PTR Spoiler/Discussion Thread (Part 2)

Argent Dawn
7996

In most content, pets aren’t anything other than a significant source of damage-over-time with a health bar attached instead of a timer and if that health bar is depleted, the damage-over-time stops and a bunch of your abilities become unusable until you can revive the pet. You would need to overhaul how pets work and what they are if you want to make them more interactive and meaningful than that.

So for what pets are in the context of WoW, I really don’t think that Blizzard could have done much better than that.

Which is one of the things that drives me to think that people might be expecting too much from hero talents. When people list what they want hero talents, they make it sound like they expected forty brand new subclasses that completely change how we play the game, when that is never what was advertised.

7997

The Hero Talents stuff really comes across as one of those things they really shouldn’t have bothered with. I get it, you need something to advertise Blizzard but you straight up jumped into a problem you previously wanted to avoid with the current talent tree.

Should have focused on making class skins as in, different set of animations, spells and visuals you could unlock while playing the game all while making you revisit the essence of it through questing in both the current expansion and throughout the old world. Instead you just made Covenant Abilities and Soulbinding combined… Again.

Just my two cents.

3 Likes
7998

There would have been mountains of complaining about “maintenance mode” if there were no gameplay changes at all.

There would have been mountains of complaining about “borrowed power” if they included some sort of temporary system that would have been deleted come Midnight.

There would have been mountains of complaining about balance issues if they just gave everyone another ten talent points and completely ruined the balance of the talent trees they made for Dragonflight.

Every expansion has to introduce something that changes gameplay at least a little in order to justify its existence and honestly, I don’t see anything wrong with this particular system. In the end, it’s just a choice between two groups of eleven talents, depending on your spec, which really isn’t as bad as the covenant and soulbinding system.

The only issue is the flavour that has been attached to it, which has thrown a lot of people off-balance.

7999

At this point there are more people obnoxiously crying about how there are some people saying Night Elves are underrepresented, than there are people saying Night Elves are underrepresented.

Damn, I wish all the Orc and Human players stopped saying their races are underrepresented after we get the 14th game in a row about Orcs and Humans! It’s so funny how a patch or expansion gets branded as Night Elf patch/expansion because one Night Elf breathed in a corner somewhere.

Damn, every spec (except Druid Hero specs) are so blatantly about Orcs and Humans! Both of them can be Warriors and have major Warrior lore characters! DKs literally have Horsemen with only Orcs and Humans! Because of Jaina and Khadgar, Mages are yet again another Human class (and ditto for Shamans and Orcs). I don’t even need to start on Priests and Paladins!

Keeper of the Grove is a Night Elf Hero spec in name only, as nothing about the spec does anything more than the Druid class already does. The spec revolves around Force of Nature - oh wow, an iconic WC3 ability from the Night Elven hero! - and does nothing Night Elven about it. You have one talent that mentions Cenarius and everything else is a nothingburger. You could just name the spec Botanist and the spec identity wouldn’t change.

I wish the spec did represent the Night Elven identity more. Make one branch (hehe) turn Force of Nature to a passive where you just summon more Treants on your own as some sort of a pseudo-pet class. Or make Force of Nature summon more than just Treants. If you want to double down on the Night Elven identity, there’s a cool quest(line) in Feralas doing exactly that - making you summon forces of Nature (treants, Ancients, Mountain Giants, Faerie Dragons etc) to your aid. The final branching option could instead turn the Force of Nature spell to summoning more offensive roots/vines on the battlefield, instead of Treants, so that Balance wouldn’t have this awful cosmic :poop: of a design all the time.

People saying the spec is awfully designed are not people who say Night Elves are underrepresented. They’re simply saying the spec is awfully designed. Night Elf mains complain about representation not because they’re underrepresented, they complain because they’re almost always poorly represented.

2 Likes
8000

Maiev hooking up with a hunky DH lady would be excellent character development.

2 Likes
8001

So let them complain, it would be a reactionary, unfounded response and they’d look stupid.

True, but they’ve sworn off this to the applause of the community so adding one is unnecessary anyways and again, they’d just be acting reactionary for the sake of it.

They have created severe balancing issues already with these W.I.P Hero Talents, to the degree that a lot of class analysts are asking for overhauls and revamps to several different trees, so in trying to avoid the ghost of a problem they have created themselves an actual, tangible problem that is going to haunt them for at least the next 3 expansions as it increases in depth and complexity.

I know we fundamentally disagree on this one but a lot of people, on these forums as well, have voiced concerns and also pointed out that it very much feels like a sense of false-advertising much like BfA’s original advertisements. We saw Sylvanas burn the tree, we all knew it was probably just her having a Sylvanas:tm: Moment and yet Blizzard kept teasing that there was something else happening, someone else behind it all pulling strings here and there to make it happen. It is false advertisement, pure and simple.

Hero Talents are the same issue, they hype them up (as they are paid to do, of course), talk about the EPIC changes they will bring to make players feel like they are truly dipping into a very unique, specific fantasy that is a part of Warcraft. . .and then they show us them and it’s a buncha RNG, Passives, Damage Increases, CD Reduction, Skill Stat Buffs etc. etc. which are all the domain of talents and spellbook abilities/spellbook passives not something HEROIC and EPIC that makes you feel like you are embodying a specific, unique fantasy for your class.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with some boring damage buffs, cd reductions, stat increases etc., they’re fine, but they are fundamentally not something that makes people think “ah yes, 3% kill command damage, that’s an EPIC Hero Talent”, it makes you think “Huh, where’s that on the beastmaster talent tree, I don’t see it”.

2 Likes
8002

Well you wanted the Azer’dorei Empire and you shall have it… under the benevolent guidance of the Alliance’s Golden Lion. :lion:

2 Likes
8003

Not necessarily. I can see them focusing on expanding hero talents horizontally, by offering an additional hero talent tree for each spec to choose from with each expansion. And ultimately, fixing the balance of all of these little bundles of eleven talents is going to a lot easier than trying to mend entire talent trees.

The only thing that does that is the flavour, which people seem to have blown out of proportion. In terms of gameplay, we’ve known from the very start that hero talents are as simple as two groups of eleven talents that we’ll need to choose between. To me, it comes across as people trying to find reasons to hype themselves up and disappoint themselves, instead of realising how simple the system really is.

8004

My issue with the hero talents is that either they are uninspired passive bloat, or degenerate game design (e.g. automating gameplay, removing restrictions from abilities or counterplay).

But Blizzard has been designing the classes degenerately since Legion so not much we can do.

Degenerate classes made by degenerate devs.

1 Like
8005

She realised what she’d actually been missing all this time and her girlfriend isn’t nearly as much of a narcissistic jerk, just confident. I definitely picture Maiev as the socially inept shut-in with tunnel vision, not seeing what she has right in front of her until a big huntress goes “hey nerd, date me”.

Cue flustered 40 packs a day coughs.

4 Likes
8006

There are people, entirely unironically and with their entire chest (rear end…) saying that Helldivers 2 is ‘dead’ already.

Sometimes criticism is valid.
And sometimes Gamers™ need to be told to sit down and that they’re stupid. Because they are.

4 Likes
8007

Sounds like they need to be reported to their local Democracy Officer.

RIP Naisha, taken too soon.
In 100 years Maiev gonna have a Frieren moment and go “oh, she was in love with me the whole time”

4 Likes
8008

me RN watching a friend play it on twitch

Dead huh?

1 Like
8009

Yeah… yeah.
I refuse to take such people seriously. The same as anyone giving any measure of credit to Goobisoft these days.
Clownshoes hours.

8010

New Arathi?

All thr loot I won’t be getting due to not being there because work :frowning:

8011

Theres no new Arathi, its in a separate game client, like if someone cobbled together a BR game from WoW assets and made it into a private server

Im more interested in how ActiBlizz made the choice to even develop this. Are they 6 years behind on the player feedback/suggestions list and assumed that the playerbase still wants this?

2 Likes
8012

Big Huntress helps her face her grief and move on. Lots of hugs.

8013

Being consistently at least 2 years behind on meme achievements and pop culture references, it’s not a surprise.

5 Likes
8014

I sure loved wincing everytime “Zandalar Forever!” was uttered.

8015

Giving the fancy trolls west african accents was an interesting choice.

2 Likes