Good idea.
“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
~ Donald Knuth
Meta doesn’t always work for everyone’s play style anyway. If I find it dull, I’ll struggle to do it well because I lose focus.
I pick what makes sense for me.
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Hence why I’ve played Ret since pretty much BfA, even if I wasn’t good at first and used to struggle alot before the paladin rework. I do think that you can do well with every spec though, but some are still more broken than others.
The biggest conflict of ‘aesthethics vs meta’ I have had over the years was with my death knight. IC, he is frost, but pretty often, Unholy used to outperform that, so for doing content I often did unholy. Currently I play him as obliterate frost, though I’ll admit I haven’t looked yet at how UH performs. I tried Breath of Sindragosa earlier but… that one didn’t feel fun to me.
Most questsgivers are like that. Random schmuck says his wallet got stolen by a group of brunettes? Bring me my wallet back. And also 10 heads. Trust me bro, don’t even consider I could’ve misplaced it on my way home.
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True, but this is one of the cases where the author’s greasy handprints over a character are so obvious that we’re immediately ejected back into the Primary World, left wondering who wrote this and why, instead of mentally modeling the character as a person with his own inner world.
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I think it’s also pretty funny how they said they’re doing evergreen systems and then implement Hero Talents, something that in the past has always been not evergreen at all. They remind me of the Legion’s Artefacts (specifically, the Argus patch addition that I forget the name of), where I feel like they’ll only be relevant for one expansion.
What’s going to happen in Midnight? The Last Titan? Hero Talents don’t feel like they’ll stay to me.
They just add a new branch or two to the hero talent trees.
Far less complex than adding rejigging a full set of class+spec talent trees for ten more levels. It just turns into like 3 new features per hero tree, all of which are ‘mandatory’ because you chose that hero talent option.
And then what? You’re going to have three main talent branches later? Class - Spec - Hero? What’ll happen after that?
Point is, I don’t see it as an evergreen solution. You’ll end up rejigging a full set of class+spec+hero talent trees in the end. Not to mention, the hero talents are very narrow and put the devs into a box. They’re constricted to adding only new talents that fit the niche. They have to now worry about twice as much when balancing as well, since each spec has two hero talent options. Yes, as a player you should take the more fun route (or immersive, for RPers I guess), but it shouldn’t be unplayable outside of casual stuff either.
Super Hero Talents
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I’d say that having a plan for something to stay for six years is pretty good, considering that the Last Titan is ending around 2029 - 2030. It will have lasted as much as glyphs did back in the day.
If they do get dumped, i imagine some of the skills/talents will wind their way into the base class anyway. Just like with artifact weapons.
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“All these cookie cutter spellbooks force players to all do the same boring thing. We demand variety and choice!”
Bam! Talent Trees!
“Okay, so, this patch meta our simming says your talent picks are suboptimal. Swap them for the optimised build on the website or you’re out of the raid group!”
And gods help you if you main the wrong class next expansion. 
WoW turns into saints row 4 to cash in on the dying marvel craze (as is custom, latching onto a pop culture thing in its twilight).
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Whatever’s fun is the right class 
SR4 was a good game, held back only by being called Saints Row 4 instead of Saints Row: In Space!
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Having flown around Amirdrassil on the PTR some more, I have to admit, now that the initial excitement has worn off, that it doesn’t really feel particularly night elfy compared to the vanilla zones or to BfA Darkshore.
(This is not a complaint please don’t throw nelfposter jokes at me)
It feels fey, which is befitting for a copy of an Emerald Dream zone, but fey aesthetics are an Emerald Dream thing, not a night elf thing. Part of it is all the yellow flowers, and a more important part of it is the skybox. Despite being on Azeroth, the zone bizarrely retains the Emerald Dream skybox rather than a twilight sky typical of night elf zones. It even retains those gravity-defying floating trees from the Emerald Dream zone, since they just copy-pasted the zone without any tweaks to its geography.
I appreciate what they’ve done, but they could have done better.
Also I’ve noticed that two houses in Bel’ameth aren’t used for anything. One is the small house near Cylania the blacksmith, where the dracthyr item upgraders are in the Dream; it doesn’t even have any NPCs. The other is a Legion-style two-story house with a spiral stair, not far from the portals. It only has two non-interactable Shen’dralar NPCs on the balcony and is otherwise unused. I wonder if it will be used in future questlines.
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Sounds like we could use that one as a stand-in for Mordent’s new Arcane Academy 
But yea, I do hope they’ll give, atleast the sky, a more NElfy feeling, especially since you cannot even see the Moon(s) from Amirdrassil (as far as I understood)!
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Too late, I proclaim thee a nelfposter!
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Give it time and some bloke on Epsilon will have crafted a revamped Hyjal with the recent assets or a more elaborated Bel’ameth more in line with the mortal mind vision than the fey.
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Presentation is important when it comes to nelfposting.
The Amirdrassil zone feels less like a traditional night elf zone and more like an Emerald Dream zone, which is a shame considering that Amirdrassil exists as a new home for the night elves.
A reasonable observation coupled with a reasonable opinion, perfectly sane and sensible.
Amirdrassil is yet another example of Blizzard spitting in the face of night elf players by denying us traditional night elf aesthetics and turning all night elves into nature-loving hippies who live in a crappy copy-and-pasted Emerald Dream.
Hyperbolic nonsense built on bizarre misinterpretations of the lore, assumptions of malice and a desire to be outraged. Peak nelfposting.
And while I generally agree with your statement that it doesn’t feel exactly like traditional night elf zones, it’s close enough to traditional night elf aesthetics with its giant trees and magic-infused nature and other wild and druidic features that I don’t think it’s a major issue.
It would be nice if Blizzard fixed this and made a few minor changes to make it feel more appropriate for night elves, but I’m not expecting it.
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There are similar floating islands on the Isles, so that’s not too bad for me.
The skybox though? Let’s riot a bit.
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It’s probably the lukest warm of takes that the skyboxes the old world over desperately need an overhaul.
I personally hope the ease some of the more jarring transitions too, looking at YOU Stormwind → Blackrock, skies do not work like that, on god!
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