So I’ve been reading about the Hero talents which offer every spec different choices of hero talents and it sounds really cool. But I’m scared the talents will become too cluttered having choice between the talents and additionally the hero specs.
How will the balancing work? Since two specs are bound by 1 hero spec which needs to be balanced for both specs to play equally well.
How will Tier sets work? Will one tier set force you into going a certain hero spec instead of the other because it synergizes much better with one than the other?
This situation could potentially clash with class fantasy and optimal gameplay choices. In Shadowlands, for example, many Warlocks ended up playing Night Fae even if it didn’t align with their preferred class fantasy. Similarly, while the Dark Ranger theme might be appealing, not all Hunters may desire that identity and might prefer a more nature-oriented direction. However, if Dark Ranger becomes the dominant choice for performance reasons, players might feel pressured to adopt it regardless of their preference. Then again the hero talents feel much more neutral compared to the covenants so it should be but not all.
Will it force into a certain gameplay? For example, Shamans will have a spec named Stormbringer which is probably the spec between Elemental and Enhancement, could that mean that Elemental shamans have to create lightning focused builds?
Choice is an important part of modern rpg and Blizzard can’t offer infinite options.
As long they can be changed as easily as the current talents I can’t see an issue.
We may even if see that some hero “specs” change based upon the content you are doing. As talents do now where people have a load out for raids vs keys, or specific bosses
Does matter about choice, once the top spec has been found, everyone will be running the same talents.
So balancing for Blizzard will be pretty simple to nerf the ones, which are OP and bring up the ones, which are never even touched, even though they sounds to be pretty good.
the tier sets will not be related, atleast not directly, to any of the Hero Talent Trees
the tier sets will generically be related to all Hero Talent Trees (something like "your [insert active capstone ability from Hero Talent of choice here] ability has a chance to trigger XXXX whenever XXXX happens, or something like that)
Whilst that spec does sound ok to me, I do share the concern that it is limiting choice.
I don’t see any benefit for me to a spec focused on Ele / Resto combos.
For Warrior I can see how a tanky spec that does more dps could be cool though.
Or a DPS spec that has some better survivability.
Yeah, I remember them saying that they want to get the hero talents out there as soon as possible in order to get as much feedback as possible. It’s been now what…3 months since Blizzcon and we’ve seen only a handful of hero talents for select classes. If they keep going with that pace we’ll be in midnight before we see all the hero talents.
In my opinion, hero talents should all be passive and change existing abilities, rather than adding new ones. Most specs in WoW are already extremely bloated with too many active abilities and too many procs that end up making the game unplayable without WeakAuras or Hekili.
I also think tier sets are lame. They don’t make the game more fun. On the contrary, a lot of tier sets either:
Make an ability or rotation temporarily feel better, but when the tier is over, going back to the baseline feels bad.
Make the spec annoying to play because the tier set buffs some ability that one doesn’t really want to use.