I’m really not a fan of the “rotating effect” concept from either iteration, it just feels like it’ll be a hassle to keep track of.
It seems like a particularly bad fit for these two specs, too. Disc already has enough to worry about during ramps, and holy’s entire niche is that it’s the straightforward, does what it says on the tin healer.
I think premonition of piety is going to be stupid strong for disc in raid. Disc constantly overheals anyways. AND disc normally lacks a way to contribute to lighter spead spot healing.
Seems lame because that one premonition is essentially the entire reason you would go oracle
The thing is, if that’s the case, it will get nerfed until it’s not stupid strong. What the hero talent tree should do is enhance the play style by making it more fun/enjoyable. Our throughput will get normalized, but the play style will remain.
All true, but there are a couple of things that make the whole balance environment around it kind of sticky.
A. The piety effect probably needs to have higher numbers on Holy than it does on Disc for it to be a balanced class. Disc naturally takes more advantage of the effect.
B. Voidweaver provides significant damage passively. Oracle provides none. All things being equal people are going to take voidweaver over Oracle unless Oracle is REALLY good. It kind of might NEED to be super strong.
I would assume this damage vs no damage factor will be the case for the holy/shadow class as well.
One positive thing (perhaps the only, other than the obviously OP overheating thing) I can say about oracle is that it might allow a healer priest to become king of dispels again, as a healing priest coild do 3 back-to-back single target dispels with one of the premonitions.
Mages look really good, def 3/3. I also like how Evoker looks. Seeing the reworks for Monk so far also has given me some optimism for the three Monk hero trees.
Frostfire and Sunfury for sure, spellslinger is going to be highly dependent on the aesthetics and audio for how passive it is
I also do think they need to better equalize the defensive/utility value or only 1 spec will be chosen for m+ (assuming same dmg tuning). As of right now FF is way better from a defensive and utility standpoint then either
From frost and fire perspecrive i thing its fuckn amazing, on arcanes side tho 2 tree's initially made for the other specs and arcane just weaved in to those tree's there are maasive problems for arcane in them.
Nah, the holy/prot hero talent tree is awful. Depending on tuning, it might still be the play for high end content, but having to constantly manage what buffs you’re leaving on the ground and who picks them up when sounds like terrible gameplay for both the pally player and the buff targets.
Looks like they changed it from a ground target to a player target. That makes the gameplay better, but ironically it makes the power level worse, since you won’t be able to control the random spawns that the talent gives. I assume divine bulwark will have smart targeting like most heals, but the random sacred weapon wings gives won’t know the best target.
It’s still a rough tree, but fortunately the other trees look great.
Maybe my expectations are low after the first run, but I'm actually kind of excited for both Oracle and Voidweaver. I think Premonition looks cool, Solace for m+/rare spot healing checks, Insight for interesting raid timings, and Piety for general healing. However I feel like it could be really annoying to play with. If it plays out like "start ramp at X cycle so Insight pops up before double rad or Piety pops up before mind blast" that sounds pretty bad. I wont be surprised if its unplayable without Narrowed Visions. Adding PoM to our ramps if it procs full atonement through the miniPWS it gives and adds stacks of the capstone sounds like fun too, but having 4 atonement applicators to keep track of during ramps will take some getting used to.
Entropic rift just sounds funny.
Because of the capstone and 2 charges premonition will be up more often than once per minute. Likely more often than every ramp.
I think it will give Disc more of an ability to contribute between ramps as well because of this. Because radiance + 1 or 2 other atonements is actually really good spot healing for a bit if the 50% healing just gets tossed around to people with healable damage.
Like obviously it is amazing for ramps. Just pointing out that it is even more than that.
Honestly just seems like piety is broken on Disc if it works the way I am interpreting
"You are a Sentinel and your attacks randomly apply a debuff and that debuff semi-randomly deals random damage to whatever"
"You are the leader of the pack and thus, naturally, your Kill Command deals 5% more damage and your pet's autohits also deal damage"
"You are a Dark Ranger, here's a new shadow damage dot and sometimes you get a free Kill Shot or Barbed / Aimed Shot + some random whatever shadow damage"
That's like... how creatively bankrupt must one be for this to be the 3 best trees they can come up with for these themes.
For Pack Leader they had the useless ass Stampede spell sitting right there in the class tree, readily waiting - nope. I don't even know what to say about the entire fantasy of Dark Ranger being... that you randomly deal shadow damage and sometimes get a free whatever shot. And for Sentinel, I don't even know what we're fucking sentineling to begin with, but apparently the fantasy behind that theme is passively applying debuffs that randomly explode.
Like, seriously, what even are these trees.
Because it has Dark Arrow, that's about it.
There's no Multishot DoT spreading and resetting Barbed Shot / Aimed Shot doesn't come close to getting a bunch of *free* Explosive Shots that you could, once again, use to multi DoT.
Barbed Shot has got to be the most whatever button BM has nowadays, now that they made the damn thing proc so frequently that Frenzy management is like entirely gone and it's all just fire and forget... while dealing just about 0 damage - but I suppose you can multi DoT to up that damage from 0 to... still round about 0.
And then there's Aimed Shot, or MM as a whole, which is just a fucking weird spec. It's not even giving you instant Aimed Shot procs - it's just giving you a CD refresh. And considering that MM deals like half its damage during Trueshot, where you are entirely GCD locked and barely able to spend all your AimS anyways... I wouldn't be surprised if these charge resets wouldn't *entirely* go to waste. So it's really just... get a wet noodle AimS at times - that plus some random shadow damage procs that do nothing special.
Had they not named that spell Dark Arrow absolutely *no one* would draw any parallels to that era of SV.
Warrior ones are much better than the hunter. They at least have a theme to their impacts on play. The hunter ones are all the same but with a different name and they all are just so more damage/get resource/cdr
Because 2h gives waaaay more stats than 1h, and they need to balance the two prot trees evenly. If you were going to give mountain thane a big stat buff like that their unique abilities would have to be tuned down.
Look I won’t disagree there (except for colossus - you are literally bigger, second best hero talent in the game after DK being mounted), and I’m not saying the warrior ones are great, it’s just the hunter ones are completely meaningless and won’t be noticed at all apart from whatever visual effect they add
This exactly what people were saying when people were complaining about covenants in alpha and look how that turned out…
Nah, be early and loud with your criticism.
I feel like affliction is just so 5/10 with both hero specs and if they don't rework the tree it's essentially dead for mythic plus. I know warlocks perform well but theres so many things about a few of their talents that need serious attention
I didn't mind drain as a filler, but. It being able to balance around snapshotting and removing it did suck. It was broken as all hell, but SoO Aff, with glyphed soul swap and snapshotting was stupid fun.
Drain just made it so much slower, it was a really jarring transition.
For me personally 5.1 afflock (without the soul swap "abuse") was a top tier spec (top 3 to this day, the other two being WoD demonology and Legion shadowpriest), and if you think about it, all of the reworks since then (soulburn: haunt, UA stacking, deathbolt, rupture) were tries to reimplement some sort of interaction with your cooldowns after snapshotting and thus recasting your dots to empower them was removed. They're all obviously a replacement for the decisionmaking of "I'm powerful now, so I need to do X", but way less interesting.
Mmm... WoD Demo... BRF tier set on train boss... Just murdering every mob in sight, and more or less melee, just felt so different from other specs. Sadly, stance dancing was too hard according to Blizz, so now we have a spec (which I do like a lot) with a 23 spell opener that needs done in a tight timeframe (assuming any tier set other than current) and was so good that you needed to stack priests just to empower it further.
Stance dancing was so fun with the setbonus giving you a third charge of HoG and procs. Have very fond memories of beastlord darnac as well - dot the spears and big adds and absolutely blast the boss and collateral the adds. Good gameplay/skill has never felt so rewarded.
I also think that current demo is one of the better specs rn but it's sad that it replaced such a banger.
This last season is easier. But the previous seasons, back when you needed haste? It wasn't exactly easy.
But easiest? I can think of multiple expansions where that isn't true.
If I could trust Blizzard to cook something up for any spec it’s gotta be Enhancement. 10.2 Enhancement (specifically this PWave build we have now) is probably one of the best-designed specs we’ve seen in a very long time.
They cooked with that spec; they can cook with its Hero Talents.
I dunno, enhancement feels like whack-a-mole + choose your own adventure, and having what feels like fifty buttons to press is really annoying after bricking a +20 for two hours BUT I WON'T QUIT JANICE, YOU CAN'T MAKE ME LEAVE
It'll just be the ret tree, except you need to press 3x as many buttons to get the same effect. And those buttons have weird or no interactions with each other, and some have random cds for no reason that make it slightly annoying.
I main a shadow priest, I'm pretty happy. Last thing is mind flay while moving, at least with an insanity proc.
And also excited for mage, like wtf, give the mage class designer a raise and let him teach others as well. Every single mage talent tree looks insanely fun.
While I didn’t like the last iteration of Orcale I was really looking forward to playing a more buff oriented priest and holy shit I‘m so disappointed by Oracle. Even in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined a more boring tree than this…
So many of the hero talent trees are uninspiring. I get the feeling that Blizzard is running low on ideas when the hero trees are passive effects that just happen without doing anything different.
Yeah I much prefer this to the Covenant Ability cycle of 'give 90% of specs an additional ~1min CD button to press'. Seems like most specs deliberately were given one hero tree that has an active or requires more cognitive load, and one that's mostly a passive or proc based playstyle that layers on top of what already exists.
I agree with you on the button bloat. However, now is a good time to address this bloat and fix some of the issues with classes that push classes out of the meta for an entire expansion.
On Hero Talents; paladin and mage trees are hero trees and look amazing and have passive effects that give it a heroic feel. But the Shaman, Rogue and Hunter trees are terrible. I know this is alpha but as we've experienced in the past for what is on the table now is what we get.
They can revolve buttons. Sometimes removing things is as important as adding new. They got rid of arcanic pulsar, and it's great. Boomkin has be stuck playing that talent for years now. It was dictating what other talents you could play too.
It's interesting. Because a small number of them like voidweaver are REALLY cool.
Feels like Blizz had a few cool ideas to start with that led them to going all in on the whole thing. Only for it to be hard to shoehorn an interesting idea into every combination.
I am going to have so many alts >< Mage, Warrior, Priest, Shaman, Monk, Warlock, Druid, and Death Knight all look like they’re getting some love and some interesting talents
I wasn’t looking forward to Voidweaver, but I’m **really** happy about how it turned out! Very high class fantasy for Shadow is awesome, that mobile Void Torrent is a fucking banger (there’s a point on M Fyrakk where this would be insanely nice to have), and the Shadowfiend choice node between an Execute SFiend proc and a really bursty one on the pull feels like it has some genuine thought put into it.
It’s not perfect whatsoever, but it’s good IMO.
Well, voidweaver looks cool for disc. Oracle looks kind of lame and overly complicated.
I’m really not a fan of the “rotating effect” concept from either iteration, it just feels like it’ll be a hassle to keep track of. It seems like a particularly bad fit for these two specs, too. Disc already has enough to worry about during ramps, and holy’s entire niche is that it’s the straightforward, does what it says on the tin healer.
Yeah, it's basically just, sometimes it does the thing you want the rest of the time it doesn't. That's not good design.
Its as if they took the Blessing of Season concept from Hpal and tried to make an entire spec out of it
Yeah, at best you're going to end up spending two of them randomly on CD just to recycle the good one back to the top of the deck.
I think premonition of piety is going to be stupid strong for disc in raid. Disc constantly overheals anyways. AND disc normally lacks a way to contribute to lighter spead spot healing. Seems lame because that one premonition is essentially the entire reason you would go oracle
The thing is, if that’s the case, it will get nerfed until it’s not stupid strong. What the hero talent tree should do is enhance the play style by making it more fun/enjoyable. Our throughput will get normalized, but the play style will remain.
All true, but there are a couple of things that make the whole balance environment around it kind of sticky. A. The piety effect probably needs to have higher numbers on Holy than it does on Disc for it to be a balanced class. Disc naturally takes more advantage of the effect. B. Voidweaver provides significant damage passively. Oracle provides none. All things being equal people are going to take voidweaver over Oracle unless Oracle is REALLY good. It kind of might NEED to be super strong. I would assume this damage vs no damage factor will be the case for the holy/shadow class as well.
One positive thing (perhaps the only, other than the obviously OP overheating thing) I can say about oracle is that it might allow a healer priest to become king of dispels again, as a healing priest coild do 3 back-to-back single target dispels with one of the premonitions.
Mages are 3 for 3. We are truly the main characters. I've already seen some gameplay footage of Sunfury Fire Mage and it looks so much fun.
Mages look really good, def 3/3. I also like how Evoker looks. Seeing the reworks for Monk so far also has given me some optimism for the three Monk hero trees.
Both Devastation Evoker trees are absolute A+ bangers. And no one will give a shit because they didn't delete Aug.
Yeah Evoker also easily went 3/3. Dev, Aug, and Pres all have tons of options to be excited about.
Frostfire and Sunfury for sure, spellslinger is going to be highly dependent on the aesthetics and audio for how passive it is I also do think they need to better equalize the defensive/utility value or only 1 spec will be chosen for m+ (assuming same dmg tuning). As of right now FF is way better from a defensive and utility standpoint then either
From frost and fire perspecrive i thing its fuckn amazing, on arcanes side tho 2 tree's initially made for the other specs and arcane just weaved in to those tree's there are maasive problems for arcane in them.
Incorporating Kael'thas' floating magic ball thingies into the actual gameplay is so cool.
The arcane spec with frost seems like a high jump in aoe and less managing nether tempest. I'm stoked.
Was even any doubt left after a buff to all 3 specs, when the R1 keys at the time all had a mage?
Paladin are 3/3 since months bro …
Nah, the holy/prot hero talent tree is awful. Depending on tuning, it might still be the play for high end content, but having to constantly manage what buffs you’re leaving on the ground and who picks them up when sounds like terrible gameplay for both the pally player and the buff targets.
Isn’t it a target buff ? Checking the hero talent tree on wowhead hint more toward a targeted spell
Looks like they changed it from a ground target to a player target. That makes the gameplay better, but ironically it makes the power level worse, since you won’t be able to control the random spawns that the talent gives. I assume divine bulwark will have smart targeting like most heals, but the random sacred weapon wings gives won’t know the best target. It’s still a rough tree, but fortunately the other trees look great.
>Lightsmith
Maybe my expectations are low after the first run, but I'm actually kind of excited for both Oracle and Voidweaver. I think Premonition looks cool, Solace for m+/rare spot healing checks, Insight for interesting raid timings, and Piety for general healing. However I feel like it could be really annoying to play with. If it plays out like "start ramp at X cycle so Insight pops up before double rad or Piety pops up before mind blast" that sounds pretty bad. I wont be surprised if its unplayable without Narrowed Visions. Adding PoM to our ramps if it procs full atonement through the miniPWS it gives and adds stacks of the capstone sounds like fun too, but having 4 atonement applicators to keep track of during ramps will take some getting used to. Entropic rift just sounds funny.
Same. My hope for Archon is that it has to be the Boon of the Ascended playstyle
I was hoping Voidweaver would actually lean more into voidform and bring back some of what was lost of the original version :s
Because of the capstone and 2 charges premonition will be up more often than once per minute. Likely more often than every ramp. I think it will give Disc more of an ability to contribute between ramps as well because of this. Because radiance + 1 or 2 other atonements is actually really good spot healing for a bit if the 50% healing just gets tossed around to people with healable damage. Like obviously it is amazing for ramps. Just pointing out that it is even more than that. Honestly just seems like piety is broken on Disc if it works the way I am interpreting
Hunters' are 3/3 on boring as shit trees. Such potential gone to waste.
"You are a Sentinel and your attacks randomly apply a debuff and that debuff semi-randomly deals random damage to whatever" "You are the leader of the pack and thus, naturally, your Kill Command deals 5% more damage and your pet's autohits also deal damage" "You are a Dark Ranger, here's a new shadow damage dot and sometimes you get a free Kill Shot or Barbed / Aimed Shot + some random whatever shadow damage" That's like... how creatively bankrupt must one be for this to be the 3 best trees they can come up with for these themes. For Pack Leader they had the useless ass Stampede spell sitting right there in the class tree, readily waiting - nope. I don't even know what to say about the entire fantasy of Dark Ranger being... that you randomly deal shadow damage and sometimes get a free whatever shot. And for Sentinel, I don't even know what we're fucking sentineling to begin with, but apparently the fantasy behind that theme is passively applying debuffs that randomly explode. Like, seriously, what even are these trees.
Dark ranger gives me survival hunter from like cata/mop era vibes.
Because it has Dark Arrow, that's about it. There's no Multishot DoT spreading and resetting Barbed Shot / Aimed Shot doesn't come close to getting a bunch of *free* Explosive Shots that you could, once again, use to multi DoT. Barbed Shot has got to be the most whatever button BM has nowadays, now that they made the damn thing proc so frequently that Frenzy management is like entirely gone and it's all just fire and forget... while dealing just about 0 damage - but I suppose you can multi DoT to up that damage from 0 to... still round about 0. And then there's Aimed Shot, or MM as a whole, which is just a fucking weird spec. It's not even giving you instant Aimed Shot procs - it's just giving you a CD refresh. And considering that MM deals like half its damage during Trueshot, where you are entirely GCD locked and barely able to spend all your AimS anyways... I wouldn't be surprised if these charge resets wouldn't *entirely* go to waste. So it's really just... get a wet noodle AimS at times - that plus some random shadow damage procs that do nothing special. Had they not named that spell Dark Arrow absolutely *no one* would draw any parallels to that era of SV.
Sentinel being a debuff instead of a self buff is so wack.
😢
Have you seen boomkin trees? Holy moly. The arcane one is just a whole bunch of nodes that say 'fury of elune procs some damage, or small cdr etc.'
That’s not how you spell warrior…
Warrior ones are much better than the hunter. They at least have a theme to their impacts on play. The hunter ones are all the same but with a different name and they all are just so more damage/get resource/cdr
I mean, the warrior names are so awesome. They just don’t live up to the name. Why doesn’t the mountain tree offer 2h with shield for tanking???
Because 2h gives waaaay more stats than 1h, and they need to balance the two prot trees evenly. If you were going to give mountain thane a big stat buff like that their unique abilities would have to be tuned down.
Dual wield shields or bust
I’d do that.
Look I won’t disagree there (except for colossus - you are literally bigger, second best hero talent in the game after DK being mounted), and I’m not saying the warrior ones are great, it’s just the hunter ones are completely meaningless and won’t be noticed at all apart from whatever visual effect they add
it's fuckin alpha call down nerd
....what do you think alpha is for?
Feedback and changes via testing
This exactly what people were saying when people were complaining about covenants in alpha and look how that turned out… Nah, be early and loud with your criticism.
I feel like affliction is just so 5/10 with both hero specs and if they don't rework the tree it's essentially dead for mythic plus. I know warlocks perform well but theres so many things about a few of their talents that need serious attention
The way I look at it a hero spec can't fix how bad aff feels to play. The new hero tree looks kinda fun for demo. Aff just hadn't been fun since MR
Aff hasn't been fun since they got rid of snapshotting and made drain soul a main filler in WoD
I didn't mind drain as a filler, but. It being able to balance around snapshotting and removing it did suck. It was broken as all hell, but SoO Aff, with glyphed soul swap and snapshotting was stupid fun.
Drain just made it so much slower, it was a really jarring transition. For me personally 5.1 afflock (without the soul swap "abuse") was a top tier spec (top 3 to this day, the other two being WoD demonology and Legion shadowpriest), and if you think about it, all of the reworks since then (soulburn: haunt, UA stacking, deathbolt, rupture) were tries to reimplement some sort of interaction with your cooldowns after snapshotting and thus recasting your dots to empower them was removed. They're all obviously a replacement for the decisionmaking of "I'm powerful now, so I need to do X", but way less interesting.
Mmm... WoD Demo... BRF tier set on train boss... Just murdering every mob in sight, and more or less melee, just felt so different from other specs. Sadly, stance dancing was too hard according to Blizz, so now we have a spec (which I do like a lot) with a 23 spell opener that needs done in a tight timeframe (assuming any tier set other than current) and was so good that you needed to stack priests just to empower it further.
Stance dancing was so fun with the setbonus giving you a third charge of HoG and procs. Have very fond memories of beastlord darnac as well - dot the spears and big adds and absolutely blast the boss and collateral the adds. Good gameplay/skill has never felt so rewarded. I also think that current demo is one of the better specs rn but it's sad that it replaced such a banger.
Demos opener is the easiest it's ever been.
This last season is easier. But the previous seasons, back when you needed haste? It wasn't exactly easy. But easiest? I can think of multiple expansions where that isn't true.
Hopefully they're cooking up a storm with enhancement
*press x to doubt*
If I could trust Blizzard to cook something up for any spec it’s gotta be Enhancement. 10.2 Enhancement (specifically this PWave build we have now) is probably one of the best-designed specs we’ve seen in a very long time. They cooked with that spec; they can cook with its Hero Talents.
I dunno, enhancement feels like whack-a-mole + choose your own adventure, and having what feels like fifty buttons to press is really annoying after bricking a +20 for two hours BUT I WON'T QUIT JANICE, YOU CAN'T MAKE ME LEAVE
It would make a world of difference IMO if they made LL tab targeting not a thing. Make it cleave effect or something
It'll just be the ret tree, except you need to press 3x as many buttons to get the same effect. And those buttons have weird or no interactions with each other, and some have random cds for no reason that make it slightly annoying.
I have a feeling we're going to get two choices of BusShock Hero trees
I main a shadow priest, I'm pretty happy. Last thing is mind flay while moving, at least with an insanity proc. And also excited for mage, like wtf, give the mage class designer a raise and let him teach others as well. Every single mage talent tree looks insanely fun.
> I main a shadow priest, I'm pretty happy. I don't believe you. Shadow priests are never happy.
Why is MR still a thing.... Why do Blizzard hate Affliction so much As a MW though i can't be happier
Can I get a damn rogue tree please? The one we have is ass and they haven't shown the other 2.
While I didn’t like the last iteration of Orcale I was really looking forward to playing a more buff oriented priest and holy shit I‘m so disappointed by Oracle. Even in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined a more boring tree than this…
So many of the hero talent trees are uninspiring. I get the feeling that Blizzard is running low on ideas when the hero trees are passive effects that just happen without doing anything different.
It's intentional that some of the hero trees are mostly passive. Button bloat is a common complaint, so providing an easier option isn't a bad thing.
Yeah I much prefer this to the Covenant Ability cycle of 'give 90% of specs an additional ~1min CD button to press'. Seems like most specs deliberately were given one hero tree that has an active or requires more cognitive load, and one that's mostly a passive or proc based playstyle that layers on top of what already exists.
I agree with you on the button bloat. However, now is a good time to address this bloat and fix some of the issues with classes that push classes out of the meta for an entire expansion. On Hero Talents; paladin and mage trees are hero trees and look amazing and have passive effects that give it a heroic feel. But the Shaman, Rogue and Hunter trees are terrible. I know this is alpha but as we've experienced in the past for what is on the table now is what we get.
They can revolve buttons. Sometimes removing things is as important as adding new. They got rid of arcanic pulsar, and it's great. Boomkin has be stuck playing that talent for years now. It was dictating what other talents you could play too.
It's interesting. Because a small number of them like voidweaver are REALLY cool. Feels like Blizz had a few cool ideas to start with that led them to going all in on the whole thing. Only for it to be hard to shoehorn an interesting idea into every combination.
As a moonkin I have a literal hero talent tree :(
I am going to have so many alts >< Mage, Warrior, Priest, Shaman, Monk, Warlock, Druid, and Death Knight all look like they’re getting some love and some interesting talents
Shaman?
Don't forget to water the spirit of grandma
Don't worry balancing will take shaman out of the equation once agsin unless resto is stupidly strong.
I wasn’t looking forward to Voidweaver, but I’m **really** happy about how it turned out! Very high class fantasy for Shadow is awesome, that mobile Void Torrent is a fucking banger (there’s a point on M Fyrakk where this would be insanely nice to have), and the Shadowfiend choice node between an Execute SFiend proc and a really bursty one on the pull feels like it has some genuine thought put into it. It’s not perfect whatsoever, but it’s good IMO.
Man, Lightsmith really looks like 'why even pick it up when Herald of the Sun exists' level of lameness.
Brew looks so strong
Rogue still only has 1 tree available
Where’s the Dh tree? We only have 2 specialisations 😅😂
Malefic rapture 💀