I wanted to share some thoughts about the Slayer tree that has been revealed.
To reference this, I play Warrior in raid and M+. I’m currently 8/9 mythic on rogue but I am changing back to warrior as a main after this tier and I have 3k score on IO. I’m saying this as my opinions might differ from others at different levels, both higher and lower.
TLDR; Overall feeling and sentiment for me would be not exciting / missing better execute opportunities.
Proc based talent tree is not a bad thing and its fun, but its overloaded with 3 different procs within this hero talent tree, plus any other procs we get from the actual specialization trees (Overpower reserts, Mortal Strike resets, Cleave resets, and Raging Blow resets to name a few)
It seems to create this problem around procing so many things that even if you follow a priority order, you are losing the battle, by either overcapping on rage, or overlapping other procs on top and losing the previous one.
Imminent Demise: Increased sudden death chance and +3 hits on Bladestorm.
- Sudden Death which has been dominant for a long time (Being a good talent isn’t bad, being always picked up for a longer period of time makes it feel bad) but always makes a return, it used way too frequently in tier sets and now hero talents.
- Sudden Death completely plays against Anger Management and Test of Might (albeit I don’t know if there are any changes to that interaction specifically in TWW).
- Sudden Death procs don’t count as Rage spending
- Anger Management requires Rage spending to proc cooldown reduction
- Test of Might requires rage spending to increase its main stat buff after colossus window ends
This then creates this problem where we are incentivizing sudden death again as a pillar of our hero talents that has no synergy with our most fun mechanic imo which is CDR. Adding the fact that Sudden death is overshadowing and essentially required makes this feeling worse to have to spend a talent point into.
My Ideal scenario: I believe Sudden death should be baseline / part of execute as a passive. And use this tree to add more to something like Juggernaut (ie. Increase stacks gained by Juggernaut by +5) or something like that. It helps bring that E X E C U T E moment back which i feel warrior has been missing for a long time now.
Accelerating the hits on bladestorm without increasing duration is AWESOME so that’s great imo!
Death Drive: 50% heal of Sudden Death damage
- Unreliable healing makes this talent feel worse.
- Creates a bad gameplay loop around dumping sudden death vs holding it for incoming damage if you don’t have defensives etc.
- ie. You are forced to save the proc so you can use it to heal instead after taking damage.
- You can override the proc which feels bad during the “wait” time
- If you are full hp, this talent doesn’t exist. Its a waste of a point. Didn’t happen. It’s Fiction.
My Ideal scenario: Make this node be more useful and different from what we already have. We have Impending Victory + Second Wind that passively heal us. (assuming we’ll be allowed to take those nodes in TWW.)
This can be something like “Shield based on 50% of sudden death damage. Stacks up to xx amount”. This allows us to become generally tankier, whilst also leaning more towards the ignore pain theme rather than healing.
It also becomes more useful when you are at full hp. reducing the amount of none healing / overhealing and basically making this talent become completely useless.
Slayer Reflexes: Slayer’s Strike has a chance to reset Overpower/Bloodthirst OR 10% CDR
- Same issue with Sudden death rage spending
- Overlaps with our tactician procs
- Creates a loop of bad gameplay due to overcapping procs and/or wanting to utilise Anger management CDR but can’t.
My main poinst on this one is for Arms. We already get a lot of resets, and Overpower is quite good which I am happy about, but now this might increase how many procs we are getting, which again, creates this bad loop of gameplay. On top of that you get Mortal strike resets from Overpower, so its Proc on top of Proc on top of Proc.
The bad loop being = I want to spend rage to get CDR on my cooldowns, I have now a sudden death proc, and an extra charge of overpower, I guess I lose in both situations.
You either lose because you spend your sudden death proc which can lead to overcapping on overpower / wasting resets. You lose if you use overpower and get a sudden death proc overlap. You lose if you use Mortal Strike / spend rage as you now can get the other two procs overlapping with previous ones and waste both at the same time.
My Ideal Scenario: This talent needs to add either a damage proc or something else to make it more exciting. Or make tactician more exciting. Or simply “Sudden Death now counts towards Anger Management”. Something to make me want to actually prioritise the proc without needed a methematics degree to calculate which is the highest gain. or in this care, what will make me LOSE THE LEAST.
Frentic Flurry: Overpower / Bloodthirst have a chance to cause bladestorm to proc
- Another proc on top of 2 procs from hero talents, and mortal strike resets proc from overpower. So now overpower is doing so many different things at once. Imagine if we get Mortal strike reset + Sudden Death proc + bladestorm proc.
- Over capping on rage without being able to spend it. The quality of life changes don’t help with spending rage.
- Bladestorm is cool, but its restrictive, and the only way to avoid that is to allow for abilities to be cast during it, which then makes it OP / or needs to be nerfed to do no damage so it stays “balanced”.
- There is no room for planning around this. It’s so random, and doesn’t really help if you proc it before your Cooldowns and then never procs when you need it etc. It sounds so frustrating from the design perspective.
This talent sounds good but in reality you just start spinning when you don’t want to. It takes away any agency from the player, because of the restrictive nature of bladestorm.
Again, this is all amplified by the sheer amount of procs of overpower Arms warrior gets, and if procs are similar for Bloodthirst, it would be the same issue with bloodthirst, raging blow and other procs as well.
My Ideal Scneario: This talent could be great if instead it proc’d our cooldowns instead, a reduced Reklessness or Avatar or even Thunderous Roar. Maybe a mini short duration Colossus smash. It should be a bonus that doesn’t take away agency, but isn’t defining the whole tree at the same time. Right now it achieves neither, and takes away agency (PS i love bladestorm, but due to its design, leaving it as a RNG proc will feel extremely annoying to play because you can’t predict or play around it).
Attack speed talents (BOTH)
- Overcapping is the only concern.
With the addition of the hero talent Slay, making critical strike chance even better which is great, you start gaining a lot of rage.
For Arms, it creates the same problem i mentioned above. Overcapping whilst prioritising what proc to use is annoying and feels awful.
For Fury, it makes it super button mashy, where your hands get tired because you are constantly pressing buttons for 20-30 mins in dungeons at a fast rate or during a 5 minute boss fight.
No ideal scenario for me, just a concern and I think maybe an opportunity to include haste stat enhancement for this (ie. Your attack speed is increased by % of your haste). This might allow gear to become more useful, allows us to scale better throughout the expansion, and gives us the agency to control how fast we want to go with this. Albeit low haste % would also make this talent super weak. Unsure on this one.
At the very least, some quality of life improvement for the buff to decay rather than drop fully would be nice!
The rest
I love the cap stone, playing into that anger management style which is super fun imo! I think the attack speed and the scaling options for Crit with the Slay talent are cool, and finally having a root break with Charge or being more mobile due to charge + leaping more.
Overall it’s missing the mark for me when it comes to what i’d expect or want to be as a Slayer, but happy with this first iteration and hoping there will be more cooking before the beta!
Thanks for reading if anyone did actually read this whole thing. Feel free to post your own feedback and please keep it constructive for us all to gain from these posts, and get what we want.