I don’t know about anyone else but Hero Talents are starting to seem extremely lackluster despite being advertised as a pretty big core feature of the levelling and endgame process. Every single talent tree is 99% passive damage/healing increases for 99% of classes thus far and they’ve suspiciously only shown Mountain King as having any real spell visual effects added to the class.
I’m starting to get the feeling this is going to disappoint a lot of people in a very deep way when we hit launch and everyone can see for themselves that they’re all just RNG passive procs and don’t actually have any fulfilling thematic purpose or visuals for almost all classes.
Edit: In other words, no actual reason for them to exist as anything but normal talents (or at all really). There is nothing about any of the ones shown so far that depicts them as needing a separate category because they add EPIC and GAME-CHANGING dynamics to the classes when so far every class analyst who’s looked at them has said; “damn, they’re uh, just some little damage and healing increases”.
Edit 2: I am however becoming really concerned that some of the Hero Talent selections seem very easy to tell as the “Meta” picks, and also that a few seem to be needlessly altering entire specs playstyles based on talent pick choices (Keeper of the Grove forcing Druids to spec heavily into summoning treants and relying on Blizzards NPC coding, for example).
In classic the green breath was like an acid spray afaik. Unless I remember Sunken Temple dungeon wrong. Not sure how the breath works now seeing Dracthyr use it to heal with like it’s a magical dream mist. Kind of like mistweaver in a way? Maybe there’s overlap with mistweaver techniques and green dragons.
Oh, you know it. Things like Dream Blossom, Emerald Communion and nearly all other green abilities are something any monk would kill for. Same with shamans and black Augment spells, or mages and the whole Devastation kit.
It’s a Mawsworn ability iconic and common with the jailer’s minions as expressed in the wider dungeon theme of his realm. Its only dark ranger connection is Sylvanas taking it on along with Zovaal as her edgy prison tat BF.
There isn’t anything stated anywhere I can find that green dragon breath attacks puts you to sleep. More often than not it melts the skin off your bones. From the wiki:
Their breath weapons can consist of a variety of nature-based attacks, including corrosive acid,[4] noxious gas,[5] and emerald-colored fire.[6]
Green dragons can force others into sleep through other magical means, however.
They kinda said it will be mostly passives and visuals as they don’t want button bloat. It’s quite overhyped for sure but if you looked trought the hype at the begining you could see it’s just another 10 mostly passive talents.
Personally I don’t mind. We get this instead of another power system you have to grind daily to be competitive and gets discarded the moment the expansion ends. This looks like they are building up on the new talent system instead, a lasting feature which might be even expanded upon.
I suppose this is for switching aswell. Your spec have 2 subspeces to choose from but one might be better for certain content while the other for other and hopefuly there will be a button which will instantly switch subspec.
It’s kinda interesting how the visual aspect of Covenant abilities was heavily criticised at the time, and afterwards, to the extent that they eventually changed the ones they baked into talents…only for them to turn around and go “yeah, we’re doing that same thing again”.
Yea, but you see; Covenants sucked(because Shadowlands) and their visuals only ever really fit 1 race/class.
Dark Rangers will fit 4 races their Hunters
Mountain Kings will fit 4(maybe 6) races their warriors…
All I see are 4 choices for 2 of my NElf Characters to choose between
On a more serious note:
Yea, Darkspear Trolls(Zandalari Balance Druids are Luna’lai anyways) are basicly Cenarion Druids anyways, with a few minor difference like the Wild-God’s shapes they decided to take, but that still means nothing, since Cenarius takes center stage all the time anyways as the leader of Wild-Gods and Loa’s, apparently. Doesn’t mean we have to like it, I wish the Troll, Tauren, Worgen, Night Elf & Kul Tiran Druidism was way more divers aswell, but if the choices between Elune’s Chosen and Keeper of the Grove only now makes people realize Druids don’t fit with most races due to the lack of diversity in how they’re handled by Blizzard I really, really, don’t know what to tell those people…
As for the Sentinel / Dark Ranger problem, yea… Sentinel is a pretty specific term, I agree; Ranger would’ve been a title more open to and for multiple races, but then people would complain about it being to tied to the Thalassian Elves, so I don’t know what kind of names they would like? Strider? Animal-Handler? It wouldn’t matter anyways, because I firmly belief they would still add the things they are adding now, but instead of Dark Ranger’s (insert spell name) it would’ve been called Strider (Insert spell name)
I’m just anticipating the wave of people taking these titles literally, flooding the land with goblin dark rangers, tauren san’layn and elven mountain kings.
It’ll be worse with monks. Whoever decided to name a heroic spec Shado-Pan has definitely never done Pandaria quests, not to mention RP. It’ll be so cringy with all those non-Pandaren running in scarves…
I was pretty sure Cenarius was leader of the Wild-Gods???
And most Loa’s are Wild-Gods, are they not?(I admit I am not that wel versed with Wild-God/Emerald Dream lore lmao)
I mean, I thought their inclusion into the Cenarion Circle basicly made them Cenarion Druids aswell, sure some forms might differ due to Gonk teaching them(in the same way Cenarius taught Malfurion and the Night Elves, mind), instead of Night Elves, but they’re basicly the same?
And then there is Zen’kiki who is a very clear Troll Cenarion Druid🤔
I do think that the naming is a lose-lose situation for Blizzard. Either you get something super-race thematic (Dark Ranger, Sentinel, Keeper of the Grove, Mountain King, San’layn etc)…
… or you get something incredibly generic that no one’s hyped for it or cares. Pack Master? More like pack your bags amirite lmaoo
Oracle Priest? Huh? Are we DnDing this up? Frostfire? Sure - I suppose that’s one of the few that are generic but recognisable thanks to one single spell.
This is just really weird, because it homogenises and tries to de-homogenise at the same time, so it just ends up doing neither and falling flat.
At the same time, we are worrying over something that was already present. Hero Talents double down on thematics that were very much already present, such as Dark Ranger being a callback to the Survival Hunter of old, or Deathstalker being a thematic already present in Subtlety Rogues, most iconic Warrior abilities being Dwarf-themed, the entire toolkit of Monks being 100% Pandaren themed ever since their release, Druids being heavily Night Elven themed…
These classes already have had their entire thematic be heavily race-themed since ages ago. Anyone who thought that a visual effect update and short talent tree extension was going to change this is in some quantum physics level of contradicting amounts of hopium and it’s-so-over-ium.
Which only makes sense since it’s a purely Pandaren class in its origin. And yes, we do hope blizz will remember that they have lore for the game and will stop making nonsense. The way to make this work to me is adding tints the NPCs aready have and that aren’t race or faction specific. Like Spellblade or Spellbow for warriors and hunters.
