World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Talent Preview

Community General Discussion
450

lizards are not even as skinny as Dracthyr so they will probably be a mages 1 day

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451

We won’t really be able to evaluate the nuances of these new talent trees until we have a calculator up on Wowhead. Being able to see the possibilities/limitations when you’re trying to apply talent points will reveal a lot.

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452

Looks cool, but there are a number of points where there doesn’t really seem to be much of a choice between the options with one being 100% the right choice, and then with points where there’s only one ability in that row, why not make that a core ability and remove that row or replace it with a few interesting options?

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My perception is this:

In the past, classes had a load of abilities, an entire toolkit for you to use, being separated between three schools in our spellbooks. Talents had the functions of improving the skills in one of these schools. There wasn’t much in terms of options, with a lot of them being ‘number’ related but that large toolkit made up for it.

These new talent trees seem to be nothing more than a fancy way of giving me what I already had and, taking into account all these pathways, probably with more restrictions than before. Looks like a restrictive system upon hyper-pruned classes.

The bright side is that there will be no more borrowed power but I don’t think it would require changing the talent system to do it.

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Random Frost DK thought:

Perhaps Might of the Frozen Waste should be a choice node with Threat of Thassarian (the OG dual wield talent before it was rolled into Might)? Maybe a dangling node under Frost Strike? Or at the top with FS under it?

Would make it a bit clearer early on which build one is aiming for. May also make for cleaner tooltips on Oblit and Frost Strike if the “both weapons” bit isn’t baked in. The latter might look odd if using 2h weapons.

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455

They have a calculator on Mythic Trap.

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456

This is Exactly the point!! I was hoping the new talent trees would alter how abilities work, and really provide true options. This mis mostly our baseline abilities mixed in with a bunch of talents we already had.

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457

I’d like to throw my 2c in as a feral druid.

First I’d love to see Primal Wraith moved from feral to druid tree. This would benefit Guardian and Resto a lot, and without the feral mastery wouldn’t be crazy amounts of damage for them, but resto in perticular this would make their damage more competitive in M+.

I’d love to see trees off the Balance tree to the druid tree, although I could see this might be a huge gain for Rest/Guardian you may not have wanted to see for M+. If that is a problem its probably better to adjust more bosses, etc to not be taunted by tress then to make this avaliable to Balance only.

On the feral tree specifically it feels off balance. I guess my hope with the new trees was that the tress would enable more varied damage profiles. I think everyone knows feral is pretty bad in M+, this season with the 4pc being an outlier we are still consistantly rated F tier. While its certainly playable and people are making it work, I would love to see some damage profiles avaliable to support better M+. The tree doubles down on the current problems, it makes you choose between great ST with no AoE, and bad AoE with bad ST, there is no option to do good ST and good AoE, or even good AoE with bad ST. We don’t really have any new choices. Granted tuning can change all of that.

First lets look at the tree in general. There are a lot of chokepoints in the tree blocking access to synergistic talents. In the first decision point you have 2 points in mediocre stealth talents vs you key AoE and ST row 1 talents and 20% to builders, theres no decision here. This choke point also blocks access to our ONLY AoE finisher with a 6 point cost. PW should be baseline, or in clearcast/taste for blood spots. Not to mention we trade bad AoE for 20% + 18% bite (which could be 50% of our damage again) and 20% to your main builder (especially since you cant get BT). This isn’t a small price to pay for mediocre AoE damage.

The next big choke point is deciding between Predatory Swiftness which is super awesome utility, but 0 damage, pass. This enables only 6% damage on 33% uptime, which is 2% overall, and BT which is great, but not worth 4 points. Adaptive swarm is also there, but its better to go via the center to access it. The next option is infected wounds which is again 0 damage, but predatory instincts is intersting, and it opens up a huge number of legendaries with AoE synergy, thats likely to be our best build for AoE with adaptive swarm, convoke, and circle, these talents are also pretty good in ST. The last option is survival instincts, frenzy bands, cats eye, SotF, Apex/Draught. Apex/Draught seem the odd ones out here since its unlikely you can ever get here with PW, so you probably don’t have a very dot focused build. Apex isn’t bad in ST with just rip, but its not great either. Here it seems like the middle or right may be viable.

When it comes down to it primal wraith is a huge problem. The tree seems designed around making us choose between having a single AoE finisher and having anything interesting in our kit. You can reach and get a little of both but the costs are huge. Feral needs to have a baseline AoE finisher. It could be improved shuffling apex/draught, savage roar to the left side and BT to the right, but you still end up making a huge choice between having good ST and having any AoE that just feels bad.

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458

I have to say though, splitting current base Berserk into two talents feels like reeally bad. Should probably undo that, make base berserk, what it is now, into the first berserk talent and figure out an additional option for the additional berserk talent. As it stands right now, I could see a world where berserk, our iconic, yet useless up until recent patches, dps ability, may not even be chosen as there are other great options that we could take with those points.

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There’s a couple of new additions to talents in there that weren’t there for the legendary effects, plus there’s an actual new talent in there or 2 as well, for bears at least.

However, I’m uspet that bears do not get adaptive swarm like all 3 other specs do. This seems minor probably, but I really like Adaptive Swarm as a talent, but I really wish they’d make it automatically split, or with the double talent option below it for the other 3 specs it becomes a 50/100% chance to split every time it jumps instead of taking the legendary route of 30/60% chance to split like I assume they will do.

On another note: why can’t we also get like 5-10 new actual talents instead of rescrapped talents? I like that there are things in there from Legion and all, I love it, but I also think we need actually new talents, too.

Why not also incorporate the good/better PvP talents into the full tree instead of keeping them PvP only?

Sharpened Claws from the PvP tree would be nice to have as a regular talent. “Maul increases the damage done by your Swipe and Thrash abilities by 25% for 6 seconds.” This would fit perfectly in there. You can also have a “Maul/Mangle” side and a “DoT” based side, along with each side, in the middle there would be some defensive options along the way. That way you can pick whether you want a bleed/DoT based style like Thrash/Moonfire, and pick Adaptive Swarm as well for it, or pick a more direct based Maul/Mangle and make it so Mangle is able to hit up to 3 targets every time you use Maul or something else to make it more enticing.

You can also throw Demoralizing Roar from the PvP tree into the PvE tree, too. “Demoralizing Roar: Demoralizes all enemies within 10 yards, reducing their damage they do by 20% for 8 seconds.” 30 second CD. This is a good talent for mythic+. I think Prot Warriors have it baseline, if I remember it correctly and not have to talent into it neither in PvE nor PvP.

Hopefully all the Incarnations will only be like 2 minutes or less in the 10.0 versions, rather than 3 minutes baseline like they are now. It’s so frustrating having to wait so long for it, even with the legendary you still only get a 2.5 minute CD instead of 3. The 30 seconds doesn’t help much.

There’s honestly a lot they could do and they could be very very very creative with these talent trees, if they put their minds to it.

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460

I’m probably the minority here based on most of the responses I read but this all looks very underwhelming. The actual spec trees look semi-interesting but the class tree’s don’t, “take away base line abilities and give you the choice between utilities” ← this is what seems bad. There will just be CLEAR winners for pvp/pve, like interrupts, cc removals or movement speed cds for BG’s…

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its just shadowlands systems 2.0 in a talent tree it a very lazy design and im not as excited as i used to be.

dragonflight will feel like shadowladns from a class design point.

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I thought I already posted in this thread but can’t find it so apologies if I am reposting.

I’m offering feedback on the Druid feral tree.

  1. What concerns me at first glance is if we can use ANY of the abilities in the Druid tree that are not part of our spec without transforming back to humanoid form or be able to use them shapeshifted? I hate the current talent tree because I pick Balance Affinity and I cannot use those abilities in my cat form. Why? It’s a loss of DPS to have to shift out to cast and back into form. I should be able to use ANY ability I pick in my current shifted form this includes the new tree abilities. Not being able to use abilities in the tree in current form are useless. Give it a separate GCD at the very least.
    2) Feral spec should be a DoT build, my personal preference, or a physical build and not just a mix. Either offer the option to make it full DoT or full physical. The row 4 ability Increased Armor and Physical Damage should allow players to pick DoT damage or physical damage not just physical.
    3) In the Feral tree Improved Shred is useless to me since I use Rake while stealthed and not shred. Either give me the option to have Improved Rake that generates one more point or make Shred a DoT while stealthed. Need more DoT options.

Thank you.

EDIT: For some reason the Feral tree seems to be lacking. A few more options somewhere in that tree would be nice. Would be nice to get Claws of Shirvallah back. Just saying.

EDIT: Changed bleed damage to DoT damage because Phoenickz explained that bleeds are physical damage.

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I got a feeling I will be using whatever cookie cutter build that is suggested.

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Unfortunately, this seems to be true.

I guess I was thinking it would be like going from Vanilla to TBC talents, where the current “bottom row” things in the Death Knight tree like Abom Limb and Soul Reaper would show up in the second to last row, and then we’d have a final row of one or two brand new, exciting things that would breathe new life into the class/specs. Like how Felguard and Unstable Affliction were added as capstone talents in TBC, and forever after defined their respective specs. I mean, the trees themselves are new, but in the past we’ve always gotten at least one or two brand new abilities to play with each expansion. There are a few little ones, but nothing big like the Covenant abilities.

I figured most of the abilities would be repackaged Shadowlands and BFA stuff and that’s okay. But there should be at least ONE new “Wow!” talent per class and/or spec.

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465

It looks awesome how? Specifically?

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466

or something new but its just copy pasta shadowlands systems 2.0 but if you like how classes are now you will like them in dragonflight they will play the same i like my dk and hunter so they will play the same.

for pve yes in that m+10 or higher you bet they will be looking at your build and in raids pve will be cookie cutter builds the only place where you can experiment with talents is pvp.

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467

Looking at the spec tree, the ranks of increased damage for a baseline ability. However, I don’t like the fact that you have to pick a talent (at the top) that is currently part of the kit. That should be taken off, and a real choice be put there.

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To be fair, bleed damage is actually physical damage, so you are actually getting higher bleed damage through that. Now, you’re not getting more DoT damage, as things like Moonfire don’t do physical damage so you wouldn’t gett a bump in it’s damage, but bleed damage is actually physical so by choosing more physical you are bumping your bleeds damage up.

Ehh, they’re not all from Shadowlands and not all play the same, though, I do see a new actual talent in the bear one, though.

After the Wildfire: Each time you spend 200 rage you heal nearby allies for 3% of your maximum health.

This talent is actually brand new and has not been there for bears before in any expansion that I can remember. We had Ysera’s Gift, and it’s close to that, though it comes at the cost of spending rage instead of just freely doing so, but also Ysera’s Gift only healed others if you were full HP. This doesn’t seem to care whether you’re full HP or not and being a tank, in dungeons you weren’t full HP during pulls and in raids if you were actively tanking you weren’t gifting this to other people, either. As far as I can tell, it’s very brand new in both of those regards. It is, however, only one brand new talent to which I really wish they had several brand new talents. Also, the other specs have a brand new one, too.

Restoration has: Invigorate: 45 second CD that’s Flourish, without being Flourish and minus the 8 second bump to all HoTs currently out. This is new, though I don’t think the name is actually brand new but rather it did something else.

They redid Celestial Alignment for Balance to make it be an area effect thing and apply Moonfire/Sunfire to all targets in the area, which is nice.

Feral has Sudden Ambush, which the effect is brand new though I don’t think the name is brand new but might be.

Point is: there are new talents 1-2 per spec, it’s just either they’re in the form of new effects for older talent names or they’re brand new, and some of them make sense, while others do not make as much sense or maybe their placement doesn’t make as much sense. Something isn’t as right about them as you would think/hope.

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469

Ah, didn’t know that. Thanks. I should probably change that to DoT damage then.

EDIT: I just crossed it off my list. I’ll leave it as is since it is a little more technical then I originally thought.

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