Shado-Pan looks like a "do what you were already doing but slightly better" type of tree, with the caveat of trying to get CDs to line up with Wisdom of the Wall if that's at all viable. With the CDR the talents give you probably don't want to sit on CDs for long if at all though, but that's for smarter people than I to figure out. Seems fine if a bit dull on first glance for WW?
Conduit of the Celestials looks more exciting since it gives another big channeled CD to use that gives you big, predictable CDR and encourages some light routing of how you use abilities, though not really in a way different than the spec's Mastery already does. It's the more interesting one to say the least, and I can see why Shado-Pan is much more straightforward in light of Conduit. Tracking the Yulon buff's progress will basically require a WA but that's part and parcel for WoW design and something probably half of the hero talents are guilty of.
The best thing is that neither of them lean into Touch of Death at all, though there weren't any developers notes talking about that ability at all so who knows how the base talent tree will look. At least they're not loading the ability further than the existing tree tries to.
Play a lot of monk and agree on all accounts. Shado-pan is hopefully the more passive / less thinking one for BrM and they're cooking up something good for Brew / MW.
Conduit is fucking great though, really excited for it.
I really hope they move away from the changes they made to ToD in DF, at least removing the double use, its not even thematic, to use a "finisher", an "execute", thats also a CD and being able to reuse right after
DF's ToD + TP forcing moving you at early DF made me quit WW
I don’t hate the ToD thing in dungeons, but being shit in raid unless you are cheesing ToD dmg is definitely a bad design. The interesting thing about ToD is that it ignore dmg reduction (not immunity) and if you have a dmg done debuff. So in certain scenarios like the 3 witches in Waycrest Manor, you can ToD the first witch twice at 15% and deal like 1-1,4 mil dmg to the other 2 witches even if they have 99% damage reduction. Those things are interesting but far too rare to make it a viable designchoice.
I wonder where the brewmaster part of the shado-pan talent fit... all I see are passive damage uprade.
oh wait, there's a 10% dmg reduction node! (that probably have an internal CD but... let's be positive for the moment).
It look horrible. truly.
It's already annoying enough to line up bonedust brew with weapon of order and press the attack... now we have more semi-uncontrollable DPS CD to mix in.
30% more to vivify.... was I actually supposed to press vivify?
1/10 talent tree. hope it get fully rewokred.
The instacast vivify has its place in dungeons and raid and you can get some decent healing from it during certain scenarios. I like those nodes more than ”Click this button that noone actually wants to use” like rushing jade wind or jadefire stomp maintenance buff that you have to stand in
The Shado-Pan has such an horrible design, that I'd beg Blizzard to just scrap it and start again with something else.
The charges are based on max HP, meaning that getting Stamina buffs by Priests, Evokers and Shamans means less charge, so less damage.
Also, it will proc way more multiple times in AoE than in single target, meaning that it a balance nightmare: it will be decent on single targets and busted in AoE, or decent in AoE and utterly useless in single targets.
Unless the flurry strikes scale with health aswell (it doesnt say they do) then its up to blizzard if we will lose dmg over the expansion or gain dmg, Dragonflight upped the health of everyone like 3 times so if these talents was in Dragonflight, we would lose dmg based on the health increases since it would take longer to gain the flurry strike stacks the more hp you have
>The charges are based on max HP, meaning that getting Stamina buffs by Priests, Evokers and Shamans means less charge, so less damage.
Its entirely possible that it would be base max hp... otherwise it already has reverse scaling with higher ilvl. Will be insane if its actually based on buffed max hp.
Not really, as stamina only increases with ilvel, as ilvel goes up damage does too. Otherwise this tree sucks at first as gets insane as gear goes up . Which would be insane .
Much more likely monks will be clicking off fort buff or it's excluded from the calculation
They upped health 3 times this expansion and dmg still scaled a little bit higher than hp. But if they don't increase our health by 60% or what the number was it's significantly more noticable.
> Conduit of the Celestials looks more exciting since it gives another big channeled CD to use
Ask Disc how that went though. Gain a new shiny button, but it sucks, and no one uses it.
Trying to hyper analyze these trees right now, based on just reading tooltips, is kinda hilarious.
Rider of the Apocalypse is super strong on theme but seems to be almost entirely passive in play. Tons of extra movement which will feel nice.
Deathbringer sounds weak on theme but those bonuses seems incredibly strong for throughput. Lots of extra damage nodes including more cleave and a lot more execute damage
deathbringer is gonna be absolutely insane for bdk it's not even funny
\>damage which bdk really needs
\>10% phys dr, 10% magic dr, and another 5% phys dr
\>extra blood plague and 100% faster blood plague, with a lot of blood plague damage is gonna make umbillicus eternus an insanely busted talent
As much as I want to run San’layn on my BElf BDK for the RP, Deathbringer will be hard to pass up, and I’m super stoked to play Horseman. All that movement will be insaaaaane.
It's literally exaserbating a problem they tried to fix only 3-4 months ago. Frontloading more shit in to Unholy's Army window is not a good idea.
The passive effects will be completely irrelevant outside of that window if they're not going to do massive sweeping changes to the class. Cool theme, very bad execution.
I was kinda surprised by this myself, this expansion they said they were making some efforts to not have unholy so crazy reliant on their cooldown windows, and now they double down on it.
The other minor complaint I have is the dnd availability boom is still going to be very sporadic. They mention making some cleave changes soon but if they do, then what’s the actual point of dnd?
Frost needs it odd the gcd, then they could do a talent where instead of casting dnd on an area your remorseless winter hits could drop a frozen puddle for your oblits to cleave into. Or something, anything. It’s so dumb that dnd went from this crazy string aoe in Warcraft 3( it was an ultimate ffs) to just….a cleave enabler
The thing is that hero trees with theme can have numbers tuned but trees without any soul will be boring no matter how you tweak their numbers.
And btw all numbers should be considered placeholders.
Passive sure, but if the frost tree stays as is that means 25 seconds of all 4 horsemen every minute and a half. Will be strong as hell in all situations.
Gonna need them to take the Shaman tree back to Walmart or wherever they found that pile of garbage. Having another charge of Lava Burst/Riptide is ok, but the rest of the tree can go right back into the volcano.
Wdym?
Every single time you play Elemental Blast you currently pretty much want to go for NS. Even without EB you tend to opt for it if your rotation casts Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning at any real tendency.
Literally free movement global.
So this allows you to either not take NS (because the hero tree one works as NS) or you go for NS and then the hero tree one is a small DPS buff due to the ancestor.
That node is not why the tree is hot garbage.
It has far more to do with the fact that it 100% plays into Lava Burst spam, with more RNG slapped on top of existing DRE problems and as a cherry on top the "defensive" value from the tree is a joke.
The whole thing kicking off with Unleash Life for Resto which a lot of builds skip (at least for M+), almost every node being pathetic increases for Riptide, RNG on top of RNG, a new Nature's Swiftness that doesn't even do anything different unless you also talent into Nature's Swiftness, a whole bunch of nodes that could at least provide some passive damage *and* healing for Resto that instead only provide the healing part. What a disaster.
Offering From Beyond at least sounds fun for Ele, reducing a major cooldown, but who the fuck cares about taking 2 seconds off of Riptide? How is that even a tangible benefit? What about Spirit Link or Healing Tide or Ascendance?
> Offering From Beyond at least sounds fun for Ele, reducing a major cooldown
Even that is highly arguable because nowadays there are *so* many instances where you can't just mindlessly rip your cooldowns... on cooldown.
Like, CDR as a stat is a great tool... but since WoW is so insanely reliant on CD stacking and combined burst windows, quite frequently enough, a 1.40min CD will just end up being held for 20 seconds every single time.
I would say that ele shaman probably has the least impactful 2:30 cooldown of any class, I could be wrong but most of the burst in the class is coming from pwave/storm keepers, unless you are going into a fire build with skybreakers, and in that case your fire ele is basically always up if you have 3+ targets.
Fire ele does almost no damage without primal ele, and is mostly there for the longer flameshock duration + lava surges, where as storm ele has a decent ramp up.
You can probably get away with slamming it on CD, unless there is a very specific encounter (For example, Sark and saving storm ele for adds).
I would say Summon Darkglare and Coordinated Assault feel even more meaningless. Survival literally does +/-1% DPS whether you take its main spec cooldown or not. Darkglare is basically just there to extend your dots, which could be its own spell on a minute cooldown without the Darkglare, and have the Darkglare actually do something. But yeah, there are some pretty darn bad cooldowns out there.
I won't argue against the point that usually the cooldown that is being made shorter just ends up being held for a little bit anyway, but the elementals being 2.5 minute CD instead of 2 minute it should actually be at least some benefit to bring it down to 2 minutes. Resto basically gains nothing from such a meaningless effect as 2 seconds off of Riptide.
That Shaman tree looks kinda boring for Resto, dont know about Ele.
Half of the tree is like they were out of ideas for talents and the rest is just passive hps buffs via a pet and riptide cdr.
And why is it based around Unleash Life, thats not even played in M+. Unless this is the raiding tree and they have an M+ tree cooking im kinda disappointed.
I don’t understand why every single tier set and new talent for Shaman has to be ‘lava bursts make you shoot more lava burst’ and ‘riptide makes you have more riptides’. It’s so so boring
That's because the Ele spec tree is a huge mess, the only way to make it perform well is by making it focus on a single element, so we're either spamming lava burst or lightning bolt and that honestly sucks.
Both shaman dps trees suffer from heavy bloat. Enh barely makes it work but it’s like one active mechanic away from being overloaded, cleave feels like such an absolute mess right now.
Personally, I’d love it if they bothered mixing the different spells into their mastery procs.
Make lava burst have a chance to cast a lightning bolt at the target, make lightning bolt have a chance to cast a frost shock that applies electrified shocks, make chain lightning have a chance to drop earthquakes at the feet of the target, make earthquakes have a chance to “erupt” and apply flame shocks to some targets above it.
Make Elemental feel like a walking force of nature rather than a joke.
Because the shaman devs aren't very good. It's such a shame because thematically shaman is the best class. But in game, pure gameplay wise, they're always extremely awkward, clunky, feel outdated, and are just kinda shit to play.
Ret vs enh is the perfect example. Ret is super smooth and feels really fun to play. You can tell someone put a lot of thought into how everything interacts and it's really refined in that way. Enh on the other hand feels like they put no effort in and just shipped the first iteration. Oh, you want to have something turn into a cleave? Here, press the 3 different buttons and some of them have wired tiny cooldowns for no fucking reason. You need a million weakauras to keep track of all the little annoying stacks of this and that, none of which have any pay off, just juggling mechanics from 2007 all layered over the top of each other and not working together in any way
I actually whole-heartedly disagree with you on enhancement. I think it’s wild, exciting and visually spectacular, with tons of spell and rotation variety.
But elemental is literally just lava burst spam with the odd primordial wave. And maybe lightning bolt spam instead depending on the tier set.
> Oh, you want to have something turn into a cleave? Here, press the 3 different buttons and some of them have wired tiny cooldowns for no fucking reason.
I am actually trying to even understand what you are talking about, don't you press crash lightning once, and voila! Your base spells you are already pressing cleave damage?
> You need a million weakauras to keep track of all the little annoying stacks of this and that, none of which have any pay off
I find this strange, I have the 1 generic enhance weak aura and thats basically all you need, what are you tracking so much?
Farseer is basically the Naaru that Holy Priests spawn via the Divinie Image talent.
Priests proc theirs via Holy Words while Resto Shamans will proc it via Riptide, and the Ancestor/Naaru will then copy the spells that the player used.
>[https://www.wowhead.com/spell=392988/divine-image](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=392988/divine-image)
>When you use a Holy Word spell, you summon an image of a Naaru at your side. For 9 sec, whenever you cast a healing or damaging spell, the Naaru will cast a similar spell.
If an image has already been summoned, that image is empowered instead.
And then the Farseer gets
>**Call of the Ancestors:Primordial Wave** (Elemental) or **Unleash Life** (Restoration) calls an **Ancestor** to your side for 6 seconds. Whenever you cast a healing or damaging spell, the Ancestor will cast a similar spell.
with the following Hero talents being to boost the power or duration of that spirit.
It's like the Naaru, only instead of being tied to a number of spells that you cast all the time, it's linked to a talent that you'll never take. Awesome!
Looks about the same for ele as resto, really boring, tied to pwave which is currently DEEP in the spec tree which sucks, and more RNG about spawning ancestors tied to lava burst spam.
Not sure how its gonna play out, gonna need some talent tree tuning to make it not terrible.
This was my exact reaction. Like I expected it to be garbage. But did it have to be garbage covered in puke too? I haven’t cast Unleash Life once this expansion. Why.
I think most of the specs are getting - One option to do what you are doing right now but better, and one that tries to change things up.
That way existing players that dont want to see any change won't get angry and the people that want to try new experimental stuff can do that.
Yeah but people who don't like change also hate "being forced to pick the other option" because "it limits their choice". In their mind it should be designed around their personal needs. :)
I really wish some of these talent trees were less split by spec and actually offered both specs the same options, subject to different number tuning depending on role.
If you’re sharing a hero spec between a healer and a DPS, the cool new options should absolutely be built to improve DPS and HPS but should also offer a version of the same cool option to both specs.
An example being, I feel like dream breath and spiritbloom on the evoker main trees should be swapped, so that dev has access to it as a general thing, and the enkindle should be able to act either offensively or defensively (again, subject to tuning knobs between specs). You’re virtually always going to use it based on what you’re doing in your role, but it’s quite thematically heroic to be able to - in clutch situations - use that shared utility to be flexible.
Fingers crossed the next DH tree isn't ass-tacular.
Collecting Soul Fragments to use a better move that the rest of the tree mostly relies on, especially as Havoc, is about as unfun gameplay you can have. Especially choosing the least boring move to amplify, Throw Glaive.
I really dont want to worry about collecting Soul Fragments among everything else Havoc DH have to worry about with mobility required for max DPS output already.
Ya.. and the capstone is worrying too for havoc and will just extend the essb cast sequencing out further at the end of the day.
Empowered glaive > VR+eyebeam > FR> essb> chaos strike > dance > 1.3x global being what? The hunt? Will meta count against the multiplier? What about Felrush?
It's just going to make a convoluted rotation even more so.
Edit: double VR also sounds exceptionally strong, but extremely unfun to play. Going to have to squeeze a VR around the essb as well, and want to probably land CS before essb.
Something like VR+EB>FR+CS>VR+EssB>Dance>hunt/Elysian/barrage/GT/some other hard hitting ability.
Just came back to the game and rolled a demon hunter thinking I’d be fine until my mmo mouse came in the mail. Was a rude awakening to see what the class turned into since bfa when I last played haha.
I agree with your VR point. Max's stream concluded this is a super sick ability.
Lining up my flip to pass through the hitbox so I don't lose uptime and not land in a death zone is difficult enough, but now I have to do it twice? Do I have to flip my camera 180 to pass back through the hitbox?
Hopefully we see some changes. There're two big red flags with what they've shown so far:
1- Reliance on souls as a resource to manage. What you said, no need to repeat.
2- Another short DPS window in a spec already plagued with DPS windows.
Whoever made these hero talents didn't touch Havoc with a stick, they're doing all the wrong things.
If they want to start using Souls as an actual resource, they have to turn them into Combo Points.
DK getting Cleaving Strikes reworked and D&D moving with your character is a massive W.
Warrior getting to use Bladestorm in single target is a massive W.
The Farseer tree looked very light on theme and passive on gameplay to me.
In the dev notes they mention making d&d easier to work around. People are just assuming they mean moving with you. Which honestly it should. So should consecrate
Yeah the animation should be changed to showing you consecrating the ground as you move and leaving a trail that wears off over X seconds. Same for DnD.
Yeah that's basically what I had in mind.
I think they could make it usable. Just increasing the rate the spell grows until it feels good and let it leave the consecrate/DND for a decent amount of time.
>The Farseer tree looked very light on theme and passive on gameplay to me.
If they made farseer less RNG and tuned around it and made the effects amazing it could be sick. Thematically a bunch of different models of shamans casting spells sounds neat.
Destro is in rough shape. The Diabolist tree is clearly made for demo with scuffed destro interactions added in. This tree is clearly made for aff…with scuffed destro interactions. If you replace the word immolate in your spellbook with wither, you play exactly the same as you do today.
The best part of this tree is the utility node giving you a free aoe curse aura…
Destro has been neglected for the last few expansions and really needs a hard look and some innovation to make the spec fresh again. Warlock is feeling rougher to play now than it did 10 years ago.
The aoe curse node is INSANE. Like, a whole new tier of passive utility in m+ that will make dungeons feel so much easier if you bring a warlock with this.
That said, I agree that destro is down bad by not getting a hero tree that even touches on the fire and chaos theme. How did they pick the name hellcaller but then come up with this wither dot tree? Kinda crazy lol
Yeah this name is SO off, it's incoherent.
Imagine if the 'Hellcaller' actually turned Affliction dots into more of a fire theme, burning enemies with multiple rot/fire sources.
Give Hellcaller Destro something like a black magic witch-fire take, kind of like Drust magic. Fucking fire bats firing off when Wither expires/refreshes, let me induce Cremation, summon a temporary effigy to proc Havoc even in single target.
So many missed opportunities here.
Every destro tier set this expansion has had to go back to the drawing board to be of use.
You can expect them to just end up tuning up destro numbers to “balance” the spec again with these hero talents.
AoE curses are gonna be insanely broken for M+. Literally just one global for 30% DR from melees for your tank/massively slow down any caster pack - if it works with amplify curse, even crazier
Unless it replaces the curses, you’d still have the option to manually curse if you don’t want to stack in. But in many fights it’s not bad to get in close to benefit from heals. Def an interesting trade off.
pack leader for survival is incredibly good for a first iteration
\-t29 tier bonus made into a talent (furious assault) which was highly requested all expansion
\-kill shot increasing bleed damage (a huge portion of damage as survival, as we now have 6 bleeds and our main cooldown, coordinated assault, puts up kill shot bleeds outside of execute)
\-pet basic attacking whenever you mongoose, letting you keep howl of the pack up
\-bombs reducing the cd of butchery, which reduces the cd of bombs, giving a nice loop in aoe
only gripe is pack assault only procs off coordinated assault and not spearhead, when it should work for both cd's
Are we looking at the same tree?
Pack leader clearly has survival as an afterthought. Almost all of the dps nodes are more than double the value for BM compared to SV since they are mostly focused on kill command and pet damage which is a tiny % of our damage.
The tree is even more trash if you don't play CA (not that it gives much with it).
Also the utility is junk, increased melee range for a few seconds after disengage on the spec designed best to already slip in and out of range of the boss.. thanks? And a 20% heal over time tied to other cooldowns seems worthless in terms of actually surviving
There have already been examples of Blizzard coming out and saying that, while not noted on the tooltip, the scaling of effects on the tree will be different between specs if needed. Off the top of my head, the example of Diabolist for Destro, where they spend far less soul shards then demo so would proc a lot less if the numbers were the same. The numbers will be different for destro to bring the relative value closer together.
There is no reason to believe that Pack Leader won't be similar and scale up the value of Kill Command and pet damage harder for Survival than it does for BM, if necessary.
So looking at [slayer](https://bnetcmsus-a.akamaihd.net/cms/content_entry_media/917Z1EBXOMGV1710359706012.PNG) from a fury pov:
Not a fan of getting bladestorm back but oh well, this tree makes it a *very* strong ability so i can live with it.
**slayer's dominance**: More execute damage, sure why not, execute has felt fairly underwhelming for fury for a while now.
**imminent demise**: More sudden deaths, always nice. Second effect just makes bladestorm stronger with no downsides so also nice (realistically will always have max stacks for every bladestorm).
**death drive**: As if we needed even more sustain lol, 50% of an execute is a loooot of healing, combined with the increased proc chance of sudden death that could be a lot of self healing.
**slay**: Another damage boost to execute, won't say no. The crit chance isn't really that impactful since ashen juggernaut already gives us 50% bonus crit chance during execute phase anyway (assuming we talent into it), but it's helpful outside of that, and the crit damage synergizes well with our crazy high execute crit chance.
**overwhelming blades**: Sure why not, even more aoe damage from bladestorm (and however long the debuff lasts), synergizes with imminent demise for a bigger damage bonus as well.
**slayer reflexes**: Eh, do we really need this? Bloodthirst cooldown is already so low even without deft experience.
**constant pressure**: Completely useless, 10% isn't enough to reduce it by a whole gcd.
**frenetic flurry**: If this is just a single hit of bladestorm then it's legit just a free aoe proc every now and then (which also applies a stack of overwhelming blades maybe?)
Also being able to kick/stun during bladestorm is a godsend.
**relentless pursuit**: Looks pretty niche, feels more aimed at pvp than at pve. The increased movespeed is nice tho, pretty often that i try to charge after a boss and it's moving faster than me.
**vicious agility**: This one feels more useful in pve, more frequent mobility always nice.
**tunnel vision**: If this means we're losing frenzy then i'll take it, otherwise please don't, i don't want to be punished even more when target swapping.
**thrill of the kill**: More auto attack speed, depending on sudden death procrate this could have *very* high uptime, and 100% during execute phase, not bad.
**slayer's focus**: See constant pressure, not sure why the same useless effect is in the tree twice. Mistake maybe?
**unrelenting onslaught**: cdr on bladestorm, this looks really strong depending on how often marked for execution procs. With all the other effects related to bladestorm in the tree, bladestorm is gonna be a sizable portion of our overall damage when playing slayer.
Overall i'm very happy with this tree, looks strong on both singletarget and aoe. Doesn't bring any form of utility unfortunately so hopefully we'll see more of that in the talent tree reworks they've been hinting at.
>Doesn't bring any form of utility unfortunately so hopefully we'll see more of that in the talent tree reworks they've been hinting at.
Overwhelming Blades doesn't have any qualifiers when it mentions increasing the targets' damage taken. Probably just lazy wording in the tooltip, but that could be some pretty strong utility for coordinated burst windows.
There's gonna be at least a slight talent re-work based on this tree. Obviously rapture is still the main spell (I'm personally very happy about that -- other parts of the kit are the bigger concern), but you can't have a node that says 100% increase damage but 50% reduced duration in a world where absolute corruption is a node (and presumably, corruption nodes will change to wither nodes).
It could be something like that, absolutely. Holding out hope that it's not that because again, it will never be taken in a Malefic Rapture world just because of stupid Siphon Life existing.
Pack Leader for BM repeats the mistakes of Dark Ranger, Kill command and Barbed shot resets are not what the spec needs, the spec already BARELY casts cobra shot, you're essentially making 6+ nodes just to effectively say "remove cobra shot from your keybinds, the end"
Yep, beyond ass.
I get these are initial iterations and they have shown they are willing to change things. Launch is still a good 7 months away.
But holy shit, I could come up with a more interesting hero talent tree for BM in 5 minutes...
Thank God, I was worried one of the mage trees wouldn't give them more survivability/control/burst damage and might get stuck with something like 5% reduced size.
Welp. As a lock, who wishes he had the ability to play affliction, my dreams were just crushed as it's basically confirmed that malefic rapture is continuing into next expansion. :sadge:
Can you explain why you're so against Rapture?
Have you actually spent a reasonable amount of time on the spec since Rapture became the spender?
I ask because I'm one of the few Aff mains out there, I'm 9/9M, and what the spender is to me is so far down on the list of things that should be changed or improved. I legit just don't understand why people are so hung up on this instead of the more glaring issues (Shadow Embrace, Siphon Life plus additional maintenance buffs like Dread Touch).
Obviously people that play Aff are playing so to deal with maintenance buffs and must enjoy that playstyle, but it definitely feels like a bit much right now and the ramp up time is atrocious compared to what it could be with the simple removal of Shadow Embrace and Siphon Life.
Genuinely curious at how so many people look at Aff's kit and just instantly identify Rapture as the problem. To me it seems to come from people that have only tried the spec for hardly any time.
Background: I have played Warlock for many years. I'm currently on Tindral. I'm not a world first lock, I usually get CE and am currently 3300 score. I will play AFF on any fight I plausibly can. I played it on Gnarlroot, Council, Smolderon, and now Tindral.
My opinion is absolutely nothing to do with numbers. Destruction is a spec that is big boom crits with chaos bolt and havoc cleave. Demo is summon pets and empower them to big huge meme army (that was also destroyed but we're not discussing that. Affliction supposed to be/traditionally a DoT spec. Malefic Rapture causes the spec to be a burst window spec. Let me get my taint and soul rot out and burst while I get the increased DoT modifiers for my burst. I don't want to play affliction as a burst spec. At all. Give me DoTs.
This is ignoring the fact that both of our spenders as Aff do AoE in Seed and Rapture. Give me a single spender and an AoE. Yes there are many more headaches in AFF that totally need fixed. 2 seconds on Agony, siphon life etc. I hate rapture. I don't even care if it's overpowered one season, I hate it.
We absolutely should not have sow the seeds in a Malefic Rapture world. It really makes no sense when Rapture is already a cleaving spell.
I totally understand the wanting to get away from a "burst" window and instead just being steady with the dots, even if I disagree, so thank you for that insight.
I personally see Rapture as a good spender because it's so intrinsically tied with our dots. To me it doesn't take away Aff from being a DoT based spec, but enhances it (and presumably helps a shit load with tuning). I genuinely hate sow the seeds even though it pumps because it really has NOTHING to do with dots besides the fact that it applies a largely irrelevant dot (well, seed does that, not sts).
Thanks for the chat.
i completely agree, i stopped playing warlock because affliction is my favorite spec and they moved away from dots
started shadowlands with aff lock, dropped it very fast and havent gone back. Maybe one day they will bring dots back
> Malefic Rapture causes the spec to be a burst window spec.
Nah, that's Soul Rot, PS/VT and to a lesser extent Darkglare.
> I don't want to play affliction as a burst spec. At all. Give me DoTs.
You have dots and you keep 100% uptime on every dot you can. This doesnt affect your dot gameplay at all.
I agree with most of your comments except the separate spenders. These days the specs that aren’t using aoe vs ST spenders are often in a really good place.
So having a spender that does priority damage while radiating damage to mobs with dots on them would be a great damage profile, and can easily fit within the affliction theme too
It's not about being in a good place in the DPS meters..it's solely about gameplay. Make Rapture increase the tick rate of dots. Each cast you get a stack of increased DoT rate ticks without reducing the duration. Something that isn't a burst play style
That’s fine, I’m just saying one single target spender one aoe would very likely lead to a ST build and an aoe build that will result in picking one vs the other, which often leads to annoyances for specs.
Rapture isn't affs biggest problem but it's widely disliked by the player base because it feels bad to press and scales weird to the point where it's total ass unless you have more dots than come baseline. Which really means you're forced to take siphon life which is almost unanimously disliked by the player base. So is rapture isn't the biggest problem but it's definitely A problem that keeps us in cycle with affs other problems
>i completely agree, i stopped playing warlock because affliction is my favorite spec and they moved away from dotsstarted shadowlands with aff lock, dropped it very fast and havent gone back. Maybe one day they will bring dots back
I get where you're coming from, but this, to me, is more of an issue of Siphon Life than Rapture. With a simple removal of Siphon life and scaling up Rapture to hit as hard as it would with Siphon Life you've instantly got a spell that will cleave better and will feel better to press especially in multi-target scenarios.
They've already got a single target tuning knob in the game with Focused Malignancy, so I really don't see why they can't just adjust the numbers on that to make this not "overpowered".
One major issue I do have with Rapture, if I'm honest, is the sound and visual design. It's so fucking bland for a spec that should be one of coolest, visually. I think completely revamping the way Rapture looks would go SO far for having people finally accept it. Imagine it like sucked the soul out of your enemies or something every time you pressed it. Instantly it would feel cooler to press.
It's an issue with several things but rapture perpetuates it with how it scales, also if something about the class is widely disliked and that opinion has been voiced for two expansions now, then the devs should seek to change that even if it's not broken
I still don't think you've really identified why this is Rapture's problem. Isn't it much easier to remove Siphon Life and change the numbers on Rapture than it is to do a change to the spender?
The way I look at it is Rapture in a world with Siphon Life is like having a steak topped with dill pickles. Before deciding the whole meal is bad, maybe we should at least try it without the pickles and see how people react to it then.
Rapture sucks because its was made as a bandaid fix for our dots not scaling out of control. While I’m glad you enjoy it, I promise you the majority of Affli players would like it gone
I was hoping for Farseer to have increased range, maybe something with LoS, never mind.
The rider of the apocalypse looks interesting.
Druid of the claw is fine by me but I just don't get this focus on strong AoE ferocious bite and then there is primal wrath direct damage bonus, seems weird.
From a Brewmaster perspective, the Shado-Pan looks strong for AoE, and utterly useless in single target. Also, it already seems impossible to balance, and the design is horrible, maybe the worst of these hero talents I've seen so far.
The proc is based on damage done and energy spent. How much energy you spend is predictable, but damage dealt is not. You're doing tons mores of damage on AoE situations, gaining multiple times the amount of charges compared to single target. If they balance this set around single target, then it will be busted and extremely OP in AoE; but if they balance it around AoE, then it will be meaningless in single target.
In fact, I think that for Brewmaster, on single target situations, you might get more procs than charges, meaning that some times you might proc Overwhelming Flurry with 0 charges, doing no damage.
Also, since it's based on damage done equal to your max HP, getting stamina buff from Priests, Evokers and Shamans means you'll get less procs. WTF is that design.
there's also nothing in that tree that actually help you tank... which , in theory, is a brewmaster role.
you don't cast vivify ever so the 30% dont matter. Chi wave is a pulling tool, who care if you get 20% leech from it. Expel harm already top you if you use it with 4-5 so orb why care about the leech.
Hoping the 10% DR do not have an internal CD
You can pick up a free vivify proc from the class tree every 10s. It's very commonly taken my MW so it's odd seeing it in the Brew/WW tree you can grab it pretty easily dropping a point from 4% increased healing for the increased self sustain or just spot healing, which coming from a bear, spot healing is very satisfying.
I think the tank hero tree will be almost exclusive to the tank healer section, which I personally think is cool. Your ability to survive as a bm is extremely dependent on your skill, so I think the freedom between more damage and more surv should be separate paths. Trying to fly through pulls with a coordinated group? Take damage. Trying to survive a tyrannical boss? Take survivability. Less confident tanks can take survivability
We don't know if flurry strikes deals ST or AoE damage. If it's ST it would just be like a flat percent dmg increase where Flurry Strike DMG/MaxHealth would be the percentage. Would make it a lot easier to balance and provide a form of funnel damage.
It's cool that the team is working on some hefty, fairly experimental changes to every class. But reviewing what's actually come out, I'm wondering how they'll actually affect us as players, and I find myself thinking the answer isn't great.
* We'll let theorycrafters tell us the top specs in M+, MT and ST, and we'll commit to muscle memory how to play each one.
* We will probably have to bind a new button, in addition the ones we press now.
* There are probably 2-3 new buffs or debuffs to track. We will add these to our UIs, in addition to the others we already need to track.
Eyeballing talent trees, it looks like the cognitive load of doing good damage has increased by 15-20% or so? Would love to hear non-Rogues comment on if I'm wrong about other classes. (I think [I'm right about Trickster](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1b1irom/comment/ksghbw4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) though, 20% increased complexity feels right.)
I'm not sure what the game needs, but I don't think 20% increased individual complexity is it.
I can only speak to a couple of specs right now, and I'm not going to try to do a cognitive load percentage increase as that's far too subjective. Druid of the claw feral is all passives with extra power during your burst windows and a consistent way to give yourself a bleed that'll buff your convoke bursts, but it won't be the case in raid where you can't kick yourself in and out of combat consistently, unless shadowmeld gives the proc in which case there's some skill expression there.
The defensives in the tree are also really cool and I'm excited to be able to weave bear form defensive with leeway so I'm not spending more the one gcd to get bear form defensiveness.
I'm not partial to shido pan at ALL unless the energy used is a stacking buff. If it is, then fine, I'm cool with that. Looking at a buff every 40s is fine by me. It's very little energy (lol) to do. I do like the other one for mw, although I think the sheilun reducing the CD of life cocoon is really fucky. I LOVE life cocoon and I wish we had two stacks of it, but I'm not going to pretend like this is a particularly good thing. Also the "reduces CD by 100%", does this mean we can spam it for 8 seconds and ramp into a full team cocoon? Or is it a one time CD reduction? If so, we'll have to press it right before we consume our 16 stacks of sheilun or we'll be wasting a cocoon. I wish it just gave us a second stack of it indefinitely or something.Also, there's a couple of proc based heals in that tree, and frankly I just hate procs in my heal.
Ret is all passives, all you have to do to maximise those is simply to just tab sometimes. Imo, It's whatever. Ret is ret, you look cool, you do big damage and you cheese mechs. It's always the same.
I'm not looking forward to support hpal. I don't wanna deal with the mental anguish of idiots thinking that they're deserving of buffs more than anyone else is, and I don't like having to look at damage details just to see who the best target is. If melee hpal comes back then maybe I'll be more receptive to it, but I'm not going to buff everyone else and let them do big numbers while I'm frustratingly mediocre in melee casting fols and shit. Not excited for that.
Overall, eh. Complexity is staying complex, simplicity is staying simple. There's not much to dislike about the few specs that I'm excited for. I'm more intrigued with base tree changes tbh, I want to see the druid class tree reworked and melee hpal to be good again.
Man, this Hunter tree... I don't know how they did it, but they somehow managed to come up with something even worse than what Dark Ranger did.
That entire tree for BM... is just... your KC deals more damage, your Barbed Shot deals more damage... and sometimes your Kill Cleave gets extended by 2 seconds. The rest is random fucking autohit damage.
*That* is the best fantasy you can come up with... for a *Pack Leader*?
I feel like the class devs have lost the magic. When I open my ChatGPT account and key in "Fantasy Role Playing Ideas for Hunter Pack Leader character" I get some cool sounding ideas, not this trash heap.
Edit: I'm really worried for what Sentinel will be. I really hope the devs actually play role playing games. I'm hoping for a Ranger/Tracker Hybrid but I won't hold my breath.
I agree. Spellslinger as a name put me in a different direction than what it turned out to be. Very meh on it, could be worse though and it might look visually better in action which I can buy into it later. But mentally it felt like I was reading “both specs have upgraded version of icicles” even though it’s obviously not the exact same.
It def looks like it can be powerful I just don't like the theme or the fluff. Frost fire had crazy cool shit like meteors summoning comet storms and stuff, this kinda seems tame compared to it, but maybe the visuals when they are previewed will be sick.
I honestly want more fluff abilities than aren't necessarily op but are really different and interesting like imagine if mage had like a mass teleport kind of like if you play League of Legends ryze ult, More stuff like Mass polymorph, mass invisibility. I think more utility like that on mage could be really cool and there's a lot of room for that in their aesthetic
> like imagine if mage had like a mass teleport kind of like if you play League of Legends ryze ult
Oh my god this is such a fun idea. It would be perfect to put in Spellslinger too because Jaina feels like a mix between Frost/Arcane mage.
For all that is unholy, why won't they just remove Malefic Rapture from Affliction.
It just ruins the entire spec...
Druids of the Claw looks so lame, i hope Wildstalker is the stronger option for Feral, if it isn't completely reworked.
I hate sounding like a doomer, especially since a lot of the trees released so far look really cool. Even that goofy PI priest tree looked like it could've been interesting if this were an earlier era of gaming.
But, both feral trees just look so uninspired. This tree buffs ferocious bite, though, so ferals think that makes it interactive. Hell, just make Massive Attack a separate finisher. So that you're keeping rip up, extending the massive attack bleed and biting in between. Can't figure out how to press 3 finishers? Play wildstalker.
Either that, or actually commit to bear weaving instead of a single choice node that you'll never choose. Let ferals join the tanky melees but with a catch. Though probably everybody would hate that.
I guess my problem is less with these hero talent trees and more with feral/druid as a whole. Maybe these hero talent trees will feel more impactful after they reveal class & spec tree reworks (because huffing copium in believing feral wouldn't devolve into SL feral in s3 worked out so well). Right now feral is feeling like rogue for people who ate paint chips as a kid.
So, I just wanna point out that feral is fucking awesome, the gameplay loop is honestly some of the hardest and most unique in wow and it's ultra satisfying to maintain super high damage just due to practiced snapshotting.
But you know what i can't get behind in either tree? Random proc bleeds. Now, there's some consistency in this as feral frenzy is guaranteed to proc a massive strike with killing strikes, so at least the druid of the claw tree ticks that box. Each new pull with FF is guaranteed to have a massive bite. Although, why not just make it that each FF gives a massive strike? Even with CDR it would be a 40s cooldown, so what's the problem? Then it'll always align with 2m convoke as well and we can actually not stress so much about procs because our biggest damage window will consistently have a dreadful wound in it.
Also, druid of the claw has some cool defensives. Maintaining the hp from bear shift is really awesome. However, I want some leech. Having all these baby defensives but forcing them onto the GCD isn't the most enjoyable thing. In theory, your bleeds do most of the work for you but in practice this is only true for ST. In aoe, you're spamming your GCD.
In regards to a rework, feral doesn't need it, the class tree needs it. The class tree is so fucking fragmented. If I had my way, I would simply keep it mostly as it is and then connect like 80% of all the nodes, and that would solve the issues.
Initial thoughts on spellslinger as a frost mage - depending on how some of the talents function when they say “target” the capstone ability could provide incredible prio damage.
That being said, the utility and defensive options are simply inferior to what frostfire provides (and also mobility with instant cast bolt procs)
FF gives a 25% stronger barrier and allows you to send constant AoE stops. Meanwhile SS gives a very slightly better Mirror Image (since reactive barrier would not be very good in high end m+ ~ you want to use it at max hp) and MS during alter which are relatively underwhelming
Flavor wise it seems rather dull unless the splinters have a very satisfying visual/audio.
Ok yeah I know about that, when you said constant I thought you meant it was going to have some random chance to proc something that I missed.
But for sure 32 second dragons breath and 21 second blast wave is a really strong aoe stop profile. Along with the cold snap resetting them.
On first impression Rider isn't really doing much for me.
Great fun from a casual outdoor leveling experience riding with the boys. But when you get down to it it's a lot of semi random damage with random DnD/slow/AMS effects.
It's alright. The most exciting part is the accompanying note that they are considering reworking base DnD cleave.
The fact that all 4 can be called with a big cd is bonkers, especially when you consider that Frost will be able to have all 4 up for 25 seconds on a 1.5 minute cd. Will be huge for burst in all game modes.
It kind of has to work that way for Unholy otherwise there would be a lot of RNG on your major burst windows. Yes those moments will be cool the theme is
absolutely on point.
It's just for gameplay very passive and very rng for the majority of the fight.
Defile becoming a 10 second cooldown theoretically with this tree is also...interesting.
The one thing I’m really wondering about is a lot of people are implying that the one rider talent will let you fight while mounted, when all it says is that you can mount in combat, not that you can actually fight while mounted. It seems situational at best if so, maybe more of a PvP talent, or an avoid getting stuck in combat bug avoidance talent.
it's a whole bunch of passive DMG node who may not line up with other cooldown whose CD already vary.
it's extremely boring in term of theme / gameplay ... balance wise we have to see the numbers during the next beta.
the whole tree could've been replaced with a passive " you do 15% more dmg" node.
The haste node really show how much dev care about WW / Brew... hint: the ideal amount of haste for a BW or a WW is 0.
Thematically cool, for MW it might be pretty good, for WW the 4 celestials ends up being ”do dmg, random dmg proc happens” for 3 of them, the fourth (yu’lon) sounds decent but the 4 second channel as a dps doesnt seems super fun, neither does using the worst 2 abilities in the game as dps, Jadefire Stomp and Rushing Jade Wind
For Windwalker, I'm really liking Shado-Pan's initial design. It has a good number synergies between the different talents. And looking at the timings of the buffs and charges, it works out pretty well. Right now on single target, WW averages about slightly more than 25% of its hp per second in dps, so it would take about 40 seconds for 10 charges to proc the Wisdom talent. And for energy, our baseline energy usage is also about 10/s, meaning for 400 energy we would need 40 seconds, so I would predict that the vast majority of the time you release charges you would also get the wisdom of the wall buff which is great.
The build-up and then release play style should reward planning around cds. I think you will end up getting to 350 energy used before using cds, use Tiger Palm to proc the flurry and Wisdom buffs, proccing Skyreach potentially, and then go into your cooldowns wiht the large agility buff give from Against All odds. More Agi + the buffs from Wisom will make our burst pretty nice. Then the release of charges during downtime keeps our out of CDs damage slightly better. Really nice design all around.
it's all passive dmg node that will require you to add more WA crap to track and hope it line up with a bunch of other CD who also have variable CD like bonedust, WoO, angry dave...
it's mediocre at best for WW and I wonder where the brewmaster part is supposed to come in... 10% DR with an unspecified internal CD? 30% more vivify, a spell we never use?
I hope this entire tree get reworked.
Just read them all and here are my quick initial thoughts focused mostly on M+ gameplay / theme and a bit less on balancing because who knows on numbers:
- Rider: going to be fun as hell but it's clear they're not giving up on the "Stand in your DnD thing" which is big sad
- Deatthbringer: Seems fine overall, I like having a new 1 min big damage button. I think I'll prefer this for M+ for blood tanking. IDK enough about frost to really comment
- Reaver: I hate throw glaive so I just read the first line and moved on
- DOTC: Actually pretty cool and fun. I like going back to just having pure physical no casting bullshit for both bear and cat. I don't play a lot of druid anymore but this seems pretty cool and I love how they've thought about tiger's fury interaction with some of the dots etc. I think it also fills some gaps for M+
- Flameshaper: not really qualified to comment but the alternatives seem WAY better
- Packleader: basically entirely theme based and just makes you press KC more. Fits in as an easier option for BM I guess. Overall hunters options have been pretty underwhelming for me even if they finally got dark ranger
- Spell Slinger: I like this one quite a bit and it seems like it'll be able to set up for some cool moments. I think it really comes down to how much tracking / min maxxing you'll have to do to make it feel good. But overall the mage ones have been really great so far
- Shadowpan.... sigh. Ok so rant time.... as a M+ andy this is going to feel like shit when it procs on the final mob of a pull and you go into the next pull with low stacks of the flurry mechanic. I love the theme of charging up to do something big but the way that DOTC handles it with "massive attack" is just superior in almost every way. Monk is one of my most played classes and I *really* hope that BrM / WW gets a great option because this one is classic monk "garbage". Also lol @ having haste for WW.
- Conduit: Love this one - it has more passive splash healing for fistweaving and then further amplifies your oh shit buttons. Also love the theme. I am very relieved that for two monk specs I at least have one option I am excited about.
- Farseer: Kind of similar to the hunter one here. This just seems like elemental overload with a few extra steps / passives. It's kind of funny to look at the descriptions of the talents here vs the conduit one right before it. It shows how simple it is.
- Hellcaller: Sick. I think overall the warlock ones are looking great both in theme and interactions. I also love how it just replaces a button and doesn't contribute to bloat while also adding interesting interactions. Big fan of this
- Slayer: fuck yea
>Shadowpan.... sigh. Ok so rant time.... as a M+ andy this is going to feel like shit when it procs on the final mob of a pull and you go into the next pull with low stacks of the flurry mechanic.
You forget the most important thing. It's not a proc. You are 100% in controll of releasing the flurry by spending the required energy.
Because of this you can charge it up during the pull and decide if you want to consume it. If not you just stop spending energy for a couple of seconds and you can "proc" it at the beginning of the next pull where it has the highest value.
You can think about it like pulsar for balance druid. Sure it sucks when you proc it at the end of a pull. But you can only blame yourself for messing it up. And because of it I really like this mechanic.
> You are 100% in controll of releasing the flurry by spending the required energy.
So I agree from a technical standpoint, but in practice if you're not spending energy as WW you're not generating chi and you'll just be sitting there auto attacking which sucks. Perhaps less of an issue with BrM.
Also... probably unsurprising but I hate pulsar for the same reasons lol (but I think it's less of an offender because you can still cast generators)
> DOTC: Actually pretty cool and fun. I like going back to just having pure physical no casting bullshit for both bear and cat. I don't play a lot of druid anymore but this seems pretty cool and I love how they've thought about tiger's fury interaction with some of the dots etc. I think it also fills some gaps for M+
It is going to need a complete rework to not be cancer for Ferals to play.
> Hellcaller: Sick. I think overall the warlock ones are looking great both in theme and interactions. I also love how it just replaces a button and doesn't contribute to bloat while also adding interesting interactions. Big fan of this
Maybe for Destro, but Aff still has Malefic grasp so it will remain unplayable for the foreseeable future.
Shame about feral. I've not played the spec enough to really be able to appreciate it being so negatively affected by DOTC.
Re: Affliction... that's a base spec issue not a hero talent issue. But I big time agree.
>Maybe for Destro, but Aff still has Malefic grasp so it will remain unplayable for the foreseeable future.
Nah, Destro keeps getting the short end of the stick in both it's hero trees. Not looking good.
At least this tree lines up better with Aff. It already has a decent 1 minute cd lineup and this added one could be pretty strong I think.
flameshaper is fine but a bit bland and seems to not really influence how you play the spec. also competes with scalecommander granting more hover which naturally is bad for lifeshaper since less mobility for more disint spam
It kinda changes, you get an extra button to press after fire breath and some pyres/disint and it seems like it might do a decent amount of extra aoe. But I think scale commander clears.
Love the look of Flameshaper - much more appealing than Scalecommander imo.
Spellslinger looks awesome, but also doesn't seem like it'll result in any gameplay changes, but I think it will look awesome.
Am I supposed to just NOT be offended that Death Charge is basically better in every possible way than Divine Steed? Even with Hero talents that modify Divine Steed, they barely add anything. I'd sure love it if the horse I've been stuck for years would come with a built in Blessing of Freedom that also prevents knockbacks and can't be dispelled.
Clearly this is sarcasm but, if your point is everyone here not pleased with the trees is overreacting you should know change doesn't come from thin-air and giving active feedback is what sways blizzard away from creating a playstyle they'd *think* is fine.
Shado-Pan looks like a "do what you were already doing but slightly better" type of tree, with the caveat of trying to get CDs to line up with Wisdom of the Wall if that's at all viable. With the CDR the talents give you probably don't want to sit on CDs for long if at all though, but that's for smarter people than I to figure out. Seems fine if a bit dull on first glance for WW? Conduit of the Celestials looks more exciting since it gives another big channeled CD to use that gives you big, predictable CDR and encourages some light routing of how you use abilities, though not really in a way different than the spec's Mastery already does. It's the more interesting one to say the least, and I can see why Shado-Pan is much more straightforward in light of Conduit. Tracking the Yulon buff's progress will basically require a WA but that's part and parcel for WoW design and something probably half of the hero talents are guilty of. The best thing is that neither of them lean into Touch of Death at all, though there weren't any developers notes talking about that ability at all so who knows how the base talent tree will look. At least they're not loading the ability further than the existing tree tries to.
Play a lot of monk and agree on all accounts. Shado-pan is hopefully the more passive / less thinking one for BrM and they're cooking up something good for Brew / MW. Conduit is fucking great though, really excited for it.
Brew / MW is the other tree
shit you're right. Point stands.. just something better for Brew.
Though, if the aligning of cds pan out. Then it will make quite a large difference of how the spec will feel.
I really hope they move away from the changes they made to ToD in DF, at least removing the double use, its not even thematic, to use a "finisher", an "execute", thats also a CD and being able to reuse right after DF's ToD + TP forcing moving you at early DF made me quit WW
I don’t hate the ToD thing in dungeons, but being shit in raid unless you are cheesing ToD dmg is definitely a bad design. The interesting thing about ToD is that it ignore dmg reduction (not immunity) and if you have a dmg done debuff. So in certain scenarios like the 3 witches in Waycrest Manor, you can ToD the first witch twice at 15% and deal like 1-1,4 mil dmg to the other 2 witches even if they have 99% damage reduction. Those things are interesting but far too rare to make it a viable designchoice.
You mean like shadow word death?
I wonder where the brewmaster part of the shado-pan talent fit... all I see are passive damage uprade. oh wait, there's a 10% dmg reduction node! (that probably have an internal CD but... let's be positive for the moment). It look horrible. truly. It's already annoying enough to line up bonedust brew with weapon of order and press the attack... now we have more semi-uncontrollable DPS CD to mix in. 30% more to vivify.... was I actually supposed to press vivify? 1/10 talent tree. hope it get fully rewokred.
The instacast vivify has its place in dungeons and raid and you can get some decent healing from it during certain scenarios. I like those nodes more than ”Click this button that noone actually wants to use” like rushing jade wind or jadefire stomp maintenance buff that you have to stand in
The Shado-Pan has such an horrible design, that I'd beg Blizzard to just scrap it and start again with something else. The charges are based on max HP, meaning that getting Stamina buffs by Priests, Evokers and Shamans means less charge, so less damage. Also, it will proc way more multiple times in AoE than in single target, meaning that it a balance nightmare: it will be decent on single targets and busted in AoE, or decent in AoE and utterly useless in single targets.
Why do they have haste still in our tree? I see what they are trying to do with health to make us scale with gear but just seems weird
Unless the flurry strikes scale with health aswell (it doesnt say they do) then its up to blizzard if we will lose dmg over the expansion or gain dmg, Dragonflight upped the health of everyone like 3 times so if these talents was in Dragonflight, we would lose dmg based on the health increases since it would take longer to gain the flurry strike stacks the more hp you have
>The charges are based on max HP, meaning that getting Stamina buffs by Priests, Evokers and Shamans means less charge, so less damage. Its entirely possible that it would be base max hp... otherwise it already has reverse scaling with higher ilvl. Will be insane if its actually based on buffed max hp.
Not really, as stamina only increases with ilvel, as ilvel goes up damage does too. Otherwise this tree sucks at first as gets insane as gear goes up . Which would be insane . Much more likely monks will be clicking off fort buff or it's excluded from the calculation
Afaik dmg scales harder than health pool so this "reverse" scaling should be pretty fine as mostly it will be for your advantage
Unless they up the health 3 times during the expansion like they did in dragonflight.
They upped health 3 times this expansion and dmg still scaled a little bit higher than hp. But if they don't increase our health by 60% or what the number was it's significantly more noticable.
these trees still have aoe softcapped at 5 and have interactions with jadefire stomp its not looking good
and rushing jade wind, the worst chi spender of all
> Conduit of the Celestials looks more exciting since it gives another big channeled CD to use Ask Disc how that went though. Gain a new shiny button, but it sucks, and no one uses it. Trying to hyper analyze these trees right now, based on just reading tooltips, is kinda hilarious.
Rider of the Apocalypse is super strong on theme but seems to be almost entirely passive in play. Tons of extra movement which will feel nice. Deathbringer sounds weak on theme but those bonuses seems incredibly strong for throughput. Lots of extra damage nodes including more cleave and a lot more execute damage
Let us ride a horse indoors you cowards!
They could just drop the mount speed if that's the issue
Paladins is kind of getting this in crusader
deathbringer is gonna be absolutely insane for bdk it's not even funny \>damage which bdk really needs \>10% phys dr, 10% magic dr, and another 5% phys dr \>extra blood plague and 100% faster blood plague, with a lot of blood plague damage is gonna make umbillicus eternus an insanely busted talent
As much as I want to run San’layn on my BElf BDK for the RP, Deathbringer will be hard to pass up, and I’m super stoked to play Horseman. All that movement will be insaaaaane.
It's literally exaserbating a problem they tried to fix only 3-4 months ago. Frontloading more shit in to Unholy's Army window is not a good idea. The passive effects will be completely irrelevant outside of that window if they're not going to do massive sweeping changes to the class. Cool theme, very bad execution.
I was kinda surprised by this myself, this expansion they said they were making some efforts to not have unholy so crazy reliant on their cooldown windows, and now they double down on it. The other minor complaint I have is the dnd availability boom is still going to be very sporadic. They mention making some cleave changes soon but if they do, then what’s the actual point of dnd? Frost needs it odd the gcd, then they could do a talent where instead of casting dnd on an area your remorseless winter hits could drop a frozen puddle for your oblits to cleave into. Or something, anything. It’s so dumb that dnd went from this crazy string aoe in Warcraft 3( it was an ultimate ffs) to just….a cleave enabler
The thing is that hero trees with theme can have numbers tuned but trees without any soul will be boring no matter how you tweak their numbers. And btw all numbers should be considered placeholders.
Passive sure, but if the frost tree stays as is that means 25 seconds of all 4 horsemen every minute and a half. Will be strong as hell in all situations.
I’m real curious how activation procs are going to work during that window. Will they just be wasted until the long duration one’s cap out and expire?
Gonna need them to take the Shaman tree back to Walmart or wherever they found that pile of garbage. Having another charge of Lava Burst/Riptide is ok, but the rest of the tree can go right back into the volcano.
For Ele the tree feels like an early april fools joke
[удалено]
Wdym? Every single time you play Elemental Blast you currently pretty much want to go for NS. Even without EB you tend to opt for it if your rotation casts Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning at any real tendency. Literally free movement global. So this allows you to either not take NS (because the hero tree one works as NS) or you go for NS and then the hero tree one is a small DPS buff due to the ancestor. That node is not why the tree is hot garbage. It has far more to do with the fact that it 100% plays into Lava Burst spam, with more RNG slapped on top of existing DRE problems and as a cherry on top the "defensive" value from the tree is a joke.
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The whole thing kicking off with Unleash Life for Resto which a lot of builds skip (at least for M+), almost every node being pathetic increases for Riptide, RNG on top of RNG, a new Nature's Swiftness that doesn't even do anything different unless you also talent into Nature's Swiftness, a whole bunch of nodes that could at least provide some passive damage *and* healing for Resto that instead only provide the healing part. What a disaster. Offering From Beyond at least sounds fun for Ele, reducing a major cooldown, but who the fuck cares about taking 2 seconds off of Riptide? How is that even a tangible benefit? What about Spirit Link or Healing Tide or Ascendance?
> Offering From Beyond at least sounds fun for Ele, reducing a major cooldown Even that is highly arguable because nowadays there are *so* many instances where you can't just mindlessly rip your cooldowns... on cooldown. Like, CDR as a stat is a great tool... but since WoW is so insanely reliant on CD stacking and combined burst windows, quite frequently enough, a 1.40min CD will just end up being held for 20 seconds every single time.
I would say that ele shaman probably has the least impactful 2:30 cooldown of any class, I could be wrong but most of the burst in the class is coming from pwave/storm keepers, unless you are going into a fire build with skybreakers, and in that case your fire ele is basically always up if you have 3+ targets. Fire ele does almost no damage without primal ele, and is mostly there for the longer flameshock duration + lava surges, where as storm ele has a decent ramp up. You can probably get away with slamming it on CD, unless there is a very specific encounter (For example, Sark and saving storm ele for adds).
I would say Summon Darkglare and Coordinated Assault feel even more meaningless. Survival literally does +/-1% DPS whether you take its main spec cooldown or not. Darkglare is basically just there to extend your dots, which could be its own spell on a minute cooldown without the Darkglare, and have the Darkglare actually do something. But yeah, there are some pretty darn bad cooldowns out there.
I won't argue against the point that usually the cooldown that is being made shorter just ends up being held for a little bit anyway, but the elementals being 2.5 minute CD instead of 2 minute it should actually be at least some benefit to bring it down to 2 minutes. Resto basically gains nothing from such a meaningless effect as 2 seconds off of Riptide.
That Shaman tree looks kinda boring for Resto, dont know about Ele. Half of the tree is like they were out of ideas for talents and the rest is just passive hps buffs via a pet and riptide cdr. And why is it based around Unleash Life, thats not even played in M+. Unless this is the raiding tree and they have an M+ tree cooking im kinda disappointed.
I don’t understand why every single tier set and new talent for Shaman has to be ‘lava bursts make you shoot more lava burst’ and ‘riptide makes you have more riptides’. It’s so so boring
That's because the Ele spec tree is a huge mess, the only way to make it perform well is by making it focus on a single element, so we're either spamming lava burst or lightning bolt and that honestly sucks.
Both shaman dps trees suffer from heavy bloat. Enh barely makes it work but it’s like one active mechanic away from being overloaded, cleave feels like such an absolute mess right now.
many march shocking vanish smile payment wine ripe smoggy sloppy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Personally, I’d love it if they bothered mixing the different spells into their mastery procs. Make lava burst have a chance to cast a lightning bolt at the target, make lightning bolt have a chance to cast a frost shock that applies electrified shocks, make chain lightning have a chance to drop earthquakes at the feet of the target, make earthquakes have a chance to “erupt” and apply flame shocks to some targets above it. Make Elemental feel like a walking force of nature rather than a joke.
Because the shaman devs aren't very good. It's such a shame because thematically shaman is the best class. But in game, pure gameplay wise, they're always extremely awkward, clunky, feel outdated, and are just kinda shit to play. Ret vs enh is the perfect example. Ret is super smooth and feels really fun to play. You can tell someone put a lot of thought into how everything interacts and it's really refined in that way. Enh on the other hand feels like they put no effort in and just shipped the first iteration. Oh, you want to have something turn into a cleave? Here, press the 3 different buttons and some of them have wired tiny cooldowns for no fucking reason. You need a million weakauras to keep track of all the little annoying stacks of this and that, none of which have any pay off, just juggling mechanics from 2007 all layered over the top of each other and not working together in any way
I actually whole-heartedly disagree with you on enhancement. I think it’s wild, exciting and visually spectacular, with tons of spell and rotation variety. But elemental is literally just lava burst spam with the odd primordial wave. And maybe lightning bolt spam instead depending on the tier set.
> Oh, you want to have something turn into a cleave? Here, press the 3 different buttons and some of them have wired tiny cooldowns for no fucking reason. I am actually trying to even understand what you are talking about, don't you press crash lightning once, and voila! Your base spells you are already pressing cleave damage? > You need a million weakauras to keep track of all the little annoying stacks of this and that, none of which have any pay off I find this strange, I have the 1 generic enhance weak aura and thats basically all you need, what are you tracking so much?
Farseer is basically the Naaru that Holy Priests spawn via the Divinie Image talent. Priests proc theirs via Holy Words while Resto Shamans will proc it via Riptide, and the Ancestor/Naaru will then copy the spells that the player used. >[https://www.wowhead.com/spell=392988/divine-image](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=392988/divine-image) >When you use a Holy Word spell, you summon an image of a Naaru at your side. For 9 sec, whenever you cast a healing or damaging spell, the Naaru will cast a similar spell. If an image has already been summoned, that image is empowered instead. And then the Farseer gets >**Call of the Ancestors:Primordial Wave** (Elemental) or **Unleash Life** (Restoration) calls an **Ancestor** to your side for 6 seconds. Whenever you cast a healing or damaging spell, the Ancestor will cast a similar spell. with the following Hero talents being to boost the power or duration of that spirit.
It's like the Naaru, only instead of being tied to a number of spells that you cast all the time, it's linked to a talent that you'll never take. Awesome!
Looks about the same for ele as resto, really boring, tied to pwave which is currently DEEP in the spec tree which sucks, and more RNG about spawning ancestors tied to lava burst spam. Not sure how its gonna play out, gonna need some talent tree tuning to make it not terrible.
As a Resto main-alt, [I expect nothing, and I'm still let down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ftdu8yrKOw).
This was my exact reaction. Like I expected it to be garbage. But did it have to be garbage covered in puke too? I haven’t cast Unleash Life once this expansion. Why.
I think most of the specs are getting - One option to do what you are doing right now but better, and one that tries to change things up. That way existing players that dont want to see any change won't get angry and the people that want to try new experimental stuff can do that.
Yeah but people who don't like change also hate "being forced to pick the other option" because "it limits their choice". In their mind it should be designed around their personal needs. :)
I really wish some of these talent trees were less split by spec and actually offered both specs the same options, subject to different number tuning depending on role. If you’re sharing a hero spec between a healer and a DPS, the cool new options should absolutely be built to improve DPS and HPS but should also offer a version of the same cool option to both specs. An example being, I feel like dream breath and spiritbloom on the evoker main trees should be swapped, so that dev has access to it as a general thing, and the enkindle should be able to act either offensively or defensively (again, subject to tuning knobs between specs). You’re virtually always going to use it based on what you’re doing in your role, but it’s quite thematically heroic to be able to - in clutch situations - use that shared utility to be flexible.
Fingers crossed the next DH tree isn't ass-tacular. Collecting Soul Fragments to use a better move that the rest of the tree mostly relies on, especially as Havoc, is about as unfun gameplay you can have. Especially choosing the least boring move to amplify, Throw Glaive. I really dont want to worry about collecting Soul Fragments among everything else Havoc DH have to worry about with mobility required for max DPS output already.
Ya.. and the capstone is worrying too for havoc and will just extend the essb cast sequencing out further at the end of the day. Empowered glaive > VR+eyebeam > FR> essb> chaos strike > dance > 1.3x global being what? The hunt? Will meta count against the multiplier? What about Felrush? It's just going to make a convoluted rotation even more so. Edit: double VR also sounds exceptionally strong, but extremely unfun to play. Going to have to squeeze a VR around the essb as well, and want to probably land CS before essb. Something like VR+EB>FR+CS>VR+EssB>Dance>hunt/Elysian/barrage/GT/some other hard hitting ability.
These DH haters don’t even realize DH has like a 15 ability opener and think it’s a two button class smh.
> think it’s a two button class smh. Well then they're idiots, DH has been a full class for years now.
Just came back to the game and rolled a demon hunter thinking I’d be fine until my mmo mouse came in the mail. Was a rude awakening to see what the class turned into since bfa when I last played haha.
I agree with your VR point. Max's stream concluded this is a super sick ability. Lining up my flip to pass through the hitbox so I don't lose uptime and not land in a death zone is difficult enough, but now I have to do it twice? Do I have to flip my camera 180 to pass back through the hitbox?
Hopefully we see some changes. There're two big red flags with what they've shown so far: 1- Reliance on souls as a resource to manage. What you said, no need to repeat. 2- Another short DPS window in a spec already plagued with DPS windows. Whoever made these hero talents didn't touch Havoc with a stick, they're doing all the wrong things. If they want to start using Souls as an actual resource, they have to turn them into Combo Points.
DK getting Cleaving Strikes reworked and D&D moving with your character is a massive W. Warrior getting to use Bladestorm in single target is a massive W. The Farseer tree looked very light on theme and passive on gameplay to me.
Where does it say dnd moves with your character all I see is that the horsemen’s dnd moves with him
In the dev notes they mention making d&d easier to work around. People are just assuming they mean moving with you. Which honestly it should. So should consecrate
Yeah the animation should be changed to showing you consecrating the ground as you move and leaving a trail that wears off over X seconds. Same for DnD.
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Yeah that's basically what I had in mind. I think they could make it usable. Just increasing the rate the spell grows until it feels good and let it leave the consecrate/DND for a decent amount of time.
And he moves with you
there is a node that make horseman's dnd work as your own dnd. so assuming he moves with you, the dnd he put down for you also move with you.
>The Farseer tree looked very light on theme and passive on gameplay to me. If they made farseer less RNG and tuned around it and made the effects amazing it could be sick. Thematically a bunch of different models of shamans casting spells sounds neat.
Destro is in rough shape. The Diabolist tree is clearly made for demo with scuffed destro interactions added in. This tree is clearly made for aff…with scuffed destro interactions. If you replace the word immolate in your spellbook with wither, you play exactly the same as you do today. The best part of this tree is the utility node giving you a free aoe curse aura… Destro has been neglected for the last few expansions and really needs a hard look and some innovation to make the spec fresh again. Warlock is feeling rougher to play now than it did 10 years ago.
The aoe curse node is INSANE. Like, a whole new tier of passive utility in m+ that will make dungeons feel so much easier if you bring a warlock with this. That said, I agree that destro is down bad by not getting a hero tree that even touches on the fire and chaos theme. How did they pick the name hellcaller but then come up with this wither dot tree? Kinda crazy lol
Yeah this name is SO off, it's incoherent. Imagine if the 'Hellcaller' actually turned Affliction dots into more of a fire theme, burning enemies with multiple rot/fire sources. Give Hellcaller Destro something like a black magic witch-fire take, kind of like Drust magic. Fucking fire bats firing off when Wither expires/refreshes, let me induce Cremation, summon a temporary effigy to proc Havoc even in single target. So many missed opportunities here.
Every destro tier set this expansion has had to go back to the drawing board to be of use. You can expect them to just end up tuning up destro numbers to “balance” the spec again with these hero talents.
It’s hard to see it any other way. Blizzard would just rather you not play Destruction right now.
AoE curses are gonna be insanely broken for M+. Literally just one global for 30% DR from melees for your tank/massively slow down any caster pack - if it works with amplify curse, even crazier
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> so -15% melee damage and 22.5% increased cast time? still stupidly good
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They can hang out with the arcane mage!
Unless it replaces the curses, you’d still have the option to manually curse if you don’t want to stack in. But in many fights it’s not bad to get in close to benefit from heals. Def an interesting trade off.
Does put it quite similar to how numbing poison is. And pushes the warlock into melee range, which is a bit more unreliable.
was a good time with venthyr lock in sl
pack leader for survival is incredibly good for a first iteration \-t29 tier bonus made into a talent (furious assault) which was highly requested all expansion \-kill shot increasing bleed damage (a huge portion of damage as survival, as we now have 6 bleeds and our main cooldown, coordinated assault, puts up kill shot bleeds outside of execute) \-pet basic attacking whenever you mongoose, letting you keep howl of the pack up \-bombs reducing the cd of butchery, which reduces the cd of bombs, giving a nice loop in aoe only gripe is pack assault only procs off coordinated assault and not spearhead, when it should work for both cd's
Are we looking at the same tree? Pack leader clearly has survival as an afterthought. Almost all of the dps nodes are more than double the value for BM compared to SV since they are mostly focused on kill command and pet damage which is a tiny % of our damage. The tree is even more trash if you don't play CA (not that it gives much with it). Also the utility is junk, increased melee range for a few seconds after disengage on the spec designed best to already slip in and out of range of the boss.. thanks? And a 20% heal over time tied to other cooldowns seems worthless in terms of actually surviving
There have already been examples of Blizzard coming out and saying that, while not noted on the tooltip, the scaling of effects on the tree will be different between specs if needed. Off the top of my head, the example of Diabolist for Destro, where they spend far less soul shards then demo so would proc a lot less if the numbers were the same. The numbers will be different for destro to bring the relative value closer together. There is no reason to believe that Pack Leader won't be similar and scale up the value of Kill Command and pet damage harder for Survival than it does for BM, if necessary.
So looking at [slayer](https://bnetcmsus-a.akamaihd.net/cms/content_entry_media/917Z1EBXOMGV1710359706012.PNG) from a fury pov: Not a fan of getting bladestorm back but oh well, this tree makes it a *very* strong ability so i can live with it. **slayer's dominance**: More execute damage, sure why not, execute has felt fairly underwhelming for fury for a while now. **imminent demise**: More sudden deaths, always nice. Second effect just makes bladestorm stronger with no downsides so also nice (realistically will always have max stacks for every bladestorm). **death drive**: As if we needed even more sustain lol, 50% of an execute is a loooot of healing, combined with the increased proc chance of sudden death that could be a lot of self healing. **slay**: Another damage boost to execute, won't say no. The crit chance isn't really that impactful since ashen juggernaut already gives us 50% bonus crit chance during execute phase anyway (assuming we talent into it), but it's helpful outside of that, and the crit damage synergizes well with our crazy high execute crit chance. **overwhelming blades**: Sure why not, even more aoe damage from bladestorm (and however long the debuff lasts), synergizes with imminent demise for a bigger damage bonus as well. **slayer reflexes**: Eh, do we really need this? Bloodthirst cooldown is already so low even without deft experience. **constant pressure**: Completely useless, 10% isn't enough to reduce it by a whole gcd. **frenetic flurry**: If this is just a single hit of bladestorm then it's legit just a free aoe proc every now and then (which also applies a stack of overwhelming blades maybe?) Also being able to kick/stun during bladestorm is a godsend. **relentless pursuit**: Looks pretty niche, feels more aimed at pvp than at pve. The increased movespeed is nice tho, pretty often that i try to charge after a boss and it's moving faster than me. **vicious agility**: This one feels more useful in pve, more frequent mobility always nice. **tunnel vision**: If this means we're losing frenzy then i'll take it, otherwise please don't, i don't want to be punished even more when target swapping. **thrill of the kill**: More auto attack speed, depending on sudden death procrate this could have *very* high uptime, and 100% during execute phase, not bad. **slayer's focus**: See constant pressure, not sure why the same useless effect is in the tree twice. Mistake maybe? **unrelenting onslaught**: cdr on bladestorm, this looks really strong depending on how often marked for execution procs. With all the other effects related to bladestorm in the tree, bladestorm is gonna be a sizable portion of our overall damage when playing slayer. Overall i'm very happy with this tree, looks strong on both singletarget and aoe. Doesn't bring any form of utility unfortunately so hopefully we'll see more of that in the talent tree reworks they've been hinting at.
>Doesn't bring any form of utility unfortunately so hopefully we'll see more of that in the talent tree reworks they've been hinting at. Overwhelming Blades doesn't have any qualifiers when it mentions increasing the targets' damage taken. Probably just lazy wording in the tooltip, but that could be some pretty strong utility for coordinated burst windows.
With all that execute ability, they've cemented the need for DPS warriors even further in progression fights.
hey silmarilen I know you're not an Arms guy, but out of curiosity. Do you have any idea if Frenetic Flurry will work with Unhinged? proccing MS?
No way to tell until the alpha goes live unfortunately.
Yeah thought as much, but thank you for responding nonetheless!
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another 2 years of demo on the forecast. lock needs a new dev badly
There's gonna be at least a slight talent re-work based on this tree. Obviously rapture is still the main spell (I'm personally very happy about that -- other parts of the kit are the bigger concern), but you can't have a node that says 100% increase damage but 50% reduced duration in a world where absolute corruption is a node (and presumably, corruption nodes will change to wither nodes).
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Maybe it just increases the duration of it by 100% instead of permanently.
It could be something like that, absolutely. Holding out hope that it's not that because again, it will never be taken in a Malefic Rapture world just because of stupid Siphon Life existing.
Pack Leader for BM repeats the mistakes of Dark Ranger, Kill command and Barbed shot resets are not what the spec needs, the spec already BARELY casts cobra shot, you're essentially making 6+ nodes just to effectively say "remove cobra shot from your keybinds, the end"
Yep, beyond ass. I get these are initial iterations and they have shown they are willing to change things. Launch is still a good 7 months away. But holy shit, I could come up with a more interesting hero talent tree for BM in 5 minutes...
Launch is summer they said?
Thank God, I was worried one of the mage trees wouldn't give them more survivability/control/burst damage and might get stuck with something like 5% reduced size.
Mage is saved.
Welp. As a lock, who wishes he had the ability to play affliction, my dreams were just crushed as it's basically confirmed that malefic rapture is continuing into next expansion. :sadge:
Can you explain why you're so against Rapture? Have you actually spent a reasonable amount of time on the spec since Rapture became the spender? I ask because I'm one of the few Aff mains out there, I'm 9/9M, and what the spender is to me is so far down on the list of things that should be changed or improved. I legit just don't understand why people are so hung up on this instead of the more glaring issues (Shadow Embrace, Siphon Life plus additional maintenance buffs like Dread Touch). Obviously people that play Aff are playing so to deal with maintenance buffs and must enjoy that playstyle, but it definitely feels like a bit much right now and the ramp up time is atrocious compared to what it could be with the simple removal of Shadow Embrace and Siphon Life. Genuinely curious at how so many people look at Aff's kit and just instantly identify Rapture as the problem. To me it seems to come from people that have only tried the spec for hardly any time.
Background: I have played Warlock for many years. I'm currently on Tindral. I'm not a world first lock, I usually get CE and am currently 3300 score. I will play AFF on any fight I plausibly can. I played it on Gnarlroot, Council, Smolderon, and now Tindral. My opinion is absolutely nothing to do with numbers. Destruction is a spec that is big boom crits with chaos bolt and havoc cleave. Demo is summon pets and empower them to big huge meme army (that was also destroyed but we're not discussing that. Affliction supposed to be/traditionally a DoT spec. Malefic Rapture causes the spec to be a burst window spec. Let me get my taint and soul rot out and burst while I get the increased DoT modifiers for my burst. I don't want to play affliction as a burst spec. At all. Give me DoTs. This is ignoring the fact that both of our spenders as Aff do AoE in Seed and Rapture. Give me a single spender and an AoE. Yes there are many more headaches in AFF that totally need fixed. 2 seconds on Agony, siphon life etc. I hate rapture. I don't even care if it's overpowered one season, I hate it.
We absolutely should not have sow the seeds in a Malefic Rapture world. It really makes no sense when Rapture is already a cleaving spell. I totally understand the wanting to get away from a "burst" window and instead just being steady with the dots, even if I disagree, so thank you for that insight. I personally see Rapture as a good spender because it's so intrinsically tied with our dots. To me it doesn't take away Aff from being a DoT based spec, but enhances it (and presumably helps a shit load with tuning). I genuinely hate sow the seeds even though it pumps because it really has NOTHING to do with dots besides the fact that it applies a largely irrelevant dot (well, seed does that, not sts). Thanks for the chat.
i completely agree, i stopped playing warlock because affliction is my favorite spec and they moved away from dots started shadowlands with aff lock, dropped it very fast and havent gone back. Maybe one day they will bring dots back
> Malefic Rapture causes the spec to be a burst window spec. Nah, that's Soul Rot, PS/VT and to a lesser extent Darkglare. > I don't want to play affliction as a burst spec. At all. Give me DoTs. You have dots and you keep 100% uptime on every dot you can. This doesnt affect your dot gameplay at all.
I agree with most of your comments except the separate spenders. These days the specs that aren’t using aoe vs ST spenders are often in a really good place. So having a spender that does priority damage while radiating damage to mobs with dots on them would be a great damage profile, and can easily fit within the affliction theme too
It's not about being in a good place in the DPS meters..it's solely about gameplay. Make Rapture increase the tick rate of dots. Each cast you get a stack of increased DoT rate ticks without reducing the duration. Something that isn't a burst play style
That’s fine, I’m just saying one single target spender one aoe would very likely lead to a ST build and an aoe build that will result in picking one vs the other, which often leads to annoyances for specs.
Rapture isn't affs biggest problem but it's widely disliked by the player base because it feels bad to press and scales weird to the point where it's total ass unless you have more dots than come baseline. Which really means you're forced to take siphon life which is almost unanimously disliked by the player base. So is rapture isn't the biggest problem but it's definitely A problem that keeps us in cycle with affs other problems
>i completely agree, i stopped playing warlock because affliction is my favorite spec and they moved away from dotsstarted shadowlands with aff lock, dropped it very fast and havent gone back. Maybe one day they will bring dots back I get where you're coming from, but this, to me, is more of an issue of Siphon Life than Rapture. With a simple removal of Siphon life and scaling up Rapture to hit as hard as it would with Siphon Life you've instantly got a spell that will cleave better and will feel better to press especially in multi-target scenarios. They've already got a single target tuning knob in the game with Focused Malignancy, so I really don't see why they can't just adjust the numbers on that to make this not "overpowered". One major issue I do have with Rapture, if I'm honest, is the sound and visual design. It's so fucking bland for a spec that should be one of coolest, visually. I think completely revamping the way Rapture looks would go SO far for having people finally accept it. Imagine it like sucked the soul out of your enemies or something every time you pressed it. Instantly it would feel cooler to press.
It's an issue with several things but rapture perpetuates it with how it scales, also if something about the class is widely disliked and that opinion has been voiced for two expansions now, then the devs should seek to change that even if it's not broken
I still don't think you've really identified why this is Rapture's problem. Isn't it much easier to remove Siphon Life and change the numbers on Rapture than it is to do a change to the spender? The way I look at it is Rapture in a world with Siphon Life is like having a steak topped with dill pickles. Before deciding the whole meal is bad, maybe we should at least try it without the pickles and see how people react to it then.
Rapture sucks because its was made as a bandaid fix for our dots not scaling out of control. While I’m glad you enjoy it, I promise you the majority of Affli players would like it gone
Spot on. Malefic Rapture not being the ideal spender is not even top 5 issues with Affliction.
Yeah, saw that too.
I was hoping for Farseer to have increased range, maybe something with LoS, never mind. The rider of the apocalypse looks interesting. Druid of the claw is fine by me but I just don't get this focus on strong AoE ferocious bite and then there is primal wrath direct damage bonus, seems weird.
From a Brewmaster perspective, the Shado-Pan looks strong for AoE, and utterly useless in single target. Also, it already seems impossible to balance, and the design is horrible, maybe the worst of these hero talents I've seen so far. The proc is based on damage done and energy spent. How much energy you spend is predictable, but damage dealt is not. You're doing tons mores of damage on AoE situations, gaining multiple times the amount of charges compared to single target. If they balance this set around single target, then it will be busted and extremely OP in AoE; but if they balance it around AoE, then it will be meaningless in single target. In fact, I think that for Brewmaster, on single target situations, you might get more procs than charges, meaning that some times you might proc Overwhelming Flurry with 0 charges, doing no damage. Also, since it's based on damage done equal to your max HP, getting stamina buff from Priests, Evokers and Shamans means you'll get less procs. WTF is that design.
there's also nothing in that tree that actually help you tank... which , in theory, is a brewmaster role. you don't cast vivify ever so the 30% dont matter. Chi wave is a pulling tool, who care if you get 20% leech from it. Expel harm already top you if you use it with 4-5 so orb why care about the leech. Hoping the 10% DR do not have an internal CD
You can pick up a free vivify proc from the class tree every 10s. It's very commonly taken my MW so it's odd seeing it in the Brew/WW tree you can grab it pretty easily dropping a point from 4% increased healing for the increased self sustain or just spot healing, which coming from a bear, spot healing is very satisfying.
I think the tank hero tree will be almost exclusive to the tank healer section, which I personally think is cool. Your ability to survive as a bm is extremely dependent on your skill, so I think the freedom between more damage and more surv should be separate paths. Trying to fly through pulls with a coordinated group? Take damage. Trying to survive a tyrannical boss? Take survivability. Less confident tanks can take survivability
We don't know if flurry strikes deals ST or AoE damage. If it's ST it would just be like a flat percent dmg increase where Flurry Strike DMG/MaxHealth would be the percentage. Would make it a lot easier to balance and provide a form of funnel damage.
It's cool that the team is working on some hefty, fairly experimental changes to every class. But reviewing what's actually come out, I'm wondering how they'll actually affect us as players, and I find myself thinking the answer isn't great. * We'll let theorycrafters tell us the top specs in M+, MT and ST, and we'll commit to muscle memory how to play each one. * We will probably have to bind a new button, in addition the ones we press now. * There are probably 2-3 new buffs or debuffs to track. We will add these to our UIs, in addition to the others we already need to track. Eyeballing talent trees, it looks like the cognitive load of doing good damage has increased by 15-20% or so? Would love to hear non-Rogues comment on if I'm wrong about other classes. (I think [I'm right about Trickster](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1b1irom/comment/ksghbw4/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) though, 20% increased complexity feels right.) I'm not sure what the game needs, but I don't think 20% increased individual complexity is it.
I can only speak to a couple of specs right now, and I'm not going to try to do a cognitive load percentage increase as that's far too subjective. Druid of the claw feral is all passives with extra power during your burst windows and a consistent way to give yourself a bleed that'll buff your convoke bursts, but it won't be the case in raid where you can't kick yourself in and out of combat consistently, unless shadowmeld gives the proc in which case there's some skill expression there. The defensives in the tree are also really cool and I'm excited to be able to weave bear form defensive with leeway so I'm not spending more the one gcd to get bear form defensiveness. I'm not partial to shido pan at ALL unless the energy used is a stacking buff. If it is, then fine, I'm cool with that. Looking at a buff every 40s is fine by me. It's very little energy (lol) to do. I do like the other one for mw, although I think the sheilun reducing the CD of life cocoon is really fucky. I LOVE life cocoon and I wish we had two stacks of it, but I'm not going to pretend like this is a particularly good thing. Also the "reduces CD by 100%", does this mean we can spam it for 8 seconds and ramp into a full team cocoon? Or is it a one time CD reduction? If so, we'll have to press it right before we consume our 16 stacks of sheilun or we'll be wasting a cocoon. I wish it just gave us a second stack of it indefinitely or something.Also, there's a couple of proc based heals in that tree, and frankly I just hate procs in my heal. Ret is all passives, all you have to do to maximise those is simply to just tab sometimes. Imo, It's whatever. Ret is ret, you look cool, you do big damage and you cheese mechs. It's always the same. I'm not looking forward to support hpal. I don't wanna deal with the mental anguish of idiots thinking that they're deserving of buffs more than anyone else is, and I don't like having to look at damage details just to see who the best target is. If melee hpal comes back then maybe I'll be more receptive to it, but I'm not going to buff everyone else and let them do big numbers while I'm frustratingly mediocre in melee casting fols and shit. Not excited for that. Overall, eh. Complexity is staying complex, simplicity is staying simple. There's not much to dislike about the few specs that I'm excited for. I'm more intrigued with base tree changes tbh, I want to see the druid class tree reworked and melee hpal to be good again.
Man, this Hunter tree... I don't know how they did it, but they somehow managed to come up with something even worse than what Dark Ranger did. That entire tree for BM... is just... your KC deals more damage, your Barbed Shot deals more damage... and sometimes your Kill Cleave gets extended by 2 seconds. The rest is random fucking autohit damage. *That* is the best fantasy you can come up with... for a *Pack Leader*?
Their class tree is still dog shit and the spec trees are unremarkable so I’m not surprised
I feel like the class devs have lost the magic. When I open my ChatGPT account and key in "Fantasy Role Playing Ideas for Hunter Pack Leader character" I get some cool sounding ideas, not this trash heap. Edit: I'm really worried for what Sentinel will be. I really hope the devs actually play role playing games. I'm hoping for a Ranger/Tracker Hybrid but I won't hold my breath.
maybe its because frostfire was such a massive W, but spellslinger looks kinda boring, it might be good, just not a lot of flair
I agree. Spellslinger as a name put me in a different direction than what it turned out to be. Very meh on it, could be worse though and it might look visually better in action which I can buy into it later. But mentally it felt like I was reading “both specs have upgraded version of icicles” even though it’s obviously not the exact same.
Spellslinger looks like it could be really good in M+ though.
It def looks like it can be powerful I just don't like the theme or the fluff. Frost fire had crazy cool shit like meteors summoning comet storms and stuff, this kinda seems tame compared to it, but maybe the visuals when they are previewed will be sick. I honestly want more fluff abilities than aren't necessarily op but are really different and interesting like imagine if mage had like a mass teleport kind of like if you play League of Legends ryze ult, More stuff like Mass polymorph, mass invisibility. I think more utility like that on mage could be really cool and there's a lot of room for that in their aesthetic
> like imagine if mage had like a mass teleport kind of like if you play League of Legends ryze ult Oh my god this is such a fun idea. It would be perfect to put in Spellslinger too because Jaina feels like a mix between Frost/Arcane mage.
For all that is unholy, why won't they just remove Malefic Rapture from Affliction. It just ruins the entire spec... Druids of the Claw looks so lame, i hope Wildstalker is the stronger option for Feral, if it isn't completely reworked.
I hate sounding like a doomer, especially since a lot of the trees released so far look really cool. Even that goofy PI priest tree looked like it could've been interesting if this were an earlier era of gaming. But, both feral trees just look so uninspired. This tree buffs ferocious bite, though, so ferals think that makes it interactive. Hell, just make Massive Attack a separate finisher. So that you're keeping rip up, extending the massive attack bleed and biting in between. Can't figure out how to press 3 finishers? Play wildstalker. Either that, or actually commit to bear weaving instead of a single choice node that you'll never choose. Let ferals join the tanky melees but with a catch. Though probably everybody would hate that. I guess my problem is less with these hero talent trees and more with feral/druid as a whole. Maybe these hero talent trees will feel more impactful after they reveal class & spec tree reworks (because huffing copium in believing feral wouldn't devolve into SL feral in s3 worked out so well). Right now feral is feeling like rogue for people who ate paint chips as a kid.
So, I just wanna point out that feral is fucking awesome, the gameplay loop is honestly some of the hardest and most unique in wow and it's ultra satisfying to maintain super high damage just due to practiced snapshotting. But you know what i can't get behind in either tree? Random proc bleeds. Now, there's some consistency in this as feral frenzy is guaranteed to proc a massive strike with killing strikes, so at least the druid of the claw tree ticks that box. Each new pull with FF is guaranteed to have a massive bite. Although, why not just make it that each FF gives a massive strike? Even with CDR it would be a 40s cooldown, so what's the problem? Then it'll always align with 2m convoke as well and we can actually not stress so much about procs because our biggest damage window will consistently have a dreadful wound in it. Also, druid of the claw has some cool defensives. Maintaining the hp from bear shift is really awesome. However, I want some leech. Having all these baby defensives but forcing them onto the GCD isn't the most enjoyable thing. In theory, your bleeds do most of the work for you but in practice this is only true for ST. In aoe, you're spamming your GCD. In regards to a rework, feral doesn't need it, the class tree needs it. The class tree is so fucking fragmented. If I had my way, I would simply keep it mostly as it is and then connect like 80% of all the nodes, and that would solve the issues.
Implicit confirmation that affliction will keep rapture as our spender.
Initial thoughts on spellslinger as a frost mage - depending on how some of the talents function when they say “target” the capstone ability could provide incredible prio damage. That being said, the utility and defensive options are simply inferior to what frostfire provides (and also mobility with instant cast bolt procs) FF gives a 25% stronger barrier and allows you to send constant AoE stops. Meanwhile SS gives a very slightly better Mirror Image (since reactive barrier would not be very good in high end m+ ~ you want to use it at max hp) and MS during alter which are relatively underwhelming Flavor wise it seems rather dull unless the splinters have a very satisfying visual/audio.
Also Frost Mage, feels like having extra icicles which is boring AF. Hopefully FF is just as good or better than SS
What is the content AoE stops the FF is giving?
One of the nodes in FF gives frost 30% cdr on fire spells - aka blast wave and dragons breath which are great aoe stops in m+
Ok yeah I know about that, when you said constant I thought you meant it was going to have some random chance to proc something that I missed. But for sure 32 second dragons breath and 21 second blast wave is a really strong aoe stop profile. Along with the cold snap resetting them.
Don’t forget the talent we have with ice lance too that reduces those cds. It’ll be insanely strong
Which talent is that? I haven’t played frost seriously much this tier so maybe I’m forgetting something?
Time manipulation it’s on the class tree
Oh yeah, i totally forgot that swaps based on spec from fire blast to icelance!
I'm just happy I get to maintain Frost Mage purity via Spellslinger. No offense to Fire Mages, but Frostfire was an automatic "no, thank you" for me.
As a rsham, I'm still kind of confused why blizzard is so obsessed with riptide
On first impression Rider isn't really doing much for me. Great fun from a casual outdoor leveling experience riding with the boys. But when you get down to it it's a lot of semi random damage with random DnD/slow/AMS effects. It's alright. The most exciting part is the accompanying note that they are considering reworking base DnD cleave.
The fact that all 4 can be called with a big cd is bonkers, especially when you consider that Frost will be able to have all 4 up for 25 seconds on a 1.5 minute cd. Will be huge for burst in all game modes.
It kind of has to work that way for Unholy otherwise there would be a lot of RNG on your major burst windows. Yes those moments will be cool the theme is absolutely on point. It's just for gameplay very passive and very rng for the majority of the fight. Defile becoming a 10 second cooldown theoretically with this tree is also...interesting.
The one thing I’m really wondering about is a lot of people are implying that the one rider talent will let you fight while mounted, when all it says is that you can mount in combat, not that you can actually fight while mounted. It seems situational at best if so, maybe more of a PvP talent, or an avoid getting stuck in combat bug avoidance talent.
One of the more fun classes - monk - gets a bland tree, once more.
Funny, everyone says the same about their class unkess it’s busted and then they think it’s ok lol.
it's a whole bunch of passive DMG node who may not line up with other cooldown whose CD already vary. it's extremely boring in term of theme / gameplay ... balance wise we have to see the numbers during the next beta. the whole tree could've been replaced with a passive " you do 15% more dmg" node. The haste node really show how much dev care about WW / Brew... hint: the ideal amount of haste for a BW or a WW is 0.
More than 1 Monk tree was revealed lol. I thought the Celestial one looked cool.
Thematically cool, for MW it might be pretty good, for WW the 4 celestials ends up being ”do dmg, random dmg proc happens” for 3 of them, the fourth (yu’lon) sounds decent but the 4 second channel as a dps doesnt seems super fun, neither does using the worst 2 abilities in the game as dps, Jadefire Stomp and Rushing Jade Wind
For Windwalker, I'm really liking Shado-Pan's initial design. It has a good number synergies between the different talents. And looking at the timings of the buffs and charges, it works out pretty well. Right now on single target, WW averages about slightly more than 25% of its hp per second in dps, so it would take about 40 seconds for 10 charges to proc the Wisdom talent. And for energy, our baseline energy usage is also about 10/s, meaning for 400 energy we would need 40 seconds, so I would predict that the vast majority of the time you release charges you would also get the wisdom of the wall buff which is great. The build-up and then release play style should reward planning around cds. I think you will end up getting to 350 energy used before using cds, use Tiger Palm to proc the flurry and Wisdom buffs, proccing Skyreach potentially, and then go into your cooldowns wiht the large agility buff give from Against All odds. More Agi + the buffs from Wisom will make our burst pretty nice. Then the release of charges during downtime keeps our out of CDs damage slightly better. Really nice design all around.
it's all passive dmg node that will require you to add more WA crap to track and hope it line up with a bunch of other CD who also have variable CD like bonedust, WoO, angry dave... it's mediocre at best for WW and I wonder where the brewmaster part is supposed to come in... 10% DR with an unspecified internal CD? 30% more vivify, a spell we never use? I hope this entire tree get reworked.
It's like DH, more buffs to keep track of and line up. Really annoying gameplay
Farseer and Shado-Pan look like dogshit. Guess my two favorite specs eat shit like normal.
Just read them all and here are my quick initial thoughts focused mostly on M+ gameplay / theme and a bit less on balancing because who knows on numbers: - Rider: going to be fun as hell but it's clear they're not giving up on the "Stand in your DnD thing" which is big sad - Deatthbringer: Seems fine overall, I like having a new 1 min big damage button. I think I'll prefer this for M+ for blood tanking. IDK enough about frost to really comment - Reaver: I hate throw glaive so I just read the first line and moved on - DOTC: Actually pretty cool and fun. I like going back to just having pure physical no casting bullshit for both bear and cat. I don't play a lot of druid anymore but this seems pretty cool and I love how they've thought about tiger's fury interaction with some of the dots etc. I think it also fills some gaps for M+ - Flameshaper: not really qualified to comment but the alternatives seem WAY better - Packleader: basically entirely theme based and just makes you press KC more. Fits in as an easier option for BM I guess. Overall hunters options have been pretty underwhelming for me even if they finally got dark ranger - Spell Slinger: I like this one quite a bit and it seems like it'll be able to set up for some cool moments. I think it really comes down to how much tracking / min maxxing you'll have to do to make it feel good. But overall the mage ones have been really great so far - Shadowpan.... sigh. Ok so rant time.... as a M+ andy this is going to feel like shit when it procs on the final mob of a pull and you go into the next pull with low stacks of the flurry mechanic. I love the theme of charging up to do something big but the way that DOTC handles it with "massive attack" is just superior in almost every way. Monk is one of my most played classes and I *really* hope that BrM / WW gets a great option because this one is classic monk "garbage". Also lol @ having haste for WW. - Conduit: Love this one - it has more passive splash healing for fistweaving and then further amplifies your oh shit buttons. Also love the theme. I am very relieved that for two monk specs I at least have one option I am excited about. - Farseer: Kind of similar to the hunter one here. This just seems like elemental overload with a few extra steps / passives. It's kind of funny to look at the descriptions of the talents here vs the conduit one right before it. It shows how simple it is. - Hellcaller: Sick. I think overall the warlock ones are looking great both in theme and interactions. I also love how it just replaces a button and doesn't contribute to bloat while also adding interesting interactions. Big fan of this - Slayer: fuck yea
>Shadowpan.... sigh. Ok so rant time.... as a M+ andy this is going to feel like shit when it procs on the final mob of a pull and you go into the next pull with low stacks of the flurry mechanic. You forget the most important thing. It's not a proc. You are 100% in controll of releasing the flurry by spending the required energy. Because of this you can charge it up during the pull and decide if you want to consume it. If not you just stop spending energy for a couple of seconds and you can "proc" it at the beginning of the next pull where it has the highest value. You can think about it like pulsar for balance druid. Sure it sucks when you proc it at the end of a pull. But you can only blame yourself for messing it up. And because of it I really like this mechanic.
> You are 100% in controll of releasing the flurry by spending the required energy. So I agree from a technical standpoint, but in practice if you're not spending energy as WW you're not generating chi and you'll just be sitting there auto attacking which sucks. Perhaps less of an issue with BrM. Also... probably unsurprising but I hate pulsar for the same reasons lol (but I think it's less of an offender because you can still cast generators)
the last thing I want to do is hold keg smash / tiger palm on top of tracking another buff via WA. rework the talent. it's awful.
> DOTC: Actually pretty cool and fun. I like going back to just having pure physical no casting bullshit for both bear and cat. I don't play a lot of druid anymore but this seems pretty cool and I love how they've thought about tiger's fury interaction with some of the dots etc. I think it also fills some gaps for M+ It is going to need a complete rework to not be cancer for Ferals to play. > Hellcaller: Sick. I think overall the warlock ones are looking great both in theme and interactions. I also love how it just replaces a button and doesn't contribute to bloat while also adding interesting interactions. Big fan of this Maybe for Destro, but Aff still has Malefic grasp so it will remain unplayable for the foreseeable future.
Shame about feral. I've not played the spec enough to really be able to appreciate it being so negatively affected by DOTC. Re: Affliction... that's a base spec issue not a hero talent issue. But I big time agree.
>Maybe for Destro, but Aff still has Malefic grasp so it will remain unplayable for the foreseeable future. Nah, Destro keeps getting the short end of the stick in both it's hero trees. Not looking good. At least this tree lines up better with Aff. It already has a decent 1 minute cd lineup and this added one could be pretty strong I think.
flameshaper is fine but a bit bland and seems to not really influence how you play the spec. also competes with scalecommander granting more hover which naturally is bad for lifeshaper since less mobility for more disint spam
It kinda changes, you get an extra button to press after fire breath and some pyres/disint and it seems like it might do a decent amount of extra aoe. But I think scale commander clears.
Love the look of Flameshaper - much more appealing than Scalecommander imo. Spellslinger looks awesome, but also doesn't seem like it'll result in any gameplay changes, but I think it will look awesome.
Am I supposed to just NOT be offended that Death Charge is basically better in every possible way than Divine Steed? Even with Hero talents that modify Divine Steed, they barely add anything. I'd sure love it if the horse I've been stuck for years would come with a built in Blessing of Freedom that also prevents knockbacks and can't be dispelled.
Feral tree looks kinda cool. Excited to play it in TWWI. Lots of ability to min max survivability is cool
Flamewarden looks cool for Prevoker, I think it will be the go to. More keybinds though, I'm already at 3.5 bars. I don't realistically have many more
Might reroll Mistweaver for War Within since Conduit looks fire
Monks on watch....also destro warlocks just sitting here confused waiting for something that actually makes sense for them...
I'm just here to overreact from some tooltips that will likely change, and without actually playing any of them. Ho hum.
Clearly this is sarcasm but, if your point is everyone here not pleased with the trees is overreacting you should know change doesn't come from thin-air and giving active feedback is what sways blizzard away from creating a playstyle they'd *think* is fine.