Each tree is usable by two specs but it’s so clear looking at them that each tree is designed for a specific spec, to the point where all these talents should just be tacked on to the bottom of the existing spec talent trees.
Honestly feels like they just took the talents they were going to add to the trees anyways and spun them off into their own little gimmick trees. Maybe that’s the point? To have an extra gimmick? I guess just adding talents to the existing trees felt too boring so they put them on a fancy little shelf, added some RGB lights to them. HERO TALENTS! /jazz hands
17 Likes
It feels like they are just giving us a secondary MoP-style list of talents. Everyone hated the tiny talent trees but I guess they figure if they give us a tiny talent tree on top of our bloated ones that we’ll love it.
3 Likes
I see 2 big problems with hero talents.
The first is that it feels half of them are filler trees. Like they had great ideas for 15 trees but had to throw random stuff together for the rest. Some trees have awesome themes like Riders of the Apocalypse and others have no theme like Pack Leader.
The other big problem is they force you into specific talents. So now we’ll have tier set bonuses and hero talents deciding our talent builds for us. This sucks a lot for specs like elemental shaman or frost dk that have very different play styles in the same tree.
Some specs are going to feel awesome with hero talents. Others are going to be awful.
9 Likes
Not just that, but many are for a specific theme or archetype from Warcraft III so it doesn’t fit the class at all: Mountain Thane is just Mountain King, Sentinel is Priestess of the Moon, Dark Ranger is, well, Dark Ranger, Sunfury is Blood Mage, so on and so forth…
4 Likes
They like adding new layers of complexity. Some players like that. They needed to make it look like they’re working on classes and specs, because players want that. I also think they like to take on challenges that sound like they’d be interesting to design, even if they might be harder to carry out effectively. In the end we will see how well it works.
4 Likes
I think it made for an exciting feature in the game’s announcement. I’m sure they’ll be fine in terms of gameplay. But I don’t expect anything worthy of the name “hero talents”. It’s just “some more talents”.
8 Likes
Bingo. They should be. But instead of realizing they could lock you from using points the way they don’t want you using points, they made them separate points.
3 Likes
Well yeah, it’s to create a feature to sell the expac. It doesn’t really go the whole way of subclasses that some wanted, but we’ll see how it’s received.
Why? For flavor and fun. Maybe to sneak around the “borrowed power” issue that everyone complains about.
Looking for “the point” or motivation, well, it is usually meant to add fun to the game.
2 Likes
The point is to be a talented hero 
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To be able to cross boundaries and do a bit of what you maybe couldn’t do, or more of what you already can do but with a new twist.
1 Like
People will whine on twitter/GD if an xpac doesn’t add some kind of new player power system.
The point is to expand the talent trees horizontally rather than vertically. So in theory this is a better way to design talents rather than continuing to make the talent tree longer and adding yet more stuff to classes and bloating them further.
I think the problem with hero talents is that some classes do not have very strong class identities, like hunter, and so they suffer from their hero talents being lackluster from a fantasy and design perspective.
1 Like
Its mostly so that new talents dont interrupt current builds
This is my biggest concern with them. I don’t see how they could ever be balanced. Its covenants all over again because one will be numerically superior regardless of the theme a player may prefer.
Look at BM hunters having access to Pack Leader and Dark Ranger. How are they ever going to balance these two? Dark Ranger heavily favors MM, and anything they could do to make it good for BM would be too strong for MM.
This bugs me, too, and your example is a good one. How can anybody look at Pack Leader and Riders of the Apoc and feel they had even remotely comparable love put into them.
Some do and some don’t, which is in itself a problem. The DK ones add new stuff and don’t force any talents that I recall, whereas the Farseer elemental tree is 100% sticking to the Prim Wave/fire build.
They’re just all over the place with no consistency whatsoever. Its like some classes get a five course meal, some get a three course meal, and some got a PB&J and the crumbled bottom quarter of a bag of chips.
1 Like
I would disagree. Some are less balanced than others, sure, but there are a number of them that I feel like do a good job of combining the feel of both specs.
Hopefully they are able to iterate and improve on the ones that are more difficult to integrate though.
Frostfire is fine though and that’s all I’d care about.
It’s also the best hero talent tree by far in flavor and execution, as it’s the only one that really captures the hybrid fire/frost mage spirit.
The rest are all… “eh…”
Hot take. I think hero talents should have replaced normal spec talents.
Instead of having 35-45 spec talents, we could have 3-4 “hero/sub specs” each with a distict playstyle. Would also open up the option of having more race themed hero specs without forcing it on everyone.
This would give Blizzard much more creative freedom without the headache of trying to fit multiple playstyles into a single spec tree. Balancing would also be easier since you end up with all the talents. Nerfing one talent would only result in that “hero spec” being slightly worse at whatever that specific talent was doing. With the current system, you might just opt out of a specific talent if it get nerfed in favor of something else.
The downside is of course that player made builds would be dead. A massive downside indeed, but i think the pros outweigh the cons here.
1 Like
I could see a good use for hero talents to be a way to keep adding more talents to classes without always having to add more points.
To be more clear, I am saying in the future we could get more hero specs.
Instead of just one between each spec there could be two or more options for hero talents, rather than just deeper or wider talent trees
I suspect they will roll them into existing talents by the end of the expansion.
But in the meantime it’s an expansion feature. Fair enough.