The 11.2 Protection talent rework came with a bunch of interesting ideas, but seemingly thrown at random around the tree. For example, there are a lot of new talents aimed towards Execute gameplay, locked behind Shield talents and vice-versa.
To name a few:
- Devastator being a gate, locking Best Served Cold, Fueled by Violence, Punish and even the new “magic defense” talents. Devastator is, in a way, a gameplay-altering talent, and AA feels worse now that Battering Ram is gone. Should’ve remained optional.
- Tough as Nails is locked behind Thunderlord. They have very distinct use-cases, so they shouldn’t be tied in any way.
- Rend locks half of the tree. Even if we want the effect, it doesn’t even make sense as an active ability: Costs Rage and a GCD, when we can cast it on AoE for free with Thunderclap. Might as well just make it a passive at this point; or even remove Rend completely and bake its damage straight into Deep Wounds (after all, it does the same thing)
- Massacre being locked behind Shield Wall talents, on the opposite side of the other Execute talents (Red Right Hand, Heavy Handed, Sudden Death…). It simply makes no sense there. Would be far more logical to have it on the right side of the tree.
- There’s also a common, legitimate complaint about Enduring Defenses being a 2-point gate. This isn’t even about the talent’s power or quality (after all, more Shield Block uptime is an universally good thing and we DO want to pick it) It’s just… that it’s literally the ONLY 2-point talent in the tree, for absolutely no apparent reason. It feels like an arbitrary design choice.
I do believe there’s a lot of room to move talents around in a way that makes more sense, so that there’s a clearer distinction between the “offensive” and “defensive” sides; and even place the connections between the different branches a bit higher up on the tree (Tier 5, instead of Tier 6) so that the tree feels a bit more “open”.
Right now, between the pigeonholing and the random shuffling of talents (which forces us into unrelated picks), it feels like we lost choice and flexibility; which is the opposite of the stated goal of the redesign.