Dear Blizzard as WoW player for almost 15 years I’d like to leave you some feedback about the game design and my worries about the next expansion, hero talents and the direction the class design.
I really enjoyed Dragonflight expansion. It felt like a breath of fresh air and almost every spec felt like it’s well designed and has tools to be played well in almost every content. Every spec was flexible but also interesting. DF talent trees made me feel like they are 100% complete and there is nothing to add.
That’s where my issues with TWW start. Hero Talents make them feel like you added something unnecessary on top. Some of them don’t really impact the gameplay too much besides adding some passive damage. Good example is Farseer for Ele. In PvP it’s the way to go and as far as I checked used in Raids and M+ during the weeks where a little bit more of single target damage is necessary. What actually this spec brings to the gameplay? Nothing. It’s still the same Elemental Shaman however Blizzard had to rework Ele and lower the amount of procs so you can get them from other tools (Primordial and Ancestral Swiftness). Besides that Ancestors are extremely boring not bringing anything interesting for the gameplay. Stormbringer for example is amazing in aoe situations. I’d even try it in PvP if you could cast Tempest with instantly with Stormkeeper.
Again like in the past we have clear winners and things that are better for the certain scenario. This was my problem with Covenants for example that despite Ion saying that the difference will be 0,5% and it will be cosmetic it wasn’t. In fact there were clear cookie cutter specs for each content. The same thing happened here unfortunately.
My another problem with the hero talents is that they create a lot of unnecessary passives and modifiers because “we need to add something to the hero tree”. It also includes some defences and this fact made players passively way more tanky than before. This caused dot specs to be irrelevant. Dot damage doesn’t pressure enemies anymore. It looks good on paper and does a lot on the meter but it’s paded damage. Good examples of it are Affliction Warlock and Unholy DK. These specs strugle now in PvP content maybe outside of RBG/Blitz. Affliction Warlocks have an identity crysis and for the first time instead of playing around spread pressure they try to burst enemy players with Haunt → 2x Shadow Bolt and some Malefic Raptures combos. To do this they play Soul Harvester. On paper Hellcaller looks amazing but due to more passive defensives and every spec having 2-3 def CDs dot gameplay became obsolete.
When I look at the class design in TWW I already feel like some of the Hero talents feel unnecessary and like an overkill. Specs without them feel like they are finished and well designed. So my question is - what are you going to add in “Midnight”? Will you add something more/above the Hero Talents? It will make the game completely bloated and I’m almost sure I’ll go out of keybinds. There are specs that I already struggle to bind. Good example is Resto Shaman. It used to be one of my favourite alts to play in Arena but because it got a lot of tools from other Shaman specs it ruined my binding concept and I struggled with playing it. Adding anything on top of it will be a disaster… and make the game a nightmare to play for the average player. Instead I’d prefer Blizzard to prepare 2 more hero talents for every spec instead. This way we get something new that makes our gameplay different but it’s not too complicated.
Since I’m Blizzards customer and not only a WoW player. I found also some interesting solutions in your other games. I’ve played a lot Starcraft 2 coop and I love the prestige system. The reason it’s amazing is because it changes the way you play your commander completely. It also makes you lose something but this way you are more flexible and gives you options for different scenarios. To be fair I’d love Hero Talents to work this way. I’d love to have “basic” Elemental Shaman and 3-4 hero talent options like prestiges in coop that changes my gameplay but not just adding more and more modifiers making me sacrifice some part of my spec. So there could be basic Elemental Shaman, spec based more on Lava Burst or Ascendance but then you lose Stormkeeper and some of your Lava Burst modifiers are stronger. Stormkeeper based spec but you lose Ascendance however you get some compensation somewhere else. A spec based more on Elementals. Maybe you get and option to snapshot your Elementals but you deal less baseline damage. Options are endless.
I have one more concern about the current talent trees. I made specs within a class more homogenized and get some spells they never had. While for some specs (Enha) getting Thunderstorm and Lasso is like whatever. For Restoration it means it can be more disruptive but the cost is lacking in healing department so you have to compensate with great use of your utility or you will struggle. Such gameplay is way more difficult than just healing your partner passively.
To sum up. As someone who was completely against pruning in Legion and BFA. I feel like we definetely need to do it this time. The gameplay became really frustrating with the amount of CDs, passives, modifiers. I think that less is sometimes more. If Blizzard will add anything on top of existing designs I think that midnight will be in trouble. I also added my concerns about the Hero Talents.
Good analysis of hero talents. They’re a weird bunch of ideas really and can be annoying from an immersion perspective. I play ele shaman and I was really excited for the lightning spec but as I mainly pvp quite forced into farseer and I have zero interest in the whole “ancestors” thing.
I do like the idea of prestige’s - in a sense we have those as our capstone talents. This could all be designed better as you say so yes you have a lightning shaman where some fire talents are removed and fire damage nerfed; an elementalist , a lava shaman etc.
I love shadow priest and it would be crying out for something like:
Shadow Summoner: focussing on mindbender pets
Ghost Whisperer: focussing on shadow apparations, more variety that do more things
Voidmaster: Focussing on torrent, mind flay, drains, channels
Etc etc. Each one could drop 3-4 abilities and buff its key theme. So only the Shadow Summoner gets a pet etc.
I will just comment on hero talents.
Essentially they could have just been added to the spec tree in one way or another but to have something to market they made them a standalone tree.
But it absolutely exacerbates balancing and design problems. I also find that their promise of iterating on their visual appeal actively throughout the expansion was a nothing-burger, just like the promise of doing away with placeholder old expansion spells as talents when DF first launched.
If the development process were not as rushed and frantic as it is, I would recommend opting for sub-specializations but unfortunately these days I do not think they will even consider it because consistent bite-sized and drip-fed content, doubly timegated and freshly recycled is the name of the game.
I believe you were also a proponent of healers having their mana matter once again. Imagine how that would spice things up and introduce a less spammy rotation.
I feel like in the development kitchen area they should really go back to basics and take it from there.
Interactions are how abilities inform gameplay though. Take mind melt for example, stacking crit buff on next mind blast every time you cast mind spike. Sure you could achieve the same average damage by just buffing spike x% but you’d lose the gameplay of weaving spikes between mind blasts, pooling blasts and preserving spike stacks going into cooldowns, as well as interactions with the spec and critical strike damage due to having a spell with enhanced critical strike chance.
I would even take a step further in opining that mana should matter to everyone.
☆ going all in on burst vs sustain would become a decision;
☆ mindless keystrokes would eventually disappear as more resource AND encounter-aware players would greatly outperform that;
☆ healers would preferably not have to DPS so much during “downtime” as mana preservation would take precedence
☆ funnily, sensory overload from all those gigazillion spells and effects would also slowly be phased out as the encounter and game design adapted to class design
I have to pre-emptively state that this does NOT mean going back to Vanilla WoW. Some sort of a happy medium between what is going on now and the super slow combat style of vanilla is what I would support
Edit: I also support extremely strong class/spec identity, e.g Legion SP with Voidform, or the mushroom era balance druid, or the true dot-based playstyle of affliction, etc.
It seems M+ has informed on game and class design so much that pretty much everyone has tools for everything and essentially plays similarly
The only things the hero talents gave us that I actually like and find interesting is that destruction locks can have an instant dot and that enhancement shamans can have the fire turret totem back.
And I kinda like the idea behind lightsmith
I think they’re going to remove them after TWW or break them up among the existing class and spec trees, I fear they tried borrowed power without calling it borrowed power, or that they decide yeah this wasnt it and remove it, causing people to overreact as if they caught Blizzard dealing in borrowed power again
Will see what they do with it at the end, strongest memory of the hero talent trees was that I was bummed that the one hero tree I was excited about flavourwise was not available for my spec.
Loadouts, for the love of god just give every spec in the game a loadout with all the best talents baked into them. 99% of the player base just copy and paste talents anyhow whilst the other 1% do the actual theory crafting.
There are many, many sources of bloat. Blizzard also artificially bloated some specs just for the sake of bloating them to create sensory overload, that introduces artificial non-fundamental skill ceiling
You know… PvP tuning is independent from the talent trees right?
If they wanted to make dot specs relevant, they would have buffed the dots. Or nerfed the defensives.
Cause saying Unholy DK’s damage is irrelevant is a hard bargain. Because in M+ they absolutely slap hard. If you were to buff them by just a bit it would become ridiculous at this point.
I have another hypothesis. Dots are deliberately nerfed in PvP. Hard code nerf. Because in my limited experience in PvP, dot specs are THE most annoying specs to fight in Arenas.
Because they put their dots and hide behind a colunm. Taking ZERO risk on themselves in order to do so. And forcing YOU (the one that is doted) to come out of cover and chase that person to kick, CC him or something so he stops putting dots on you.
That puts you in a really bad position, ready to be bursted or CCd yourself. And if that wasent bad enough, if you were to dispel ANY of the dots an affliction puts on you, you are micro CCd for 2s.
NOT FUN. And that is why IMO dot specs are nerfed to the ground in PvP. Like tanks are.
So what is your conclusion? Talent trees in DF were perfect and all the extra abilities from hero talents are bad?
Cause then Farseer would be perfection. It changes nothing at all from the Talent trees, and your rotation would remain identical than if you had no hero talents at all. So WIN for Farseer right? Or you prefer Stormcaller? With extra skills and modifiers?
Absolutely not. What a horrible idea !!! So I would not DPS. But then what would I do instead? Sit there and AFK?
Healer DPS adds an extra layer of complexity that is very fun and engaging for those of us that want to be able to express that skill. And want more than just a 3 button spec.
And its totally voluntary. You could AFK if you want and can literally remove the DPS spells from the bar and forget about them. Nothing stops you from that. Cause the 300k DPS a healer does compared to the 12M overall DPS 3 DDs do… is completely, 100% and utterly inconsequential to the completion of the key. Its just here “for fun”.
That is why healer DPS should have feedback to HPS performance. That is what it should be.
Im a mage now?