New Hero Talent Reveals – Priest, Hunter, Druid, Mage
Hero Talent Tree Layout
Full Interview
Interview Highlights
Below you’ll find highlights from the interview, organized by topic. Watch the full interview for more details on them.
Origins of Dark Ranger
- Inspiration for Dark Ranger comes from Sylvanas in WC3: Frozen Throne. While iconic, the style didn’t fit as one of the three specs of the Hunter class when it was designed in vanilla. When Hero Talents became an option to expand the class fantasy, Dark Ranger became an obvious choice.
- The tree is defined by Black Arrow, a new rotational tool for the class. From there, the tree allows the player to customize how your rotation works and adds more tools to it.
- A lot of the ideas for Dark Ranger came from the Dark Ranger archetype in WoW, like Dark Chains is inspired by Sylvanas’ battle with The Lich King in the Shadowlands cinematic, and Shadowhounds is a reference to Nathanos’ undead pets in Eastern Plaguelands.
- A great part of the design of Hero Talents is making something that distinguishes it but isn’t overwhelming. At the end of the day, you’re still a Marksmanship or Beast Mastery Hunter, just now with Dark Ranger on top of it.
- Dark Ranger is Marksmanship and Beast Mastery because Dark Rangers are defined by ranged attacks and abilities, with Black Arrow, so it wouldn’t fit the Survival Hunter’s melee theme.
- Blizzard often draws inspiration from past systems or abilities to design new ones based on players’ feedback and community sentiment.
Design Choices and Tuning
- Hero Talents are designed with the idea that you will eventually unlock all the nodes from their trees. This gave developers more room to play around as they didn’t need to balance utility nodes competing with defensive or throughput nodes, just the tree as a whole.
- Class/Spec Talents shouldn’t influence Hero Talents, i.e., no +20% Black Arrow damage on the Marksmanship Hunter tree. However, some Hero Talents will influence some Class/Spec talents, like Frostfire Mage’s Frostfire Bolt replaces Fireball and Frostbolt for Fire and Frost, respectively, meaning any talents interacting with Fireball and Frostbolt will also benefit Frostfire Bolt.
- Hero Talents are in early stages or tuning, so don’t take effects at their raw values, but more in a thematic sense. You should expect all values from talents to increase or decrease as specs get tuned before The War Within.
- Overall, Hero Talents should bring about the same contribution to spec’s defensiveness across the board, especially when compared to other options of the same class.
- You shouldn’t feel forced to pick a Hero Talent option because it is the best defensive option.
- Withering Fire is a single target effect, despite how it may read.
- Smoke Screen adds a new defensive option for Hunters, which was one of its weaknesses in Dragonflight
Feedback
- Feedback for Hero Classes is best given in the forums, as Blizzard heavily monitors that. However, they still watch videos and read content in other places.
- Overall, written feedback is better due to the speed at which it can be read versus something that needs to be watched.
- Blizzard values all feedback. It is very important for them to receive feedback from many different perspectives, enabling them to create a richer experience.
- The current design of Dark Ranger culminates many iterations of previous designs. The current state shown is the first version that Blizzard is happy to share and collect feedback on to improve The War Within.
