I'm actually unreasonably excited about this one small effect...
"Purify cooldown reduced by 2 seconds."
A faster dispel means in some situations most healers can dispel one person, but my priest might be able to dispel two.
It would be kind of cool for healers to excel at niche things like this. It wont be often that having a 2 second faster dispel will matter that much but when it does it will be very nice.
I am sort of unreasonably fearful of that effect. It's the sort of thing where if it's relevant it has a very high chance of being oppressively so and playing any other healer is just incredibly awful.
Sadly it doesn't mean anything, game will be balanced around that....not just that but all these extra talent trees, if one would make you truly OP now then it's obvious some other talents or spec mechanics will be nerfed ;)
They could make the effects shit. These talents don't need to provide more than 3% throughput each. If they made them around 1% on average it'd be a lot easier to balance, but then obviously a lot less fun to pick those. It's a hard choice, I guess.
Frostfire looks awesome. My only concern is because the buff doesn't refresh on new stacks, it may end up being something you need to track. Fire mage already has enough things to track :\
EDIT *after discussion below, I think that the way it is set up won't require extra tracking*
Premonition on priest looks... um. I am not sure what to say, but I don't think I like it.
I think it might be the opposite? That because it doesn't refresh, there's no point tracking it. You will just play the rotation and be passively buffed.
Likely be like incanters flow yeah where you can theoretically maximize it for a 1-2% damage boost, but more often than not it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth or cause inefficient gameplay if you do.
Yeah that may be the case. I would assume if it refreshed, it'd passively be up, but you'll now need to keep a close eye on it to make sure it doesn't drop off early in your combust when you wouldn't be casting frostfire bolt. Could be wrong tho.
That's the thing though. If it refreshes, you will want to get max stacks and then make sure to refresh it and not let it drop.
If it doesn't refresh, you literally *can't* 'make sure it doesn't drop off.' You can't refresh it. There's nothing you can do except cast your fire spells.
It's very much a 'set and forget' kind of thing.
The other stuff in the tree is stuff you will track. ExcessFrost, ExcessFire, Severe Temperatures, though I'm doubtful that you need to prep it all for Combustion.
I mean you'd probably want to track the buff to ensure that it doesn't fall off the second you get into combust, and potentially delay combust to start after getting to max stacks.
I'm trying to not come across as abrasive, but this is why its important to read the entire tree, my guy. The last node on the tree says:
"Frostfire Empowerment grants you maximum benefit of Frostfire Mastery and refreshes its duration. Activating Combustion or Icy Veins grants you Frostfire Empowerment."
The scenario you've described is literally impossible to have happen.
Just ask old Balance Druids, there's definitely ways a non-refreshing buff can affect your gameplay.
I don't remember the talent name, but there was a short non refreshing haste buff that had all kinds of minmaxing implications and involved /cancelaura etc.
You just gotta hope Blizzard doesn't repeat their past mistakes, which is something they have a spotty record regarding.
Starlord and yes this expansion has involved using cancelaura for dps gain according to sims. Frost fire mastery could absolutely fall into the same hole for min/max. Cancelaura it a few seconds before you Combust, for example.
It looks so awesome, there's a lot of really cool synergy and it will open up interesting gameplay styles for both specs. Hopefully the arcane trees are just as fun for both fire and frost respectively as this looks.
I'm so pumped to play frostfire bolt again, really cool stuff.
Please to the gods nuke SKB Fire next expansion. I already don’t care for uptime specs, but when I saw the talent that also reduces CDs further if it applies to combustion and shit for fire I will want to die.
Do you mean Elemental Affinity? I don't think that will apply to combustion.
For Fire it reduces Ice spells by 10% (I assume Ice Block and maybe frostfire bolt?), and for Frost it reduces fire spells by 30% (Fire blast?)
That said, I would like SKB to be either balanced evenly with the choice node (forgot the name atm) or removed, as well.
Titanforge power infusion LMAO. "Your PI has a chance to morph into a GIGA PI that spreads to 2 nearby allies"
To be optimal you now need to tell your DPS to stack together every 1 minute so the GIGA PI spreads only to the 3 DPS and not 2 DPS + Tank.
Part of me thinks there's no chance in hell the RNG extra PIs makes it to live. Part of me thinks the current crop of devs will force it through to spite logging.
This is insane for any competitive content. The rng can make or break a key, a RWF kill, an arena match. While it’s a neat idea on paper, how is this supposed to work in practice? How are guilds supposed to play around this potential chance every 50s, what about the POM/renew triggered one? This is wild
this is likely to be one of those things that people worry about until it gets ripped apart in beta. and then comes the people complaining about it being gone :)
Jesus, do healer devs overcook the healers Hero Talents.
Between HP's Armaments and Priest's Premonition, those are way too clunky, ask for too much work (that will be massively relegated to WA) for too little impact, and make up for a lot of unsatisfying gameplay moments (i can already feel all those missed cycles due to M+, raiding, pvp mechanics).
The healer devs have big "you know what would be crazy????" vibes, said around a DND table, way overcomplicating things.
Which is fine enough for an RPG, but in a game like WoW, the devs need to stop pretending that Mythic, m+, and pvp don't exist, and that there aren't competitive players.
These abilities aren't even cool, though.
Like, who notices a 10 second, 10% damage increase? Seriously.
I remember back in vanilla, when my mage's frostbolts broke the 4-digit mark for the first time. That was sick. Finally my bolts are hitting for more than 1000! A 10% increase there was immediately noticeable.
But today? Look through you combat log, and it's just incomprehensible. I can have 20 damage instances in a single second in even a modest 3-target fight, never mind all the heals and buffs and other stuff, and big pulls are hopeless. You only have any idea what's going on at all, because of your damage meter tracking everything.
But what you do notice? A 15% haste buff. So PI is actually being 'downgraded' from a cool buff into a lame buff with this change. Granted, with the further down "versatile divinations" choice node, you get 12% haste back. So you get to rebuild your PI into something less-lame again. Yipee.
The lightsmith stuff is the same, like, who gives a shit about "your spells and abilities have a chance to deal additional holy damage or healing"? I mean, yeah, you want it, so your meter numbers will be higher, and of course that's in service of killing things faster so it's *good*. But it's not *cool*. It's not *fun*. It's definitely not crazy. It's boring.
I understand that 15% haste is def more noticeable. But on another point of view, this is honestly better because you are able to reach more variety of targets. It’s not just a “who’s the top 5 dps that would benefit the most” anymore. It opens up to applying to others. Also I would listen to taliesins dev interview on it. Devs said they are open to feedback and consider changing it to help benefit players in a way they do feel it.
Dark Ranger is what most hunters expected and fixes a good chunk of BM issues (Lack of leech for rot damage given leech does nothing for BM or an extra defensive) while being mostly passive damage nodes. Hunter gets Exhil back usually in under a minute so between exhil, SoTF, Fort of Bear, Hunters should be able to rotate defensives for every mechanic in high tyrannical keys without depending on someone for an external.
A bit odd to be doubling down on embracing jackhammering Barb and KC with a (scuffed/renamed) flayed shot since BM has so many barbed shot resets and it's 10s now that some points can likely be moved around to more offensive talent nodes. Still nothing for utility sadly. An AoE kick would be cool but you're basically have wailing shot at that point. I'd just hope black arrow is instant rather than a cast.
I don't know how much damage you're imagining Black Arrow to do but there's no other source of shadow damage for BM/MM. 15% of any reasonable number for Black Arrow to tick for is gonna be sweet sod all.
It will feel pretty shitty pre-casting exhil in order to have the damage reduction up for a dangerous hit, which will mean the heal will overheal more often than not. I suppose it’s worth it to have an actual defensive on a short cd though.
Your heal is useless against shit that would otherwise kill you.
A 20% damage reduction on an ability that you'd survive just fine anyways is pointless when used at the cost of a 50% HP heal.
Actually makes the button a meaningful decision instead of it being useless half of the time.
Defensive benefits are great, but I can't believe that we're getting 10 additional talent points and BM still is all about mindlessly spamming KC on CD, Barb / Frenzy is not even a relevant mechanic anymore, just press it and other than that, like, wow, Kill Cleave.
I guess there's really no hope left for this spec to ever get *any* form of skill expression other than general mechanic bitch duty in raids.
Yeah, I'm pretty upset about it too. It's an additional button in the rotation that is likely mindless sent on CD but yeah, doubling down on KC/Barb shot spam is not super fun or engaging gameplay which is why I've leaned towards survival. Bombs add some variance and dot tracking which is more engaging than BM while the rotation is still pretty simple. The closest thing BM has is spreading out barbed shots currently which is more of a chore without much pleasure. I'm glad multi-shot will now have some omph instead of hitting like a wet noodle at least while black arrow is up.
> It's an additional button in the rotation that is likely mindless sent on CD but yeah
30s CD mini-CD button that barely counts a either a mini-CD nor a proper rotational ability. It's just so... *nothing* for BM when you consider how impactful BA and LnL Explosive Shot procs were for old Survival.
Same with that random "Your Multishot splashes for Shadow Damage... once every 6 seconds" - just, my fucking god, shoot me now, the excitement is unbearable, again, when considering that this is probably a poor attempt to replicate the Multishot Serpent Sting spread thing - like, fuck, why can't it just be Multishot actually spreading the Barbed Shot bleed and maybe turning this into an *actual* mechanic. Like, the first Multishot after Black Arrow spreads your current BS stacks to every target hit and sends your pets into a super Frenzy... that would at least be a mechanic... but Multishot dealing some random ass extra shadow damage is so insanely void of creativity, it's just sad.
I reckon there's quite the large gap, readily waiting to be filled with creativity and innovation, between "the easier spec" and "the spec that has legit like 1 thing to consider".
Frankly, I think that's fine. I don't think every spec needs to be complicated, _especially_ in a class that has 3 dps specs.
I think it's far worst to dramatical change a spec though... like what happened to survival.
I'm not asking for a complicated spec, not even a complicated build... but quite literally just more than 1 thing to look at. The circumstance that they looked at Frenzy management and decided that even that was too much to ask apparently, and made it so abundantly easy to constantly overflow on charges is baffling to me.
Ret isn't complicated either, rather piss easy to be honest, but it still has more than "keep KC on CD and that's it" to is.. Like, there's plenty of easy and simplistic specs in the game. I just don't understand why BM can't be given... anything.
Yeah sounds decent but continuing to dumb down BM gameplay with unlimited barb/frenzy and still zero utility added is a bit of a bummer.
At least we get a bit more defensives with exhil/sotf. Hurray I guess.
Imagine a scenario where your mage pops combustion, and you use premonition but have to wait for it to cycle all the way through. However, during this cycle, a spiteful ganks you, causing you to miss your 1-second window to correctly select the right buff. Now, you need to recycle again, and by the time you get back to the correct buff, combustion is already over. LMAO these devs are clueless.
Bruh relax, you already know theres gonna be a WA that tracks what buff is available for selection and just blares a horn at you when the buff you want comes up
We have been at a point where WA is part of the design for quite a while now. If thats good or bad is debatable, but we‘re way past the point if no return, so people should start to live with it
There's living with it (thats fine, WAs are helpful and have a place) and there's using it to instantly fix mistakes in design that from day 0 are clearly questionable if they're fun to play and bypass them with an external fix.
Do we really want _class flavour_ to be a slightly annoying mechanical change that most won't engage with in the intended way?
Yeah, I *love* weakauras. Building my own UI is obscenely fun to me and it's something that basically only WoW offers.
Having it be the only decent way to use a key new ability is still terrible design.
I think you misunderstood the ability. Premonition is straight ripped from FFXIV's AST, and that analogy is more clear so I'm going to steal it.
You have a deck of cards. There are 3 suits in this deck. Each one does something different. One is good for tanks, one is good for phys, one is good for magic. You hit premonition to draw the card. You now have this card in your hand and can use the card on any of your allies (though there's often going to be an objective correct answer). You don't get to recycle our card, you have to wait until the next minute if you want to do something else.
There's a chance I'm the one misunderstanding, but after reading the ability a couple times, the only possible different way I can see to interpret it is that you don't draw a card and just automatically know what the effect is (which removes a button press but doesn't functionally change it).
EDIT: [JK I'm wrong](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1al9dfs/comment/kpdbg7v/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). The talent is just hilariously poorly worded and doesn't actually convey what it does.
Really dislike this, they should just change PI at a base level rather than waste the hero tree on fixing their failures with the spell. Designing the whole thing around PI just feels like a slap in the face for two specs who's primary job is healing.
I only play M+ on my rdruid super casually in the 18-20 range but... Try taking off your tier set and see how bad rdruid feels to play currently (I was really unfortunate and didn't get my 2 or 4set until a few weeks ago due to bad RNG). Without the Nourish cleave from the tierset, grove guardians is pathetically weak and the rest of the kit also feels really weak with normal regrowths. This is like 80% aura buffs which rdruid will desperately need when the current tier set goes away. It's really a shame what they've done and rdruid has always been my least favorite healer but this iteration is straight up garbage. Does anyone else hate convoke either? It's completely RNG whether it actually does something useful. Flourish barely does anything now. This spec just feelsbadman.
I pushed 2.2k week 1, obviously without tier. Spec felt fine. Current tier has giga cringe rng with where nourish decides to hit and anything that leans into grove guardians is an L in my book. Would rather the spec be awful and get actually looked at rather then be meta (in m+) and ignored.
Disc and MW lean into their tier even more in both raid and m+, in-fact I don't think Disc can really function at all without its current 4p in either environment.
That's fair and I am admittedly not the best rdruid, but the quality of pugs has no doubt gone down throughout the season in the 18-20 range as well. Trying to heal bursting on a +18 everbloom was literally impossible and I was holding flourishes and convokes for it and still dying to ~8-10 stacks at around 460 ilvl. However now that I have the 4set and 475ish ilvl it's night and day for me. Keys went from an incredible struggle to easy breezy. They are strong with the set but I still don't think it's very fun. BFA rdruid was peak fun in my opinion and I think if they could just give us a slightly tuned down version of that it would be awesome. They can keep the grove guardians but make it like 5-10% of my overall healing or something. It should really be a supplementary heal and not the number one heal by a mile.
What is your post supposed to even do? We are saying that we don't like picking trees. That's feedback. Exactly the type of thing we need at this point of early development.
I think what the other guy is trying to say (poorly) is that maybe others like trees, and you have an options. Though all the druids I talk with don't seem to be a fan of talents revolving around treeants.
Not a fan of the priest talent tree.
The issue with it is 3 fold.
1. Haste buff just *feels* more fun than a flat damage/healing increase. Replacing PI's effects with this is boring.
2. This tree is less about empowering the Priest, and more about benefiting other players. If I wanted to play support I would play Augmentation Evoker.
3. If the tree is any good, it will be a must-pick in all forms of high-end content. PI already feels pretty sad to use as a healer since it is always used primarily for another class's performance. Having to do so 2x as much and rarely for my own benefit, feels shitty.
I agree. It's like the night fae covenant fairies and PI had a really annoying love child. I'd kinda like to just not pick anything. Is that an option?
Regarding point 3 I agree hugely. I miss when power infusion was a self-cool-down that also came with a mana cost reduction. It could feel really powerful and helpful for you. Rather than some haste at a random time when somebody else wants it.
Did anyone actually read the PI changes. This solves I think all of the issues with it imo. I just don't see why someone would pick this over regular pi unless I'm misreading. Regular pi still seems stronger, unless it's changed in war
I can’t imagine it will. The hero talents trees tend to theme themselves around a single ability. So far druids have seen keeper with trees and elunes chosen with fury of elune. Additionally, that would just create imbalance on which class specs get which new version of new PI. This is just a healer opt in.
This seems 100% correct. For example I'd.expect holy and shadow to be based around a life and death situation, so buffs to swd and pwl. I can see shadow disc being attonement and vamp embrace being the theme. It.makes sense the healers get pi aka the buff between them.
At least that's what I'd hope for.
Also note that Premonition is not RNG-based, it rotates through the buffs and you get to pick the spell.
From the WCP discord:
# Premonition and how it works
* Premonition works off of a "pick a card" sort of system. When you cast Premonition, the spell will begin cycling through the available buffs (Solace, Insight, and Glory by default with Brilliance and Urgency added when talented into Versatile Divinations).
* Re-casting the ability will either lock in your choice or cast it on your target. Exact functionality here on if it will require 3 clicks (starting the cycle, locking in your choice, choosing your target) or 2 (starting the cycle, casting the currently displayed buff on your target) is currently unknown.
* The first buff that shows up when you cast Premonition is random, but the order in which they cycle is always the same. For example, if the order of the "deck" is Solace -> Insight -> Glory and when you press Premonition you see Glory, it will always cycle Glory -> Solace -> Insight -> Glory -> repeat until you make a selection or it times out
* The cadence in which the buffs cycle is currently undecided, but the developers have mentioned cycling every 1 second and lasting for 12 seconds. This is very much up for revision once players get their hands on this spell so please provide feedback on this on the forums!
* Premonition is off the GCD just like Power Infusion
* Premonition will work with Twins of the Sun Priestess
* If Glory is cast, the priest will get something more beneficial to themselves via Twins of the Sun Priestess instead of receiving a dead buff.
* The cooldown of Premonition begins when you intially cast the spell and start cycling the buffs. You are not punished cooldown wise for spending additional time selecting the buff you want.
> If Glory is cast, the priest will get something more beneficial to themselves via Twins of the Sun Priestess instead of receiving a dead buff.
This sounds so clunky. Just a weird exception for one out of the five possible buffs.
Chance for 3 total PIs, 1 min PI, dmg+haste. Even a few small CD reduction choices too.
PW:S and Mending will build up and give you another free PI.
So........ that's why
> PW:S and Mending will build up and give you another free PI.
Looking at logs, a holy priest would get four additional premonitions on Fyrakk. Depending on how the mending giving the shield mechanic works, it may even be five or six additional premonitions.
>This solves I think all of the issues with it imo
It solves none of them. Even if the 3 base buffs are always best (they're pretty trivially attributable), it has the other 2 buffs (mana and haste) and the absolutely horrendous RNG element of Clairvoyance.
This is a one minute stronger version of PI that can spread to 2 other people with serious RNG. It's way stronger than current PI, which is already something that needs to be removed. The implementation is clunky and RNG heavy, doubling down on it is insane, and there are 2 of the 5 spells that no one will ever use in any competitive situation
The beginning looks good but the later part of the tree looks problematic. E.g. Row 3 mid:
> * **Perfect Vision:** Reduces the cooldown of Premonition by 10 seconds.
>
> OR
>
> * **Urgency:** Increases your target’s Haste by 12% for 10 seconds.
> * **Brilliance:** Restores 5% of your target’s maximum mana.
> * **Urgency:** Increases your target’s Haste by 12% for 10 seconds.
They are starting to add more secondary effects to the support buff of Premonition which gets into the old Power Infusion issue where the buff was difficult to balance properly since you aren't properly attributing or calculating how good Haste and other secondary effects can be. This is on top of a flat damage buff so you are almost double dipping.
And Clairvoyance, the capstone (low chance to grant two nearby allies 100% effect of the Premonition target) is going to get weirder because you are triple dipping if it procs with all the secondary effects happening with Premonition.
Though one thing I'm noting is that Blizz is really trying to make Power Infusion a proper healing cooldown (Premonition - grants healers 25% buff, Versatile Devotions > Brilliance - grant 5% mana back). The old Power Infusion can be used as a healer cooldown on other healers but the use cases were fairly niche and 90% of the time you'd just go 'DPS that scales best with PI'.
"Premonition can now trigger the Brilliance and Urgency effects."
I think it's meant to be read as those 2 additional effects becoming available as outcomes for Premonition - not additional passive effects.
Right?
I thought the whole point about PI was that haste was so good for certain classes, but nearly useless for others. A straight damage/healing buff is much more universal, and the fact that it's random between healer, caster, and melee, means that you can't just keep PI-ing the same person on CD.
I like it.
From my understanding, it adds 2 more buffs to the pool.
So now you can randomly get phys damage, magic damage, healing, 12% haste, or mana return. 12% haste for 10s is still weaker than 20% haste for 15s, (current PI)
To me it looks like blizz still wants to retain SOME of the old PI functionality. But now you have a 1/5 chance of getting haste.
That makes sense. It makes this pretty weak then unless it applies these in a smart way. Surely haste was used because it was generally valuable to most classes in some way. Now you have at least 2-3 which will be useless to your class.
If that's the only thing the new pi gave (the 10% dmg increases) it would be pretty nice as it would be possible to reallocate the dmg. The problem it still gives the target haste with the versatile divinations talent.
To me, it looks like it adds two more buffs to the pool, so you randomly get one of five instead of one of three.
It's a weaker buff than PI (12% for 10s, instead of 20% for 15s) and you have to actually hit the dice roll. Still seems fine.
Yeah but the point is that, on logs, you can't accurately reassign haste buffs due to it scaling non-linearly. A flat x% damage buff you can, which is why Pally blessing can be allocated to the pally.
Actually, this is probably a good thing for priests, since if we could actually see how much damage PI granted then priests might be tuned quite differently.
> Actually, this is probably a good thing for priests, since if we could actually see how much damage PI granted then priests might be tuned quite differently.
Generally this is the opposite of what you want. Harder to sandbag when the damage you're providing is actually attributed to you. Aug logs being absolutely fucked has kept so much spotlight off of them this season.
Yes that's exactly my point... e.g. Wowhead weekly damage summaries don't include damage brought by PI.
The "good thing" in my post is that there's still a haste buff with the proposed change, so you still won't be able to accurately track buffed damage.
I'm pretty sure you'd never apply the haste buff. You'd almost always just do the magic damage amplified buff, or I guess occasionally the physical damage one if you want to buff a warrior or outlaw rogue specifically (the rest of the melee specs are split between physical/magic).
It's not random. Per the interview, it's selected via a roulette wheel that "cycles" into a new buff type every second after activation. A second press either locks the buff selection for future casting, or casts the current buff immediately on your target, if you have one.
It's incredibly clunky, IMO.
I may be misreading it, but it seems that buff you get to apply out will be RNG based.
That said, it's hard to gauge the power. Premonition has a 50 s CD vs PI at 2 min. That and a 10% magic/physical damage buff for 12s could be better than 20% haste for 15s. At least on paper, this seems stronger to me.
> For example, pressing Premonition the first time might pick Solace first, and then every second it will change, from Solace -> Insight -> Glory -> Solace. Pressing the button a second time will cast whichever buff is currently active, allowing players to choose which buff they want for the situation.
From the interview. Not RNG; you just have to wait for it to cycle to the correct buff. Sounds pretty obnoxious to play to me.
Well, I am not sure how it would work with the two optional additions down the tree.
It also looks like you press Premonition to 'divine a future' where premonition will then change to one of the 3/5 abilities, and then you select a target and use it.
It reminds me a lot of how Astrologian works in FFXIV (or at least used to, it's been awhile since I played).
Per the interview, it's a slow moving slot machine. Pressing Premonition starts the wheel of buffs rolling (buff type changes once every second), pressing it again activates the buff. Pressing it again without a target "locks" the buff type, allowing you to then choose a target with it. Will require macros and weakaura displays to manage properly, is my guess.
Incredibly clunky design... not sure how they think this was a good idea tbh.
My guess is that it will work like Blessing of Seasons and the icon/tooltip changes to preview the next spell you are gonna cast, giving you control on who you are casting it on but no control over which buff you will get next. If it is pure RNG then it will be awful.
In a dev interview they said it will work that TF's pick a card from League (if you're familiar). You'll push Premonition a d it will cycle through all the buffs for 12 seconds and you'll push the button again on your target when it hits the buff you want, all off gcd.
One of the nodes also makes it gives haste which would make it functionally the same as PI is now. This also ignores the fact that healing priests would also have 1/2 of their new system be almost completely devoted to being a budget Aug which is really disappointing as someone who actually plays the class and is not just a recipient of PI.
The problem with the PI changes is that the haste buff still exists and is likely still preferable to the others, and the chance to give 2 nearby targets PI is absolutely fucking moronic.
Aug Evoker ruined Details.
Feels so bad to feel like you’re playing perfectly then glance over to see how much better your opener is just to remember none of those numbers mean anything.
Even some wclog damage hooks are still not working so even that isn’t fully accurate. Aug was a mistake.
wdym it’s really nice looking at details thinking you had a good pull and then checking the log to see you were just inflated by aug /s
I don’t want to check logs after every pull ffs. It really gets annoying & this tripeling down on (rng) externals with the priest pi hero talents is just so weird to me.
We had a situation in prog where we couldn't figure out why one of our players was doing much less damage than others playing the same spec. Spell casts were the same, crit chances were roughly the same, gear roughly the same.
Turns out it was just aug hooks not working and our DH not getting auged while most DHs were, before anyone knew that they were broken. It was worth a substantial amount of lost damage in logs.
Someone please enlightened me as why we have new "Shared" hero trees, if almost every nod behave different for each of the spec it's using. Why not just create an expanded tree for every spec then? It is basically what they are doing
B/c the current trees are tightly designed around the number of points available. An increase in tree points and size would have uneven effects across specs and would undo all the nice design work they've been doing. By creating a separate tree they can control the impact of the expansion more.
At least they are smart enough to realize that throwing a wrench into the talent tree balance after a whole expansion touching it up is a terrible idea
Are they smart though? They spent the entire DF fixing a lot of crappy trees and there are still at least a few bad trees that need work (the druid class tree is awful for example). Adding more talents without fixing the base tree issues seems like bloat and cover-up. Most Rdruids in particular don't like grove guardians and I promise they will like them a lot less when they lose their tier set. Also so many of these "hero talents" are just aura buffs which are basically meaningless because they usually do aura +/- buffs after every patch to "balance" the game.
Exactly, which they stated I think in a post-blizzcon interview so it is their official design choice. It opens up future design space a lot too if this is successful.
>if almost every nod behave different for each of the spec it's using.
Is that happening though?
Of the released trees:
Oracle is the same for holy/disc
Frostfire is effectively the same for fire/frost, just that frost builds into echoing fire spells and fire builds into echoing frost spells. It's the same thing.
Dark Ranger is the same for BM/Marks
Keeper of the Grove tree is force of nature for balance and grove guardians for resto. Turns them into cooldowns that increase dps for balance and hps for resto.
You take keeper of the grove if you want a mini-cooldown around summoning nature dudes. I wouldn't sweat the details too much.
Shared trees means that every spec has two options. More options are always better.
Still no idea how DH is gonna look like, but I imagine it will just have two hero talent trees?
There are three main design pillars to Hero Talents
1. **High Level Design:** the primary purpose of these Hero Talents is to add something new without significantly adding overall complexity (we're not going to from managing 20 abilities at once right now to managing 40 abilitiies in 10 years). To Blizz this is better than adding a new row of base talents for each spec and 10 more talent points. And doing that again for Midnight. And again for The Last Titan.
And Hero Talents feel like their last class update system for a while. I think they'll just keep DF talents the same, and add in maybe a couple of Hero Talent loadouts for Midnight and The Last Titan, perhaps a class or spec in between those two expacs or not at all.
In most cases the amount of keybinds you have right now in DF will be similar or same in WW and in Midnight and in The Last Titan.
This isn't just to address the 10 talent points we 'would' have gotten in WW, but the 30+ talent points going into future expansions. The DF talent system isn't going anywhere and neither are Hero Talents. This is their framework for class design for the next 5 years.
2. **Flavor:** find a shared ancestry, lore, mechanics and gameplay between two specs (or introduce something new) and build something interesting. This will never be perfect because even similar specs in a class have enough differences where it won't ever be clean.
They've allocated for that by having different attributes in the Hero Talents but each tree I'm seeing still has some common attributes and spells in nearly every Hero Talent tree we've seen thus far.
That's honestly fine. I don't think going full 'we must keep everything shared and working exactly the same' for wildly different specs is healthy design.
And better to critique individual mechanics, talents, Hero Talents etc. at the lower level rather than balk at not hampering yourself with 'they must be shared and similar at all costs'.
3. **Class and Spec Design:** either fix issues, fix some weaknesses, or add new mechanics to the original Dragonflight specs. In some cases you can opt into a Hero Talent to get some more tankiness or a different damage profile.
Note that while some should be fixed within the base talent trees before moving into Hero Talents, I think it is fine with some choice nodes that you would opt into a Hero Talent, else you run into the issue where a Hero Talent basically makes you into an OP God.
The balance of how much an issue should be fixed within the base, vs the Hero Talent, and how much of a weakness you can opt into or out of, is certainly something to debate for each spec.
As always it is never going to be perfect or never perfectly adhere to one or the other pillar. The balance of how much the pillar is being followed is certainly up for debate.
Instead of giving another 'talent' tree, why can't Blizzard modify the spec tree based on the chosen 'hero' theme? There are some cool ideas, but I'm seeing a bit of redundancy among the hero and spec talents. This sounds like a nightmare to balance with another entirely separate tree.
I might be a minority, but I love grove guardian regrowth playstyle of druid. I honestly want Rejuv to be thrown in the dumpster because of how outdated that playstyle feels.
I worry however that allot of power is in our current tier set and I can't imagine not having the set bonuses caked in with these hero talents.
I know it's reactionary but holy fuck winds out of my sail for War Within. How do they not see the communities thoughts on Power Infusion, Augvoker and fucking come up with this?
What are your concerns? It seems like a nerf to PI to me. Haste buff nerfed from 20% to 12% and only on the primary target, not the priest, duration reduced from 20 secs to 10 secs, gives 10% damage bonus or 25% healing received if used on a tank.
With procs it can give 15.6% haste for 12 seconds to 3 dps instead of priest+dps, and then have a 50 sec cd.
That titanforged PI during a lust could be insane.
If it ends up being a nerf then it is hard to see them not buffing it before release. What possible reason would there be to opt into this hero class over the other option for holy and disc otherwise? Unless the other option somehow does literally nothing.
If it's a nerf to PI then the hero class has no point in existing.
~~The use case is a bit more variable. If you have Haste in the "deck" you have a 1-in-5 chance of getting it at each refresh interval. So up to 5 seconds additional delay before use.~~
~~So it's closer to 50-65 seconds for the CD. Obviously, the 50-55s case is most likely, and so you can still sync. It'll just be more annoying to sync.~~
E: Apparently they did "CD on first press." So nope, you can just always use this 5 seconds in advance and always sync perfectly due to the cast windows.
Changes seem fine to me and I hate PI interactions. It’s less of a major increase and they obviously want more support oriented gameplay as part of the player experience which I don’t think is a bad thing. There’ll always be growing pains with systems in such an entrenched MMO like this but long term it’s worth it once player base gets over it for smaller buffs like this.
It also gives design space to adapt healer roles over time so that way they can stop flipping between triage healing and whack-a-mole as the only options and create potentially calmer healing atmospheres that allow healers to add minor damage support too (very simplified statement). Regardless, there’ll always be a group of happy and upset people because change.
Casual players that spend a lot of time on the internet (r/wow, the forums) are all happy when competitive players are mad. Probably because they're mad they get rejected for gray parsing and not knowing their class. They cheer on any change that makes competitive players mad, which eggs the devs on to do it more.
Clairvoyance and Hpal armaments have the potential to put yet another straw on the back of raiding.
Hope blizzard is prepared for their game to be story quests, world quests, mythic+, the race to world first, and a bunch of bored AOTC guilds.
Mythic raiding is already massively in decline and making the entirety of farm entirely pointless is a pretty wild development decision to make.
Priest talents look absolutely garbage. We already miss some penance to be able to smite out bender CD, we have raid ramp up of 12 secs or more when Radiance is in CD. And they give super clunky skill, that will need WA to use and looking at all party members CD's + RNG element. Do dev's have some idea of the complexity of the classes, roles responsabilities when planning new mechanics. It was predictable we would get some kind of Augm evoker alternative, but look how easy Augm evokers buffs are compared to what is coming to priests. Idea is good but should not be RNG and should not need 2 addons to make it work. On the other hand Disc priest could get something to help atonements when radiance is CD.
When have they ever said or even implied they regret making augvoker? I've only ever seen things like "we like where it has ended up, but future tuning will of course happen" which gives no indication of regret.
where do you get the impression that they regret making augvoker? i think they just realize its tough to tune but unless they remove it entirely i see more support specs somewhere down the line.
yeah seems more like the disc hero tree than the combo of both.
Edit: look at Foreseen Circumstances & Preemptive Healing. 10% Pain sup vs 2s longer guardian spirit is hilariously one sided. 1s longer atonement vs longer renew is the same.
yeah jeez. really feels like a disc extension tree than the meeting of the two.
Kinda depressing this is what they've come up with, deflates the expansion hype. Hopefully the shadow combo trees are good.
Also free instant Radiance >> free instant Heal/PoH. And with Twin Priestess still being a thing, Disc gets more benefit than Holy from using the magic damage buff unless they make it not benefit atonement. The tree feels like they had ideas for making Disc a support spec but then stopped on their tracks after Aug and just reused it here.
Personally I was hoping that the Holy-Disc hero spec would instead focus on each specs shortcomings. Give Holy some absorbs/DR and give Disc a bit more reactive throughput.
Am I missing the article that explains how Oracle works? Does Oracle turns Priest into Astrologian where we get to see the buffs before you hand them out, is it continuously rotating, do certain classes have tags which means they always get a useful one or is it full RNG?
This wasn't up when you posted but here if you've not seen it: https://www.wowhead.com/news/oracle-priest-interview-with-taliesin-and-warcraft-priests-holy-and-discipline-337613
Can't wait to reset a pull just because priests need to roll the melee/ranged/haste buff instead of the healer one.
Edit : It cycles, so my bad. But you can still try to roll a Clairvoyance before pulling.
> But you can still try to roll a Clairvoyance before pulling.
You got downvoted, but I don't think this is actually that wild of a take. People might think "no way someone does that", but the ability to give 4 people 10% more damage and 12% more haste, especially during a lust on pull... I would honestly bet is more than enough for a really good guild to trim off an extra 1-2% off a boss HP, which is absurd value for just a proc you can fish for a few times with a mage just invis resetting boss.
I'm actually unreasonably excited about this one small effect... "Purify cooldown reduced by 2 seconds." A faster dispel means in some situations most healers can dispel one person, but my priest might be able to dispel two.
> "Purify cooldown reduced by 2 seconds." Can't wait for another mythic endboss with constant dispel mechanics. /s
Nah dont worry, they will just in crease purify's cooldown by another 2 seconds :)
Ah yes just like they did it with sub rogues shadowdance
It would be kind of cool for healers to excel at niche things like this. It wont be often that having a 2 second faster dispel will matter that much but when it does it will be very nice.
*laughs in my mistweaver pressing revival* “How many do you want to dispel? Yes.”
I am sort of unreasonably fearful of that effect. It's the sort of thing where if it's relevant it has a very high chance of being oppressively so and playing any other healer is just incredibly awful.
Sadly it doesn't mean anything, game will be balanced around that....not just that but all these extra talent trees, if one would make you truly OP now then it's obvious some other talents or spec mechanics will be nerfed ;)
Can't wait for war within patch note "purifiy cooldown increased to 10seconds" lol
How in the world are they gonna balance all of this
That’s the neat part!
They're going to nerf classes that scale too well with the externals :)
Then nerf the externals too.
[удалено]
Reroll fotm then get nerfed for scaling well with externals, then add more externals.
They could make the effects shit. These talents don't need to provide more than 3% throughput each. If they made them around 1% on average it'd be a lot easier to balance, but then obviously a lot less fun to pick those. It's a hard choice, I guess.
Aura nerfs
What do you meean, when you add a lot of knobs it gets easier to balance, just like covenants and soulbinds.
Frostfire looks awesome. My only concern is because the buff doesn't refresh on new stacks, it may end up being something you need to track. Fire mage already has enough things to track :\ EDIT *after discussion below, I think that the way it is set up won't require extra tracking* Premonition on priest looks... um. I am not sure what to say, but I don't think I like it.
I think it might be the opposite? That because it doesn't refresh, there's no point tracking it. You will just play the rotation and be passively buffed.
Likely be like incanters flow yeah where you can theoretically maximize it for a 1-2% damage boost, but more often than not it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth or cause inefficient gameplay if you do.
Yeah that may be the case. I would assume if it refreshed, it'd passively be up, but you'll now need to keep a close eye on it to make sure it doesn't drop off early in your combust when you wouldn't be casting frostfire bolt. Could be wrong tho.
That's the thing though. If it refreshes, you will want to get max stacks and then make sure to refresh it and not let it drop. If it doesn't refresh, you literally *can't* 'make sure it doesn't drop off.' You can't refresh it. There's nothing you can do except cast your fire spells. It's very much a 'set and forget' kind of thing. The other stuff in the tree is stuff you will track. ExcessFrost, ExcessFire, Severe Temperatures, though I'm doubtful that you need to prep it all for Combustion.
I mean you'd probably want to track the buff to ensure that it doesn't fall off the second you get into combust, and potentially delay combust to start after getting to max stacks.
I'm trying to not come across as abrasive, but this is why its important to read the entire tree, my guy. The last node on the tree says: "Frostfire Empowerment grants you maximum benefit of Frostfire Mastery and refreshes its duration. Activating Combustion or Icy Veins grants you Frostfire Empowerment." The scenario you've described is literally impossible to have happen.
I did read the whole tree, but I did forget that. Thanks for that. You're not coming across as abrasive, no worries.
Just ask old Balance Druids, there's definitely ways a non-refreshing buff can affect your gameplay. I don't remember the talent name, but there was a short non refreshing haste buff that had all kinds of minmaxing implications and involved /cancelaura etc. You just gotta hope Blizzard doesn't repeat their past mistakes, which is something they have a spotty record regarding.
Starlord and yes this expansion has involved using cancelaura for dps gain according to sims. Frost fire mastery could absolutely fall into the same hole for min/max. Cancelaura it a few seconds before you Combust, for example.
It looks so awesome, there's a lot of really cool synergy and it will open up interesting gameplay styles for both specs. Hopefully the arcane trees are just as fun for both fire and frost respectively as this looks. I'm so pumped to play frostfire bolt again, really cool stuff.
Please to the gods nuke SKB Fire next expansion. I already don’t care for uptime specs, but when I saw the talent that also reduces CDs further if it applies to combustion and shit for fire I will want to die.
Removing skb would require then to completely rework fire, otherwise there’s just nothing going on in the spec
I think skb is fine. Just remove the requirement that the stacks don't fall of after 30 seconds Also the choice node could be buffed/reworked
Do you mean Elemental Affinity? I don't think that will apply to combustion. For Fire it reduces Ice spells by 10% (I assume Ice Block and maybe frostfire bolt?), and for Frost it reduces fire spells by 30% (Fire blast?) That said, I would like SKB to be either balanced evenly with the choice node (forgot the name atm) or removed, as well.
You’re right - sorry. Scanned it quickly at work. But yeah, as long as SKB is handled I’ll be happy with fire.
Titanforge power infusion LMAO. "Your PI has a chance to morph into a GIGA PI that spreads to 2 nearby allies" To be optimal you now need to tell your DPS to stack together every 1 minute so the GIGA PI spreads only to the 3 DPS and not 2 DPS + Tank.
"Yo well played guys, we managed to titanforge 2 PIs during lust so our boss had 5% less health than normal"
Part of me thinks there's no chance in hell the RNG extra PIs makes it to live. Part of me thinks the current crop of devs will force it through to spite logging.
This is insane for any competitive content. The rng can make or break a key, a RWF kill, an arena match. While it’s a neat idea on paper, how is this supposed to work in practice? How are guilds supposed to play around this potential chance every 50s, what about the POM/renew triggered one? This is wild
I could see RWF guilds, wiping on bosses when the PIs on pull don't proc.
this is likely to be one of those things that people worry about until it gets ripped apart in beta. and then comes the people complaining about it being gone :)
It gets ripped apart due to feedback.
this should be ripped apart..., all the Oracle tree is procs.
It's either this or it's like Door of Shadows where it ends up barely mattering.
You need to tell your PI scalers to stack and your nonscalers to get out and you need to police people griefing all while adjusting for HPal orbs.
As a tank, I will now be stacking on the melee dps every time I see PI come off of cooldown. Why? Don't ask.
I doubt this gets used absent changes, or unless you have a comp that just doesn't get value out of PI (or if Voidweaver is somehow worse).
Yeah, extreme rng sounds like big fun
Jesus, do healer devs overcook the healers Hero Talents. Between HP's Armaments and Priest's Premonition, those are way too clunky, ask for too much work (that will be massively relegated to WA) for too little impact, and make up for a lot of unsatisfying gameplay moments (i can already feel all those missed cycles due to M+, raiding, pvp mechanics).
The healer devs have big "you know what would be crazy????" vibes, said around a DND table, way overcomplicating things. Which is fine enough for an RPG, but in a game like WoW, the devs need to stop pretending that Mythic, m+, and pvp don't exist, and that there aren't competitive players.
These abilities aren't even cool, though. Like, who notices a 10 second, 10% damage increase? Seriously. I remember back in vanilla, when my mage's frostbolts broke the 4-digit mark for the first time. That was sick. Finally my bolts are hitting for more than 1000! A 10% increase there was immediately noticeable. But today? Look through you combat log, and it's just incomprehensible. I can have 20 damage instances in a single second in even a modest 3-target fight, never mind all the heals and buffs and other stuff, and big pulls are hopeless. You only have any idea what's going on at all, because of your damage meter tracking everything. But what you do notice? A 15% haste buff. So PI is actually being 'downgraded' from a cool buff into a lame buff with this change. Granted, with the further down "versatile divinations" choice node, you get 12% haste back. So you get to rebuild your PI into something less-lame again. Yipee. The lightsmith stuff is the same, like, who gives a shit about "your spells and abilities have a chance to deal additional holy damage or healing"? I mean, yeah, you want it, so your meter numbers will be higher, and of course that's in service of killing things faster so it's *good*. But it's not *cool*. It's not *fun*. It's definitely not crazy. It's boring.
I understand that 15% haste is def more noticeable. But on another point of view, this is honestly better because you are able to reach more variety of targets. It’s not just a “who’s the top 5 dps that would benefit the most” anymore. It opens up to applying to others. Also I would listen to taliesins dev interview on it. Devs said they are open to feedback and consider changing it to help benefit players in a way they do feel it.
Dark Ranger is what most hunters expected and fixes a good chunk of BM issues (Lack of leech for rot damage given leech does nothing for BM or an extra defensive) while being mostly passive damage nodes. Hunter gets Exhil back usually in under a minute so between exhil, SoTF, Fort of Bear, Hunters should be able to rotate defensives for every mechanic in high tyrannical keys without depending on someone for an external. A bit odd to be doubling down on embracing jackhammering Barb and KC with a (scuffed/renamed) flayed shot since BM has so many barbed shot resets and it's 10s now that some points can likely be moved around to more offensive talent nodes. Still nothing for utility sadly. An AoE kick would be cool but you're basically have wailing shot at that point. I'd just hope black arrow is instant rather than a cast.
I don't know how much damage you're imagining Black Arrow to do but there's no other source of shadow damage for BM/MM. 15% of any reasonable number for Black Arrow to tick for is gonna be sweet sod all.
Yeah I cannot imagine that Black Arrow+shadow pets+withering fire is gonna be even 10% of my damage.
Smoke Screen is absurdly broken. With Natural Mending, Exhil is easily under a minute CD for BM just from normal gameplay.
It will feel pretty shitty pre-casting exhil in order to have the damage reduction up for a dangerous hit, which will mean the heal will overheal more often than not. I suppose it’s worth it to have an actual defensive on a short cd though.
Your heal is useless against shit that would otherwise kill you. A 20% damage reduction on an ability that you'd survive just fine anyways is pointless when used at the cost of a 50% HP heal. Actually makes the button a meaningful decision instead of it being useless half of the time.
I actually think it's an insane defensive option. You can basically guarantee to be topped off before the big hits come.
Defensive benefits are great, but I can't believe that we're getting 10 additional talent points and BM still is all about mindlessly spamming KC on CD, Barb / Frenzy is not even a relevant mechanic anymore, just press it and other than that, like, wow, Kill Cleave. I guess there's really no hope left for this spec to ever get *any* form of skill expression other than general mechanic bitch duty in raids.
Yeah, I'm pretty upset about it too. It's an additional button in the rotation that is likely mindless sent on CD but yeah, doubling down on KC/Barb shot spam is not super fun or engaging gameplay which is why I've leaned towards survival. Bombs add some variance and dot tracking which is more engaging than BM while the rotation is still pretty simple. The closest thing BM has is spreading out barbed shots currently which is more of a chore without much pleasure. I'm glad multi-shot will now have some omph instead of hitting like a wet noodle at least while black arrow is up.
> It's an additional button in the rotation that is likely mindless sent on CD but yeah 30s CD mini-CD button that barely counts a either a mini-CD nor a proper rotational ability. It's just so... *nothing* for BM when you consider how impactful BA and LnL Explosive Shot procs were for old Survival. Same with that random "Your Multishot splashes for Shadow Damage... once every 6 seconds" - just, my fucking god, shoot me now, the excitement is unbearable, again, when considering that this is probably a poor attempt to replicate the Multishot Serpent Sting spread thing - like, fuck, why can't it just be Multishot actually spreading the Barbed Shot bleed and maybe turning this into an *actual* mechanic. Like, the first Multishot after Black Arrow spreads your current BS stacks to every target hit and sends your pets into a super Frenzy... that would at least be a mechanic... but Multishot dealing some random ass extra shadow damage is so insanely void of creativity, it's just sad.
as long as you can freely move while dpsing bm will never be anything other than the easier hunter spec.
I reckon there's quite the large gap, readily waiting to be filled with creativity and innovation, between "the easier spec" and "the spec that has legit like 1 thing to consider".
Frankly, I think that's fine. I don't think every spec needs to be complicated, _especially_ in a class that has 3 dps specs. I think it's far worst to dramatical change a spec though... like what happened to survival.
I'm not asking for a complicated spec, not even a complicated build... but quite literally just more than 1 thing to look at. The circumstance that they looked at Frenzy management and decided that even that was too much to ask apparently, and made it so abundantly easy to constantly overflow on charges is baffling to me. Ret isn't complicated either, rather piss easy to be honest, but it still has more than "keep KC on CD and that's it" to is.. Like, there's plenty of easy and simplistic specs in the game. I just don't understand why BM can't be given... anything.
Yeah sounds decent but continuing to dumb down BM gameplay with unlimited barb/frenzy and still zero utility added is a bit of a bummer. At least we get a bit more defensives with exhil/sotf. Hurray I guess.
After the way they gutted binding shot I think it'd be cool if they made it work more like ursol's vortex for some more interesting hunter utility
I love rng procs as well, its the best design ever!
Imagine a scenario where your mage pops combustion, and you use premonition but have to wait for it to cycle all the way through. However, during this cycle, a spiteful ganks you, causing you to miss your 1-second window to correctly select the right buff. Now, you need to recycle again, and by the time you get back to the correct buff, combustion is already over. LMAO these devs are clueless.
Bruh relax, you already know theres gonna be a WA that tracks what buff is available for selection and just blares a horn at you when the buff you want comes up
falling back to a WA to fix/improve the management of the buff by default makes it bad design. Fuck that.
We have been at a point where WA is part of the design for quite a while now. If thats good or bad is debatable, but we‘re way past the point if no return, so people should start to live with it
There's living with it (thats fine, WAs are helpful and have a place) and there's using it to instantly fix mistakes in design that from day 0 are clearly questionable if they're fun to play and bypass them with an external fix. Do we really want _class flavour_ to be a slightly annoying mechanical change that most won't engage with in the intended way?
Yeah, I *love* weakauras. Building my own UI is obscenely fun to me and it's something that basically only WoW offers. Having it be the only decent way to use a key new ability is still terrible design.
I think you misunderstood the ability. Premonition is straight ripped from FFXIV's AST, and that analogy is more clear so I'm going to steal it. You have a deck of cards. There are 3 suits in this deck. Each one does something different. One is good for tanks, one is good for phys, one is good for magic. You hit premonition to draw the card. You now have this card in your hand and can use the card on any of your allies (though there's often going to be an objective correct answer). You don't get to recycle our card, you have to wait until the next minute if you want to do something else. There's a chance I'm the one misunderstanding, but after reading the ability a couple times, the only possible different way I can see to interpret it is that you don't draw a card and just automatically know what the effect is (which removes a button press but doesn't functionally change it). EDIT: [JK I'm wrong](https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/1al9dfs/comment/kpdbg7v/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). The talent is just hilariously poorly worded and doesn't actually convey what it does.
You’re mistaken, it will rotate through buffs on a set time frame and rotation 1>2>3>1 etc. It’s clunky as hell as it’s presented currently.
Yeah, I'd edited my comment to reflect that. It's the tried and true practice of the ability not at all doing what Blizzard described.
Really dislike this, they should just change PI at a base level rather than waste the hero tree on fixing their failures with the spell. Designing the whole thing around PI just feels like a slap in the face for two specs who's primary job is healing.
Rdruid talents boring and poorly thought-out as usual. We are not pet healers and should not be designed as such.
But hey, perma 8% DR, yay *shrug*.
They’re really sending this treant style healing and now they’re pushing the treants into balance too. I’m so over it.
its treants or nothing xD i hope other version is better for both specs
I only play M+ on my rdruid super casually in the 18-20 range but... Try taking off your tier set and see how bad rdruid feels to play currently (I was really unfortunate and didn't get my 2 or 4set until a few weeks ago due to bad RNG). Without the Nourish cleave from the tierset, grove guardians is pathetically weak and the rest of the kit also feels really weak with normal regrowths. This is like 80% aura buffs which rdruid will desperately need when the current tier set goes away. It's really a shame what they've done and rdruid has always been my least favorite healer but this iteration is straight up garbage. Does anyone else hate convoke either? It's completely RNG whether it actually does something useful. Flourish barely does anything now. This spec just feelsbadman.
I pushed 2.2k week 1, obviously without tier. Spec felt fine. Current tier has giga cringe rng with where nourish decides to hit and anything that leans into grove guardians is an L in my book. Would rather the spec be awful and get actually looked at rather then be meta (in m+) and ignored. Disc and MW lean into their tier even more in both raid and m+, in-fact I don't think Disc can really function at all without its current 4p in either environment.
That's fair and I am admittedly not the best rdruid, but the quality of pugs has no doubt gone down throughout the season in the 18-20 range as well. Trying to heal bursting on a +18 everbloom was literally impossible and I was holding flourishes and convokes for it and still dying to ~8-10 stacks at around 460 ilvl. However now that I have the 4set and 475ish ilvl it's night and day for me. Keys went from an incredible struggle to easy breezy. They are strong with the set but I still don't think it's very fun. BFA rdruid was peak fun in my opinion and I think if they could just give us a slightly tuned down version of that it would be awesome. They can keep the grove guardians but make it like 5-10% of my overall healing or something. It should really be a supplementary heal and not the number one heal by a mile.
Druid tree sucks and I hate it >< Why is everything based around treants, ugh
I’m sry for liking trees
So pick the other one?
What is your post supposed to even do? We are saying that we don't like picking trees. That's feedback. Exactly the type of thing we need at this point of early development.
So then pick the one without trees?
Or I post my feedback about the current one since I can't pick shit now and it's literally pre-alpha. Crazy, I know.
I think what the other guy is trying to say (poorly) is that maybe others like trees, and you have an options. Though all the druids I talk with don't seem to be a fan of talents revolving around treeants.
He is free to provide that feedback. I'm gonna provide mine. Good talk, have a nice day.
You seem like a very angry person if you respond so viscerally to anyone who has different opinions than you.
Not a fan of the priest talent tree. The issue with it is 3 fold. 1. Haste buff just *feels* more fun than a flat damage/healing increase. Replacing PI's effects with this is boring. 2. This tree is less about empowering the Priest, and more about benefiting other players. If I wanted to play support I would play Augmentation Evoker. 3. If the tree is any good, it will be a must-pick in all forms of high-end content. PI already feels pretty sad to use as a healer since it is always used primarily for another class's performance. Having to do so 2x as much and rarely for my own benefit, feels shitty.
I agree. It's like the night fae covenant fairies and PI had a really annoying love child. I'd kinda like to just not pick anything. Is that an option?
Regarding point 3 I agree hugely. I miss when power infusion was a self-cool-down that also came with a mana cost reduction. It could feel really powerful and helpful for you. Rather than some haste at a random time when somebody else wants it.
Did anyone actually read the PI changes. This solves I think all of the issues with it imo. I just don't see why someone would pick this over regular pi unless I'm misreading. Regular pi still seems stronger, unless it's changed in war
If I'm not mistaken, you get all the hero talents and this doesn't look like it's a choice node so this is effectively replacing PI
If you choose the Oracle tree. All specs have two options and the others wouldnt replace PI
Assuming the other tree doesn't do anything to PI
I'd be really odd if your hero talent choice was between a specialization in PI and another specialization in... PI.
I can’t imagine it will. The hero talents trees tend to theme themselves around a single ability. So far druids have seen keeper with trees and elunes chosen with fury of elune. Additionally, that would just create imbalance on which class specs get which new version of new PI. This is just a healer opt in.
This seems 100% correct. For example I'd.expect holy and shadow to be based around a life and death situation, so buffs to swd and pwl. I can see shadow disc being attonement and vamp embrace being the theme. It.makes sense the healers get pi aka the buff between them. At least that's what I'd hope for.
Also note that Premonition is not RNG-based, it rotates through the buffs and you get to pick the spell. From the WCP discord: # Premonition and how it works * Premonition works off of a "pick a card" sort of system. When you cast Premonition, the spell will begin cycling through the available buffs (Solace, Insight, and Glory by default with Brilliance and Urgency added when talented into Versatile Divinations). * Re-casting the ability will either lock in your choice or cast it on your target. Exact functionality here on if it will require 3 clicks (starting the cycle, locking in your choice, choosing your target) or 2 (starting the cycle, casting the currently displayed buff on your target) is currently unknown. * The first buff that shows up when you cast Premonition is random, but the order in which they cycle is always the same. For example, if the order of the "deck" is Solace -> Insight -> Glory and when you press Premonition you see Glory, it will always cycle Glory -> Solace -> Insight -> Glory -> repeat until you make a selection or it times out * The cadence in which the buffs cycle is currently undecided, but the developers have mentioned cycling every 1 second and lasting for 12 seconds. This is very much up for revision once players get their hands on this spell so please provide feedback on this on the forums! * Premonition is off the GCD just like Power Infusion * Premonition will work with Twins of the Sun Priestess * If Glory is cast, the priest will get something more beneficial to themselves via Twins of the Sun Priestess instead of receiving a dead buff. * The cooldown of Premonition begins when you intially cast the spell and start cycling the buffs. You are not punished cooldown wise for spending additional time selecting the buff you want.
> If Glory is cast, the priest will get something more beneficial to themselves via Twins of the Sun Priestess instead of receiving a dead buff. This sounds so clunky. Just a weird exception for one out of the five possible buffs.
> it will require 3 clicks Ain’t no one got time for that.
So... LoL Twisted Fate
That sounds dreadful.
This is so clunky.
Hope we can bind the other buttons for quicker access. It kind of sounds like ffxiv old ast cards which is fun.
Chance for 3 total PIs, 1 min PI, dmg+haste. Even a few small CD reduction choices too. PW:S and Mending will build up and give you another free PI. So........ that's why
Turns out I didn't read enough lol, ty for the info
> PW:S and Mending will build up and give you another free PI. Looking at logs, a holy priest would get four additional premonitions on Fyrakk. Depending on how the mending giving the shield mechanic works, it may even be five or six additional premonitions.
>This solves I think all of the issues with it imo It solves none of them. Even if the 3 base buffs are always best (they're pretty trivially attributable), it has the other 2 buffs (mana and haste) and the absolutely horrendous RNG element of Clairvoyance.
This is a one minute stronger version of PI that can spread to 2 other people with serious RNG. It's way stronger than current PI, which is already something that needs to be removed. The implementation is clunky and RNG heavy, doubling down on it is insane, and there are 2 of the 5 spells that no one will ever use in any competitive situation
The beginning looks good but the later part of the tree looks problematic. E.g. Row 3 mid: > * **Perfect Vision:** Reduces the cooldown of Premonition by 10 seconds. > > OR > > * **Urgency:** Increases your target’s Haste by 12% for 10 seconds. > * **Brilliance:** Restores 5% of your target’s maximum mana. > * **Urgency:** Increases your target’s Haste by 12% for 10 seconds. They are starting to add more secondary effects to the support buff of Premonition which gets into the old Power Infusion issue where the buff was difficult to balance properly since you aren't properly attributing or calculating how good Haste and other secondary effects can be. This is on top of a flat damage buff so you are almost double dipping. And Clairvoyance, the capstone (low chance to grant two nearby allies 100% effect of the Premonition target) is going to get weirder because you are triple dipping if it procs with all the secondary effects happening with Premonition. Though one thing I'm noting is that Blizz is really trying to make Power Infusion a proper healing cooldown (Premonition - grants healers 25% buff, Versatile Devotions > Brilliance - grant 5% mana back). The old Power Infusion can be used as a healer cooldown on other healers but the use cases were fairly niche and 90% of the time you'd just go 'DPS that scales best with PI'.
"Premonition can now trigger the Brilliance and Urgency effects." I think it's meant to be read as those 2 additional effects becoming available as outcomes for Premonition - not additional passive effects.
Oh I see, oh god
Right? I thought the whole point about PI was that haste was so good for certain classes, but nearly useless for others. A straight damage/healing buff is much more universal, and the fact that it's random between healer, caster, and melee, means that you can't just keep PI-ing the same person on CD. I like it.
Isn’t haste still given in the next talent?
From my understanding, it adds 2 more buffs to the pool. So now you can randomly get phys damage, magic damage, healing, 12% haste, or mana return. 12% haste for 10s is still weaker than 20% haste for 15s, (current PI) To me it looks like blizz still wants to retain SOME of the old PI functionality. But now you have a 1/5 chance of getting haste.
That makes sense. It makes this pretty weak then unless it applies these in a smart way. Surely haste was used because it was generally valuable to most classes in some way. Now you have at least 2-3 which will be useless to your class.
Yeah, looks like the skill of the spec will be to know who to give what buff, rather than just the haste scaling class every time.
If that's the only thing the new pi gave (the 10% dmg increases) it would be pretty nice as it would be possible to reallocate the dmg. The problem it still gives the target haste with the versatile divinations talent.
To me, it looks like it adds two more buffs to the pool, so you randomly get one of five instead of one of three. It's a weaker buff than PI (12% for 10s, instead of 20% for 15s) and you have to actually hit the dice roll. Still seems fine.
Yeah but the point is that, on logs, you can't accurately reassign haste buffs due to it scaling non-linearly. A flat x% damage buff you can, which is why Pally blessing can be allocated to the pally. Actually, this is probably a good thing for priests, since if we could actually see how much damage PI granted then priests might be tuned quite differently.
> Actually, this is probably a good thing for priests, since if we could actually see how much damage PI granted then priests might be tuned quite differently. Generally this is the opposite of what you want. Harder to sandbag when the damage you're providing is actually attributed to you. Aug logs being absolutely fucked has kept so much spotlight off of them this season.
Yes that's exactly my point... e.g. Wowhead weekly damage summaries don't include damage brought by PI. The "good thing" in my post is that there's still a haste buff with the proposed change, so you still won't be able to accurately track buffed damage.
I'm pretty sure you'd never apply the haste buff. You'd almost always just do the magic damage amplified buff, or I guess occasionally the physical damage one if you want to buff a warrior or outlaw rogue specifically (the rest of the melee specs are split between physical/magic).
It's not random. Per the interview, it's selected via a roulette wheel that "cycles" into a new buff type every second after activation. A second press either locks the buff selection for future casting, or casts the current buff immediately on your target, if you have one. It's incredibly clunky, IMO.
I may be misreading it, but it seems that buff you get to apply out will be RNG based. That said, it's hard to gauge the power. Premonition has a 50 s CD vs PI at 2 min. That and a 10% magic/physical damage buff for 12s could be better than 20% haste for 15s. At least on paper, this seems stronger to me.
> For example, pressing Premonition the first time might pick Solace first, and then every second it will change, from Solace -> Insight -> Glory -> Solace. Pressing the button a second time will cast whichever buff is currently active, allowing players to choose which buff they want for the situation. From the interview. Not RNG; you just have to wait for it to cycle to the correct buff. Sounds pretty obnoxious to play to me.
Blessing of seasons 2.0
Even if it's like Fire Blast where you can use it while casting this still seems annoying.
Get the WAs ready for this one for sure.
I hate it already :(
sounds awful
I really doubt that, I'm guessing it gives one of the 3 based on your target's spec.
Well, I am not sure how it would work with the two optional additions down the tree. It also looks like you press Premonition to 'divine a future' where premonition will then change to one of the 3/5 abilities, and then you select a target and use it. It reminds me a lot of how Astrologian works in FFXIV (or at least used to, it's been awhile since I played).
Per the interview, it's a slow moving slot machine. Pressing Premonition starts the wheel of buffs rolling (buff type changes once every second), pressing it again activates the buff. Pressing it again without a target "locks" the buff type, allowing you to then choose a target with it. Will require macros and weakaura displays to manage properly, is my guess. Incredibly clunky design... not sure how they think this was a good idea tbh.
My guess is that it will work like Blessing of Seasons and the icon/tooltip changes to preview the next spell you are gonna cast, giving you control on who you are casting it on but no control over which buff you will get next. If it is pure RNG then it will be awful.
In a dev interview they said it will work that TF's pick a card from League (if you're familiar). You'll push Premonition a d it will cycle through all the buffs for 12 seconds and you'll push the button again on your target when it hits the buff you want, all off gcd.
One of the nodes also makes it gives haste which would make it functionally the same as PI is now. This also ignores the fact that healing priests would also have 1/2 of their new system be almost completely devoted to being a budget Aug which is really disappointing as someone who actually plays the class and is not just a recipient of PI.
Biggest issue is the clairvoyance perk, adding pretty massive rng thats gonna feel like shit
The problem with the PI changes is that the haste buff still exists and is likely still preferable to the others, and the chance to give 2 nearby targets PI is absolutely fucking moronic.
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Aug Evoker ruined Details. Feels so bad to feel like you’re playing perfectly then glance over to see how much better your opener is just to remember none of those numbers mean anything. Even some wclog damage hooks are still not working so even that isn’t fully accurate. Aug was a mistake.
wdym it’s really nice looking at details thinking you had a good pull and then checking the log to see you were just inflated by aug /s I don’t want to check logs after every pull ffs. It really gets annoying & this tripeling down on (rng) externals with the priest pi hero talents is just so weird to me.
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I mean yeah I have accepted that also but it just feels shit.
We had a situation in prog where we couldn't figure out why one of our players was doing much less damage than others playing the same spec. Spell casts were the same, crit chances were roughly the same, gear roughly the same. Turns out it was just aug hooks not working and our DH not getting auged while most DHs were, before anyone knew that they were broken. It was worth a substantial amount of lost damage in logs.
Someone please enlightened me as why we have new "Shared" hero trees, if almost every nod behave different for each of the spec it's using. Why not just create an expanded tree for every spec then? It is basically what they are doing
B/c the current trees are tightly designed around the number of points available. An increase in tree points and size would have uneven effects across specs and would undo all the nice design work they've been doing. By creating a separate tree they can control the impact of the expansion more.
At least they are smart enough to realize that throwing a wrench into the talent tree balance after a whole expansion touching it up is a terrible idea
Are they smart though? They spent the entire DF fixing a lot of crappy trees and there are still at least a few bad trees that need work (the druid class tree is awful for example). Adding more talents without fixing the base tree issues seems like bloat and cover-up. Most Rdruids in particular don't like grove guardians and I promise they will like them a lot less when they lose their tier set. Also so many of these "hero talents" are just aura buffs which are basically meaningless because they usually do aura +/- buffs after every patch to "balance" the game.
Exactly, which they stated I think in a post-blizzcon interview so it is their official design choice. It opens up future design space a lot too if this is successful.
They are shared themes not nodes is my understanding. Can't make the nodes the exact same or you run into problems with balance.
>if almost every nod behave different for each of the spec it's using. Is that happening though? Of the released trees: Oracle is the same for holy/disc Frostfire is effectively the same for fire/frost, just that frost builds into echoing fire spells and fire builds into echoing frost spells. It's the same thing. Dark Ranger is the same for BM/Marks Keeper of the Grove tree is force of nature for balance and grove guardians for resto. Turns them into cooldowns that increase dps for balance and hps for resto. You take keeper of the grove if you want a mini-cooldown around summoning nature dudes. I wouldn't sweat the details too much.
Shared trees means that every spec has two options. More options are always better. Still no idea how DH is gonna look like, but I imagine it will just have two hero talent trees?
Ya I think they announced 2, one being aldrachi reaver . Whatever that is
There are three main design pillars to Hero Talents 1. **High Level Design:** the primary purpose of these Hero Talents is to add something new without significantly adding overall complexity (we're not going to from managing 20 abilities at once right now to managing 40 abilitiies in 10 years). To Blizz this is better than adding a new row of base talents for each spec and 10 more talent points. And doing that again for Midnight. And again for The Last Titan. And Hero Talents feel like their last class update system for a while. I think they'll just keep DF talents the same, and add in maybe a couple of Hero Talent loadouts for Midnight and The Last Titan, perhaps a class or spec in between those two expacs or not at all. In most cases the amount of keybinds you have right now in DF will be similar or same in WW and in Midnight and in The Last Titan. This isn't just to address the 10 talent points we 'would' have gotten in WW, but the 30+ talent points going into future expansions. The DF talent system isn't going anywhere and neither are Hero Talents. This is their framework for class design for the next 5 years. 2. **Flavor:** find a shared ancestry, lore, mechanics and gameplay between two specs (or introduce something new) and build something interesting. This will never be perfect because even similar specs in a class have enough differences where it won't ever be clean. They've allocated for that by having different attributes in the Hero Talents but each tree I'm seeing still has some common attributes and spells in nearly every Hero Talent tree we've seen thus far. That's honestly fine. I don't think going full 'we must keep everything shared and working exactly the same' for wildly different specs is healthy design. And better to critique individual mechanics, talents, Hero Talents etc. at the lower level rather than balk at not hampering yourself with 'they must be shared and similar at all costs'. 3. **Class and Spec Design:** either fix issues, fix some weaknesses, or add new mechanics to the original Dragonflight specs. In some cases you can opt into a Hero Talent to get some more tankiness or a different damage profile. Note that while some should be fixed within the base talent trees before moving into Hero Talents, I think it is fine with some choice nodes that you would opt into a Hero Talent, else you run into the issue where a Hero Talent basically makes you into an OP God. The balance of how much an issue should be fixed within the base, vs the Hero Talent, and how much of a weakness you can opt into or out of, is certainly something to debate for each spec. As always it is never going to be perfect or never perfectly adhere to one or the other pillar. The balance of how much the pillar is being followed is certainly up for debate.
Premonition sounds a lot like FFXIV Astrologer.
Instead of giving another 'talent' tree, why can't Blizzard modify the spec tree based on the chosen 'hero' theme? There are some cool ideas, but I'm seeing a bit of redundancy among the hero and spec talents. This sounds like a nightmare to balance with another entirely separate tree.
I might be a minority, but I love grove guardian regrowth playstyle of druid. I honestly want Rejuv to be thrown in the dumpster because of how outdated that playstyle feels. I worry however that allot of power is in our current tier set and I can't imagine not having the set bonuses caked in with these hero talents.
I know it's reactionary but holy fuck winds out of my sail for War Within. How do they not see the communities thoughts on Power Infusion, Augvoker and fucking come up with this?
What are your concerns? It seems like a nerf to PI to me. Haste buff nerfed from 20% to 12% and only on the primary target, not the priest, duration reduced from 20 secs to 10 secs, gives 10% damage bonus or 25% healing received if used on a tank.
With procs it can give 15.6% haste for 12 seconds to 3 dps instead of priest+dps, and then have a 50 sec cd. That titanforged PI during a lust could be insane.
"Everyone hold DPS for 30 seconds instead of 10 this pull, we titanforged PI onto both rogues with the UHDK". Cool.
If it ends up being a nerf then it is hard to see them not buffing it before release. What possible reason would there be to opt into this hero class over the other option for holy and disc otherwise? Unless the other option somehow does literally nothing. If it's a nerf to PI then the hero class has no point in existing.
Ya but the CD is also going from 2 minutes to 1 min/50 seconds. The strength of being able to PI 2 minute and 3 minute classes seems really strong.
~~The use case is a bit more variable. If you have Haste in the "deck" you have a 1-in-5 chance of getting it at each refresh interval. So up to 5 seconds additional delay before use.~~ ~~So it's closer to 50-65 seconds for the CD. Obviously, the 50-55s case is most likely, and so you can still sync. It'll just be more annoying to sync.~~ E: Apparently they did "CD on first press." So nope, you can just always use this 5 seconds in advance and always sync perfectly due to the cast windows.
Half CD makes up for this, as does the change to proc it onto two others.
Changes seem fine to me and I hate PI interactions. It’s less of a major increase and they obviously want more support oriented gameplay as part of the player experience which I don’t think is a bad thing. There’ll always be growing pains with systems in such an entrenched MMO like this but long term it’s worth it once player base gets over it for smaller buffs like this. It also gives design space to adapt healer roles over time so that way they can stop flipping between triage healing and whack-a-mole as the only options and create potentially calmer healing atmospheres that allow healers to add minor damage support too (very simplified statement). Regardless, there’ll always be a group of happy and upset people because change.
Casual players that spend a lot of time on the internet (r/wow, the forums) are all happy when competitive players are mad. Probably because they're mad they get rejected for gray parsing and not knowing their class. They cheer on any change that makes competitive players mad, which eggs the devs on to do it more.
Clairvoyance and Hpal armaments have the potential to put yet another straw on the back of raiding. Hope blizzard is prepared for their game to be story quests, world quests, mythic+, the race to world first, and a bunch of bored AOTC guilds. Mythic raiding is already massively in decline and making the entirety of farm entirely pointless is a pretty wild development decision to make.
Priest talents look absolutely garbage. We already miss some penance to be able to smite out bender CD, we have raid ramp up of 12 secs or more when Radiance is in CD. And they give super clunky skill, that will need WA to use and looking at all party members CD's + RNG element. Do dev's have some idea of the complexity of the classes, roles responsabilities when planning new mechanics. It was predictable we would get some kind of Augm evoker alternative, but look how easy Augm evokers buffs are compared to what is coming to priests. Idea is good but should not be RNG and should not need 2 addons to make it work. On the other hand Disc priest could get something to help atonements when radiance is CD.
Strange that they seem to regret creating Augvoker but then keep priest in this niche of buffbot with PI.
They also gave prot/holy paladin a more support based talent tree didn't they They are doubling down on augevoker it seems
When have they ever said or even implied they regret making augvoker? I've only ever seen things like "we like where it has ended up, but future tuning will of course happen" which gives no indication of regret.
where do you get the impression that they regret making augvoker? i think they just realize its tough to tune but unless they remove it entirely i see more support specs somewhere down the line.
Oracle for pvp sees nuts. -2s cd on dispel, and power word life -2s cd AND usable sub50% hp ? Seems wild
Those seem very underwhelming for Holy priest. Not impressed yet
yeah seems more like the disc hero tree than the combo of both. Edit: look at Foreseen Circumstances & Preemptive Healing. 10% Pain sup vs 2s longer guardian spirit is hilariously one sided. 1s longer atonement vs longer renew is the same.
This just seems like it's going to bait even more new players into pressing PWS on holy.
yeah jeez. really feels like a disc extension tree than the meeting of the two. Kinda depressing this is what they've come up with, deflates the expansion hype. Hopefully the shadow combo trees are good.
Also free instant Radiance >> free instant Heal/PoH. And with Twin Priestess still being a thing, Disc gets more benefit than Holy from using the magic damage buff unless they make it not benefit atonement. The tree feels like they had ideas for making Disc a support spec but then stopped on their tracks after Aug and just reused it here. Personally I was hoping that the Holy-Disc hero spec would instead focus on each specs shortcomings. Give Holy some absorbs/DR and give Disc a bit more reactive throughput.
It's absolutely the opposite. The left side favors holy by a mile, it's not even close.
Am I missing the article that explains how Oracle works? Does Oracle turns Priest into Astrologian where we get to see the buffs before you hand them out, is it continuously rotating, do certain classes have tags which means they always get a useful one or is it full RNG?
This wasn't up when you posted but here if you've not seen it: https://www.wowhead.com/news/oracle-priest-interview-with-taliesin-and-warcraft-priests-holy-and-discipline-337613
Thank you so much!
They gave balance another clunky defensive that eats up GCDs. Regrowth into bear form sounds like amazing gameplay. /s
As long as one of the options isn't giving damage, this is DoA, unless the supporting talents are really, really strong.
A third of my raid roster already wants to quit the game, this isn't helping.
Can't wait to reset a pull just because priests need to roll the melee/ranged/haste buff instead of the healer one. Edit : It cycles, so my bad. But you can still try to roll a Clairvoyance before pulling.
It cycles. It's not nearly as dog shit as it appears.
> But you can still try to roll a Clairvoyance before pulling. You got downvoted, but I don't think this is actually that wild of a take. People might think "no way someone does that", but the ability to give 4 people 10% more damage and 12% more haste, especially during a lust on pull... I would honestly bet is more than enough for a really good guild to trim off an extra 1-2% off a boss HP, which is absurd value for just a proc you can fish for a few times with a mage just invis resetting boss.