My take on that is that the designer understands the origin of Shadow Priest, i.e. a spec where Mind Flay was your iconic main ability that you used to melt faces with, and therefore the talent tree is designed so you can relive that old playstyle and spec fantasy. It may not be the most optimal or effective use of talent points to make a whacky Mind Flay build with moar DoTs, but there’s a certain appeal to it I think. I certainly feel some draw toward a couple of “builds” because they resonate with my character fantasy and the kind of combat adventure I want in the game, regardless of the fact that they may not be “the best”.
I think some of the charm of these new talent trees goes away a bit if everything needs to be viewed under the microscope of rotational optimization and theorycrafting and logs and meters and such. There’s a roleplaying aspect to WoW as well, and these new talent trees emphasize that more than anything we’ve had before, which I think is great.
The problem is that that mind flay build was fine and okay in a game that existed +15 years ago.
Blizzard has designed the game so that stationary turret specs that spend time channeling long, heavy spells are simply no longer viable.
Look at Affliction warlock, the spec that is supposed to be all about that. The only way they ever could make it good was to buff it to such a ridiculous level it finished channeling in under 1,5 seconds or less. In which case you might as well ask yourself why have channeled spells at all and why not just have instants?
I’m not saying this direction where the game is fast, dynamic and damage has to happen now and not in 6 years is a good direction, but is the reality wherein we live in. And there’s no putting genie back into the bottle anymore, so they just have to give up trying fringe stuff like this.
Nobody (0/0) will enjoy the aspect of having dead talents that are there for the sake of nostalgia or RP. You want everything in your talent tree to be useful, and the choice should come from you having to pick which ones you like the most.
Again I will say that viewing everything through the lens of M+ and Raids and PvP and how to be competitive and “viable” in it is not all that there is to the game.
I do hardly any of those activities anymore and mostly play the game as an immersive fantasy solo story adventure. What’s “viable” from that perspective?! Well it’s less about talents that emphasize competitive usefulness and performance, and more about iconic fantasy tropes and sense of identity.
In which case, if you don’t do any content and you don’t care about any viability, it won’t matter how the classes and the game is designed because you’re going to like it anyway
Let’s all just try to agree that it’s mostly important that they make us functional rather than thematically pleasing, which talents really won’t change much about anyways. The only thematical change the talents bring is if you wanna be a shadow priest or a void priest
Well, they did say that they don’t care about viability. Shadow could for all we know be a very flashy super omega good looking visual class that in reality deals potato damage and has to jump through ten hoops to get the same result somebody gets from pressing 1.
But yeah. The main problems of current SP talent trees are:
Far too much of SP’s utility is in their spec talent tree when it should be either baseline or in the class talent tree.
SP’s aoe and ST both still have very degenerate game design elements people have wanted gone since SL alpha.
The talent trees have far too many minor impact and/or high " % chance" effects, dead talents and path choices.
That was a really bad take on what I have written.
I don’t see how the talents don’t propose functional builds in general. There are some odd ends here and there, like you can skip Devouring Plague, yet it’s the only Insanity spender there is. That seems to break the functionality a bit. But otherwise it seems fine to me.
I guess the underlying point is that the builds should be able to produce enough damage to be viable and competitive and so on. But I think that has more to do with tuning and balancing rather than design and fantasy.
If I were to wager a guess, then Blizzard will design the talent trees with choice and customization and fantasy and such first, and then they’ll wait and see what builds the competitive players pick. And then they’ll balance those to be more or less equal to each other after the fact.
It’s far easier to have a reactive approach to balancing when you have lots of customization as opposed to having a proactive approach. Let players sort out the variables and narrow down the competitive choices, rather than Blizzard trying to balance everything to be equal – which will never happen anyway.
They said this in the post “Speaking of specialization, we wanted to make an important callout for Shadow Priests: Dark Thoughts has been removed from the Shadow Priest toolkit. The reasoning is Dark Thoughts placed a large emphasis on Mind Flay and made it feel mandatory to keep it always channeled to roll for a proc”
So making so many MF talents is really counteracting their own words, thus why I proposed to make them work with MB instead
Or, in other words, Blizzard gave up after trying to balance the classes since Legion and now is throwing the ball to the Players.
Not because that’s how it should be or needs to be, but because they have to: Because they are incompetent. There’s a reason Jailer has been nerfed more times than I can count at the moment, and why the arena ladder at the moment might as well be called outlaw rogue mage and holy priest ladder.
Nobody’s asking for the game to be completely equalized or completely balanced- But that shouldn’t mean you abandon striving for it. That is what made the game great from Vanilla to MoP. Nobody’s saying those expansions were 100% balanced, but there is a great difference between what we are seeing now and what we have seen so far in SL and comparing that to expansions like Cataclysm and Wotlk.
Isn’t their point that Dark Thoughts is very confining passive for Shadow Priests to have? If we had it in Dragonflight, then you would feel “forced” to take all the Mind Flay talents.
By choosing to remove Dark Thoughts completely they de-emphasize the value of Mind Flay, that way you have more freedom to pick whatever talents you want – a build with lots of Mind Flay or one without.
I think that’s their point. The passive is too powerful and makes Shadow Priest all about Mind Flay. By getting rid of it they open the spec up to more choices.
I appreciate having a conversation, but your reason for posting seems to be that annoying attitude of wanting Blizzard to listen to you and you alone, because you’re right and everyone who thinks otherwise are wrong and needs to be told so.
It’s so childish.
It’s a discussion forum. Either have the discussion out of curious interest or keep quiet. Seeking the attention of Blizzard through belittlement of others is not very admirable. And I strongly doubt it works.
Ehm Monomania increases dot tick speed by 100% while casting MF on target, Abyssal Knowledge increases dot crit chance by up to 15% and Eidolic Intuition making Vampiric Insight proc more often. How are those not making MF a must channel 24/7? And those are a must pick for a ST build.
Like don’t get me wrong I like the look of them, I just think it would be way better to bind them to MB rather than MF
So by seeing this nice old school talent tree, not realy old school but it geta close…
So dual spec is making a return i hope
Looking forward for Dragongflight!!
I don’t care if I’m bad or good sport- So long as I’m right, that’s fine by me.
And I am right about the current state of the tree- I mean, I didn’t make up the goals Blizzard stated. I’m just quoting them and pointing out these things are at odds with their goals.
Well they are – if you pick them. Which is surely why you would pick them.
I think that’s the intent.
I think what they want to try and avoid is that Shadow Priest has passives (Dark Thoughts) that synergize too much with certain talents, making them more powerful than they ought to be, thereby removing any semblance of choice (i.e. picking left-side talents for example).
So to stroke your mental ego?
Forgive me for not really wanting to indulge – the enjoyment seems very one-sided. But whatever works for you, I guess.
It took 8 years, but WoD pvp gearing is coming back.
It took 8 years, but borrowed power is finally gone.
Just as it took ages to get rid of titanforging, get back tier sets, etc.
I have gotten many of the things I want back- Not because I was condescending about it, but because deep down Blizzard knew / knows that people that shared the same view as I did were right. That’s all there is to it.
We have to pick them for a ST build, and as they are rn would make us never use VB, which is why MF should remain a filler, and not become a main spell, because it will put us back into the bad gameplay loop of casting nothing but MF and procs
Just gonna pop this in again “Speaking of specialization, we wanted to make an important callout for Shadow Priests: Dark Thoughts has been removed from the Shadow Priest toolkit. The reasoning is Dark Thoughts placed a large emphasis on Mind Flay and made it feel mandatory to keep it always channeled to roll for a proc”
They don’t want us to spam MF outside of filling in downtime
I don’t want to burst your bubble, but there’s a difference between being aligned with Blizzard’s game design philosophies because they cater to your gaming preferences, and then thinking that you’re right about game design because Blizzard’s design philosophies are aligned with your gaming preferences.
That’s more to their credit than yours.
I’ve always loved WoW and felt Blizzard have done almost exactly as I’ve wanted them to over the years. But I’m not going to confuse the fact that Blizzard are good at catering to me as a customer with me being wise about game design because Blizzard have done as I’ve said they should.
But maybe my humility beats my ego, whereas for you…
I think this is more a matter of tuning numbers than changing talents. But we’ll see. I certainly understand the worry, but I’m personally not too concerned myself, so far.
They didn’t cater to my preferences though- That is the reason why me and others made all those posts back in the day, after all. And here we are. I don’t really care what changed or who needed to be fired or who left the company or who took charge, doesn’t matter to me. So long as good changes happen to the game, I’m content.
You’ve always been a flag that turns with the wind- Whichever way it blows. They could turn the game into a mobile one and you’d still find a way to be happy with the change.
That’s the difference between us. Somebody who strives for change, and one who accepts it.
Aye, it’s saying one thing and doing the other thing.
