At least as enhance, the 3 totem speed increase seems like it’s pretty rarely going to be available and a 2 point investment for 10% more ghost wolf speed is pretty bad.
If you go down this path, there’s a good chance you won’t have healing stream totem. You also may not choose to take WF totem. And it’s very likely you won’t have some of the other niche totems at the bottom of the tree.
At that point, how are you going to have 3 totems down for any reliable period of time?
Can this be changed to be 5% move speed PER TOTEM?
Also, can this be moved to an optional side node instead of being a mandatory pickup to get to spirit walk/gust?
This is kind of a niche ability to put as a forced pick on the path to what has historically been our baseline sprint/root break.
Does anyone else get the sense the more we analyze the talent trees the more of a cookie cutter feel this is going to become? I mean it always felt that way if you want to do high-end content you have to have your character built a certain way. It just seems to me right now that we are going to be coerced into talents that are not really fun or appealing. Or is it just the sense I am getting on this?
I’m willing to accept that some key utility abilities will be locked behind stat nodes to increase their cost, but this is the only place in the tree where a basic part of our utility is locked behind 4 points of low value undesirable stuff.
It’s so bad that I’m expecting I will usually just skip out on spirit walk as enhance because it’s just too many wasted points.
Which feels really bad since it’s been our baseline root break/sprint since it was introduced.
Honestly don’t feel like sprit walk should have to be hard to get. I’d like to see it switched with the spirit wolf node. Then the wolf stuff can go together if you really want to focus on ghost wolf mobility. Improved spirit walk could just get removed. It’s too expensive for too little benefit anyway.
Its especially bad because they decided to nerf Gust of wind to 30 sec cd. And its also especially bad now that they have done reworks to many of the other class trees which had poor design. Most of the other class trees (minus maybe druid) now dont have as many “wasted” points but for some reason shamans need to waste 4 just to be able to put that 5th into an over nerfed gust of wind.
Yeah. 4 garbage points to get to our core movement ability is really overkill. And these are some really bad garbage points too. Nature crit? Not even real crit, but just nature crit. When nature damage is like a tiny fraction of the damage that enhance does. It’s barely anything. And then 10% move speed on ghost wolf since the al’akir buff will be up pretty much never. So its 4 forced points for basically nothing. Feels so bad I have a hard time stomaching taking them just to get the spirit walk and might just skip it.
Personally, I have dropped gust of wind from my current elemental build. Its 100% not worth it. I picked up so many other things after I stopped wasting those 5 points. I now have call of the elements, 15 sec hex (not bad not bad), natures guardian, spirit wolf, and improved astral shift. I feel it was 100% worth the trade. 4 points of absolute uselessness and now I can pressure way harder with 15 sec cd hex (first time in ele history I think, was 20 sec in shadowlands), and double skyfury with call of the elements. Also picked up the 50% reduced interrupt / no casting delay totem to actually get those hexs off reliably
For starters did I state that it was every high-end content in every MMORPG? No, I didn’t I was only referencing World of Warcraft. Please do not attempt to add words that I did not say or imply in my comment.
Well if I remember it was either Cata or Mist might have even been Legion Q&A one of the WoW devs was asked about talent diversity and I can’t remember the exact quote said something about Blizzard was going to the three choices to try and give players more customization choices so it didn’t feel cookie cutter. Has that backfired oh hell yes it has? I hoped that with Blizzard bringing out the new talent trees that this could have broken that cookie-cutter feel. That having to immediately once you reach maxed level go to Icey Veins or some other website and make sure talents were set correctly so I could raid. So a player could max their DPS and not be pigeoned holed into only taking certain talents or risk not being part of the raid team. Yet as I felt from first seeing the talent trees and even now I got that feeling that this was just going to be another form of a cookie cutter build. I was really hoping to be wrong.
This is why I commented the way I did to see If maybe I was just overcomplicating my view of the talent trees.
Yes, absolutely. That’s the inevitable end point of talent trees, and why the game was right to move away from them in the first place. Returning to them is a massive step backwards that we should not be taking.
The thing is, it did work. For a long time, we had actual choices in our talent selections in the current system. The problems with the current system are simply, A) bad balancing of individual talents and rows, and B) borrowed power systems creating/amplifying imbalances between talent choices. Both of which are absolutely solvable without going back to the terrible tree iteration of talents that has always abjectly failed at delivering customization.
I would disagree on, that it did not give any customization to a character. You might have felt that way. I know for myself it did not. giving three options would have never solved any balance problems no matter what anyone attempted. So how you can say that it did work or could have worked is just fooling yourself on this topic. Borrow power yeah this to me is just something I don’t understand why it’s a new thing. Blizzard has always done that and why we think they would have ever changed on that is beyond me. Seriously it is called an expansion for a reason and not just Burning Crusade a new World of Warcraft game (I was just pulling an example.) of course its going to use borrowed power. Again if the talents were three choices of poor poor poor or good decent and poor or good good poor or poor poor great etc of course the talents would have never been balanced. At least with talent trees you arent getting let me choose from the worst of three evils. You know what the talents do you know how they work and you know how to customize them to match your play style unless you want to do end-game content then you have to do things exactly the way Joe Whateverthehell from icy tells you to choose. Again I would have rather Blizzard just put every into one great big tree or let us choose from a huge spell book of all shaman or any class abilities and talents and we can customize that way instead of causing things to remain cookie cutter as it has been.