically conjure a small blue (or purple if you’re Arcane) needle that pricks and embeds itself in your target, and create a bigger storm of said needles (aka Splinters) after eight or more are accumulated. Neat! … But that’s it. Not really all that impressive compared to summoning a literal phoenix or calling down meteors and intertwining blasts of fire and ice - and don’t even get me started on this season’s tier bonuses.

When I think of Spellslinger, I think of a Mage so masterful in their craft that they’re capable of broadsiding their foes with a venerable barrage of bolts, blasts, bombs, and beams (alliteration not intended). Splinters are nice, but there’s so much more interactivity between spells that could be done. For instance: one of the nodes for Spellslinger became a choice node between Shifting Shards and Signature Spell. Instead of just making Glacial Spike just conjure additional splinters when consuming Winter’s Chill, they could’ve added more by splitting the spell into glacial fragments and making them crash down in an area around the primary target.

They could’ve kept the previous iteration of Spellfrost Teachings by empowering your next Frozen Orb reset, causing it to explode for massive damage after its duration expired and making the explosion conjure more splinters from the residual frost energies, turning it into a delayed blast frost bomb of sorts.

Or they could’ve given more love to less-used talents such as Ray of Frost, generating a stack of Winter’s Chill and launching an Ice Lance at reduced effectiveness every time it inflicts damage. That would allow for more synergy with a Frost Mage’s arsenal while also complimenting both tier set bonuses that increase Ice Lance damage, grants a stack of Cold Front, and still conjuring frost splinters.

These types of synergistic talents would make the spec feel more impactful - not just for Spellslinger, but for any other Hero Talent that feels underwhelming compared to others.