During Season 1, many builds felt as though they were designed around the Apex Talent first, with the rest of the talent tree being selected mainly to support that specific mechanic. This made the original idea that players could ignore the Apex Talent and continue investing in the main tree feel unrealistic, because the performance difference was often far too large.
Season 2 currently feels much healthier because more power is being returned to core abilities and the specialization tree. Hero Talents and Apex Talents can still provide strong themes, synergies and meaningful bonuses, but they should feel like additional layers on top of a complete base kit rather than becoming the entire engine of the build.
Is this the team’s intended long-term design direction: keeping most of a specialization’s power in its base kit and main talent tree, while Hero and Apex Talents provide flavour, gameplay variation and moderate power without dictating almost every other talent choice?
Additionally, what performance difference does the team consider acceptable between an optimized Apex build and a player who chooses to spend those four points elsewhere? A difference of around 5% may represent a meaningful choice, but a difference of 30–50% effectively removes that choice entirely.
Diogo Silva