When Blizzard mentions that they want something to both have flavor and also be a source of player power, it is usually a sign of trouble.
Hero talents for The War Within are starting to kind of fall into this trap, where they are a mixed bag with some bags having flavor, some having good player power (in theory), and some having or even lacking both. Today, now that one of my most-played specs in Dragonflight has both of its trees published and I’ve started debating what spec I intend to play next expansion, let’s take a look at Hero talents.
The Tug of War Between Flavor and Power
Blizzard’s core issue with this, which crops up almost every time they build a system like this, is that they have their own narrow definition of the allowable “flavor” in a given class and spec, and they assume that they can and will get to a point of acceptable balance. Because of this, the refrain, as with Covenants and Soulbinds, always ends up being, “just play what you want.” And sure, again, you can just pick the one you most like and play it, and people aren’t going to inspect you and push you out of a group for being the “wrong” Hero spec (unless you run into a glue-sniffing dumbass who’s hardstuck because they suck) – but to a fair number of activities in WoW and those who play them, the choice actually does make a difference, and taking a different Hero talent tree does have some potential limiting effects on what you might be able to bring to a party. Granted, right now, this is all based on pre-release, unplayable talents without damage numbers or raw values to them to give us a mathematical way to distinguish them.
What I see in Hero talents is a new sort of problem with this approach from Blizzard, though. In locking Hero trees to a certain “flavor” they also limit the perception of that flavor to what they see in it. For me, this is embodied in the Brewmaster/Windwalker Monk tree Shado-pan. The Shado-pan were an organization of Pandaren in Mists of Pandaria who were not all monks, but used the teachings of the class alongside principles of stealth and skillful combat. There are Shado-pan archers, plate-suited warriors, mages, and yes, Monks – and in many ways, the actual flavor of the Shado-pan as an entity veers almost closer to Rogue. I kind of like this though – my hope for the flavor of the Shado-pan tree would be leaning into that, like having Shado-pan agents come to assist you in combat on certain conditions or being able to activate them as a cooldown to use all the powers at the order’s disposal against your enemies. In my head, the theme was something I was interested in and really liked!
And then the tree was released this week, and…uh, well…it’s not that.
When Flavor is Missing
Shado-pan in the preview is fine enough from a gameplay perspective, to be clear. The main ability, Flurry Strikes, is a passive proccing Fists of Fury style melee attack that builds charges as you deal damage equal to your health and then triggers the stored charges as strikes when you spend a sufficient amount of energy (400 in the current iteration). By the end of the tree, you’re gaining stat buffs for triggering it, both to agility and added effects to secondary stats, and the overall potential for it is good. There’s one potential awkward interaction and it is the condition of building charges – in scenarios with certain health buffs, it will be mathematically harder to build a charge and there’s some logical concern about how that will scale over the course of the expansion since health totals are so fussy to Blizzard (it was one major patch version ago that every single player got a double-digit percentage health buff, after all), but that is the kind of thing you would expect to be ironed out (hopefully, god willing) in the alpha and beta testing phases, or, perhaps more likely, the week before the first season goes live with a tuning hotfix. So what’s the problem?
Well, the Shado-pan talents are just kinda boring. There’s good damage contribution, some benefits for Brewmaster tanks in the tree, and some interesting ideas in it – but nothing about it is thematically fitting of Shado-pan. Okay, sure – the secondary modifier buff that makes up the capstone talent is called “Wisdom of the Wall” and hey, remember that big wall in Pandaria that the Shado-pan defended? Ah ha! Flavor! Outside of that though, nothing about it feels Shado-pan. It’s a bunch of passive damage multipliers that is anchored by one proccing passive that probably has a punching animation tied to it, if I had to guess – and that’s it! It just doesn’t fit or feel like the Shado-pan. For Windwalker, it is an especially stark contrast because the other WW-usable tree, Conduit of the Celestials, causes the four August Celestials to spawn and do different things for you in your rotation, includes an active ability to call their powers in a channeled ability, and by the capstone you can get all 4 of them at once to unify in a joint offensive on your targets. Provided the in-game animations and flavor are even remotely in the ballpark, these Hero talents are just clearly better – if flavor is what you want, at least. Mathematically…well, it depends on how things end up on test servers, but it seems pretty decent!
When Flavor Interacts Poorly With Game Mechanics
A fair few of the Hero talent trees have a secondary problem, which is where the flavor is excellent but the interaction with gameplay is potentially problematic. San’layn, a tree shared between Unholy and Blood Death Knights, is a good example. Its core theme of vampirism and leech, tied with the San’layn being servants of the Lich King who were heavily involved in the DK starting experience, is strong. However, the capstone of the tree has a glaring issue for Blood DKs in particular – it ties a defensive cooldown to offensive use. Why is this problematic? Well, it creates a negative friction in the rotation, where you probably really want to save Vampiric Blood for a moment where you need a lot of survivability, but the Hero talents interact with it to make it have a high offensive value, so you also want to send it on cooldown to increase your damage. If you do use it offensively, however, there’s no guarantee that it will lineup with needed defensive use, but also saving it to use defensively now carries a much higher cost. That does create a problem that can be fun to solve, but it sort of breaks the role of Vampiric Blood in your toolkit and it can create a lot of traps in your gameplay. On a flavor basis, this tree is absolutely nailing it, but in gameplay terms, how it seems like it will feel, well – that is kind of an issue. This is a relatively minor case, because oh boy, we will get to some worse ones!
The Flavor is Ass and So Too is The Gameplay
Hello, Oracle Priest? Sure, Priests aren’t fortunetellers or blessed with futuresight in WoW lore, and sure Power Infusion is one of the defining cooldowns that makes Priests worth bringing to a lot of high-end progression content, so why don’t we fucking annihilate both of these by saddling them with flavor the class has never had and also ruin by far their best overall cooldown (it’s also contentious and sometimes problematic, but hey, it gets them in the door so it has value!). Oracle Priest’s main talent is changing Power Infusion to a buff called Premonition, which starts as one of 3 (or 5 depending on choice nodes) buffs that are more directed and specific to given roles – the first Premonition cast in a combat cycle is random, picking one of the eligible buffs for your talent build so you can give it out and cycling which buff it is on a timer if you don’t cast it. These buffs are intended to make you not miss Power Infusion, but oh they do poorly at that. The base buffs are flat damage increases (either to magic or physical) of 10% for 10 seconds, with the last buff being a real stinker – 25% more healing received for 10 seconds. The bonus two effects you can talent into include a mana restore option and a haste buff that mirrors what PI already does. The capstone gives you a decent chance of being able to use Premonition as an AoE spell, giving that buff to everyone in a range around your target, which is admittedly a cool concept, but the buffs kinda suck! None of them are flat out better than PI, they mean giving up PI which is an awful decision, and the buff whack-a-mole with it rotating through different buffs is straight up ass – you’re going to need either a huge Premonition button at center screen to watch it or a Weak Aura exclusively to track it, which is a hallmark of overcomplicated design! Couple that with the flavor not matching WoW’s vision of Priests in the slightest, and the whole thing should be scrapped and rebuilt! (To their credit, Blizzard has already admitted defeat on this tree and has claimed a rework is coming.)
When They’re Good, They’re Great
I’m actually considering changing my raid main in The War Within because of a particular set of Hero talents and the strong thematic and gameplay interactions – and that would be to Protection Warrior for Mountain Thane Hero talents. Why? Well, I do enjoy Prot Warrior right now as it is, thematically, in gameplay, and in terms of how the overall fantasy of Warrior comes together. You jump into a pull, yell at everything, stomp your feet and start swinging your weapon and your shield around like a menace – it’s such a cool overall integration of gameplay kit and flavor already. Mountain Thane adds to that in multiple ways that make sense and draw upon existing class and spec toolkit and established Warcraft fantasy, by taking the lightning and thunder themes of the Mountain Thane unit from the RTS and infusing it into Warrior, whose kit already draws upon that unit in some ways. For Prot Warrior, while some of the talents are fully passive multiplicative damage increases, the rest of the kit synergizes well with existing abilities. The whole main thing is that it enhances existing abilities, first by adding proc bonuses to them but then using proc bonuses to transform Thunderclap into a new ability. It has zero action bar bloat, adds a reasonable amount of both passive buffs and active new gameplay interactions, and doubles-down on the thematic strengths Warrior already has by working with existing abilities in small but transformative ways. Provided the damage tuning isn’t awful, Mountain Thane seems fucking awesome and it is such a draw to playing a Prot Warrior that I’m sitting here thinking about how I want to play it.
Likewise, there are some other really good ones. I named Conduit of the Celestials for WW/MW Monks as a contrast above, but the flavor of the design is excellent and the overall gameplay interactions seem positive. It does add an extra button, but that button seems so worth pressing for both specs that it feels very much worthwhile, and the overall flavor and ways that flavor adds player power is great, on paper. Rider of the Apocalypse is the best-named Hero Talent tree (you cannot change my mind) and the cool bonuses it offers to both DPS DK specs is substantial. You can remain mounted in outdoor combat? You can summon the Four Horsemen as pets to do your bidding? Holy shit it’s awesome-sounding and it also helps actual core DK issues (being able to be mounted in outdoor-coded zones during combat is a huge mobility boost alone, and that is a choice node that also allows you to get a Divine Steed equivalent to get a huge speed boost during combat, which helps the core weakness of DKs).
A Lack of Certain Flavors
One thing that Hero Talents do sort of close the door on (for now, at least) is the ability to add more base specs or even classes with these flavors. A lot of players really want a Dark Ranger class or full Hunter spec, but it is locked as a Hero tree for both ranged Hunter specs, where the flavor is kind of a miss (Marksmanship it kinda fits, but Beast Mastery doesn’t feel like it would fit a Dark Ranger at all, in my opinion). The Paladin specs are all pretty cool and pretty good but there’s a lack of interesting flavor in there, like it would be nice if any of the Holy Light-adjacent Hero specs even mentioned An’she or mixed that theme into the recipe. Some of the shared trees lean almost too hard into one of the spec flavors over the other, like how Diabolist for Demonology and Destruction Warlocks feels very coded towards Demonology, or how the only revealed Demon Hunter tree, Aldrachi Reaver, is very tank themed (it does have the name and lore connection to the tank Artifact from Legion, but hey). The only Rogue tree out so far was so poorly received that it is one of only two trees (alongside Oracle Priest) to be confirmed as getting a second pass because of it and the thematic flavor of it was sort of weird. Warcraft as a setting has 30 years of worldbuilding and storytelling to draw upon, and I think that some of the Hero talents cut off more promising options for full classes or specs while others mis-leverage or underleverage the breadth of possible themes that could be brought into the fold for a new generation.
So in the end, in attempting to appease on both flavor and gameplay, Hero Talents fall right back into the Blizzard trap – not enough flavor in some, not enough gameplay in others, not enough of either in yet others, and some are just right, and all of these will create different pressures to choose or not choose certain trees. The ones they’ve gotten just right sound awesome and like things I want to immediately play with, but some of them seem to miss the mark so bad that I will feel bad to take them when the gameplay wins on them. Shado-pan seems to have a higher potential damage ceiling for Windwalker, and like, okay, but the flavor is just bland nothingness that doesn’t even fit with the name. Mountain Thane fits so well and sounds like it has a lot of positive gameplay interactions that I cannot wait to play a Prot Warrior rocking those talents – and by Blizzard’s own stated goals, this spectrum of opinion should not exist within this system.
The Longer-Term Problem
One last thing that is a different critique of Hero talents I wanted to sneak in here is the long-term game effects. Blizzard has explicitly said that the goal of Hero talents is to create a system to allow for expansive gameplay and player power into the future without falling into the trap of just adding more talent nodes to the existing trees we just got in Dragonflight – and, having lived through the original era of talent bloat, this is a reasonable thing to want to avoid! Even the best baseline talent design can be completely upended by players getting more points to add to those trees and even the addition of juicy powerful nodes deeper into the tree won’t stop some players from doubling-back into the lower tiers to take more talent choices they want to have together. Hero talents circumvent that for The War Within by adding a totally separate tree that you’ll fully populate, where the choice comes down to which of the two trees per spec do you want for a given main spec and what choice nodes on that Hero tree you choose for yourself. And that’s great…for The War Within.
As WoW moves towards a new future after the rebuilding cycle of Dragonflight, one thing I am quite nervous about is how talents and player power rewards are kept interesting in the long-term, in two expansions, 3 expansions, even 4 into the future. It only took the base game and two expansions before Blizzard had to completely reinvent talents, and it only took the one expansion with that reinvention for talents to be completely reinvented again. If Blizzard keeps adding accessory talent trees onto the existing setup, it won’t take long before the whole thing is a bloated, overcomplicated mess. Hell, even if they just expand the Hero talents for the rest of the Worldsoul Saga expansions, we’ll end up in a spot where every player has 3 distinct trees with 30-odd points in each – and that is probably the best possible outcome under current conditions, because it sure beats bolting a new feature on every single expansion until the talent pane is an ugly mess of nodes, interfaces and subinterfaces loaded with dozens of tiny little icons and huge tooltips.
Blizzard committed to removing borrowed power and has kept to that word throughout Dragonflight. They’ve also expressed a desire to make evergreen content and systems that exist for the long haul. Talents can absolutely be a part of that but the fear I hold at the moment is that the WoW design team won’t be able to constrain them and that we’ll see the talent system have to be squeezed or adjusted in just the space of a couple of expansions yet again, just as it was going into Cataclysm, and that eventually this road leads to further compression or redesigns of a system that has, overall, worked fairly well for Dragonflight.
For right now – I’m actually still excited about Hero Talents and putting them out early to get feedback they’ve mostly responded to quickly is a good move. I think that having a chance to hassle them about core themes and implications on gameplay before we even have damage numbers or gameplay in a test environment helps to get a different type of feedback than the WoW team normally gets – and feedback that should actually help the flavor and identity parts of the Hero talent system have greater overall impact. If that ends up translating to anything meaningful in the actual gameplay loop remains to be seen, and if Blizzard avoids the pitfalls that can come in this kind of system likewise is an unknown variable at the moment.
Kaylriene 