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.
Design Choices and Tuning
- Frostfire Mastery are two separate buffs, one for each school. You’re not supposed cast a lot of Fire spells while Frost specced and vice-versa to get your stacks of Frost or Fire Mastery. There are other tools within the Frostfire Hero Talent tree that helps you with accumulating stacks of both Frostfire Mastery buffs without needing to dip too deep into casting spells of your other school.
- The goal with the Frostfire Hero Talent is to work seamlessly with both Frost and Fire specs, even with the massive differences between Frost and Fire Mage’s Mastery. As an example, when playing as a Frostfire Fire Mage, Frostfire Bolt will accumulate Ignite, and the same will occur with Frost Mage and Icicles.
Another example mentioned: Frostfire Bolt should work the exact way that Frostbolt does when it comes to Shatter effects. - If you test this in the future and that’s not the case, send feedback so it is fixed as soon as possible!
- The slight differences between Frost and Fire versions of Frostfire Hero Talents are due to balance concerns – Frost doesn’t have as much access to Fire spells as Fire does to Frost spells, as an example. Numbers are still being figured out, but they want it to be different between Frost and Fire Mages to ensure they’re equally balanced. The numbers we’re seeing on the early Frostfire Talent Tree mockup are very early and bound to change.
There are no current plans to increase spell access to the other spec – No extra Frost spells will be accessible for Fire and vice-versa. Right now, the focus is to make Hero Talents as polished as possible in preparation for more public testing.
The Frostfire Tree incorporates many of the ideas iterated in the past by the devs, but no ideas are ever added in the first iteration. An example of this in the Frostfire Talent mockup is Isothermic Core: They originally wanted a Frostfire version of Comet Storm/Meteor, but iteration made it feel like it was just tacked onto the tree and didn’t make much sense, so Isothermic Core is the compromise they reached to implement that idea in some way.
Hero Talents and Feedback
- Hero Talents should not feel like they’re there to complicate your rotation. They should feel seamless while adding extra flavor to your favorite spec!
- They are also attempting to avoid the same effect that the new talent trees had in Dragonflight, of adding too many new spells all of a sudden to players and make them feel overwhelmed. An example of this is the capstone Frostfire talents, Flash Freezeburn, which grants maximum benefits of Frostfire Mastery and refreshes its duration, which should alleviate concerns with maintaining stacks of Frostfire Mastery for critical moments.
- The intention with Hero Talents is not to homogenize how each spec plays – Even with the interwoven Hero Talents, the core identity of both specs (such as Fire’s Combustion and Hot Streak) should be maintained. Both specs should benefit from Hero Talents in a similar manner, but they still need to feel different enough from each other! If you feel both specs become too similar in gameplay when Hero Talents are added into the equation, this is excellent feedback to send to the devs.
- Both PvE and PvP scenarios are being considered when designing the Hero Talent Trees.
Miscellaneous
- Spellslinger and Sunfury Hero talents are currently being iterated on, but no sneak peeks at this time!
- There are no plans to make Orb spells static – The skillshot aspect of Arcane and Frozen Orbs is unique and they recognize the frustration it can cause, but they feel that making them easily targettable would remove some of the skill expression with both specs. Flame Orbs are cool, they’re not saying no to the idea, but there are no current plans for a Flame Orb spell.
- Although the idea of other schools of magic such as new Conjuration spells is cool, they’re afraid this will lead to further button bloat, which is an issue that became more apparent with the Dragonflight talent revamps.
