What is the future of Hero Talents?

[korijenkins]

20 talent hero talents would allow them to flesh them out more. I guess they could be lazy and let you use two at once, but that sounds like a balancing nightmare.

You assume they care at all about game balance. They do not. An unbalanced game means people rerolling, means higher engagement, means more $.

Do you really believe these guys, who can just do hotfixes every day to balance correctly, are simply fucking inept? It's a multi-billion dollar entity with money on the line from boosts. There's a direct incentive for them to waste your time as much as possible, and an unbalanced game is great for that.

Similar reason we can't simply switch stat priority on gear to play other specs, they'd rather you make a whole new character for that.

[Schizoide]

You're taking cynicism too far. I'm a cynical dude too, but ease up a bit.

Blizzard cares about game balance a great deal. They do have an incentive to keep people playing, but they are fully aware that retention is directly correlated to the player experience. Poor gameplay loses players, it doesn't keep them, saying otherwise is a crazy conspiracy theory. So why do they often fail to execute and deliver on their goals, maybe even more often than not? Why isn't it perfectly balanced? And why is the game so buggy?

Well, two reasons. First, it's an extraordinarily complex game that is constantly changing and that's a super tough problem. Second, internal stuff we don't know much about. Resource constraints, mass layoffs from Microsoft, people quitting and not being replaced to save money, internal politics as in Schreir's new book, etc, etc.

WoW is incredibly buggy these days. Major features launch into production and don't work for weeks, across multiple hotfixes. But that isn't due to some evil master plan, it's because Blizzard is repeatedly failing to execute. And that's what we should be criticizing. Not their goals, their delivery.

[FossilFree]

Yeah, pack leader is simultaneously incredibly boring and the best QoL I absolutely cannot live without with the kill command extending beast cleave thing.

Totally possible they horizontally expand existing trees, sure, so you can’t get everything and have to choose. I just don’t think they’ll add more points.

Yea, that and Den Recovery are all it has going for it really. But both of those could easily be BM spec tree talents.

I think they should have saved Huntmaster's Call and based the hero talents around that ability instead. It feels heroic to summon Hati and Fenrir, and it would have given Survival the ability to use them too.

[Zorvaine]

I think its a missed oportunity to have hero talents not be auto-available, but tie them into a nice little quest chain, similair to the legion artifacts.
Let players feel they earned these powers and worked for them.
Sure, there van be passives, but at least give 1 new spell or replace 1-2 spells.

And once players have reached 80, let there be a mastery-quest chain that ends in the player earning the title of said hero talent.

This way, the whole hero talent-road, feels like its a reward - not a given. And, every class gets a little bit more flavour and replayability!

100% this. Similar to Class Quests in Classic WoW

[Nadiru]

Hero talents have 10 points allocatable to them, we have two more expansion packs in The Worldsoul Saga, and you get 30 points in each of the Class and Spec talent trees. I just can't connect these dots, man. The Batman's going to be up all night trying to crack this.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Hero talents have 10 points allocatable to them, we have two more expansion packs in The Worldsoul Saga, and you get 30 points in each of the Class and Spec talent trees. I just can't connect these dots, man. The Batman's going to be up all night trying to crack this.

I can't imagine what the obvious path forward will be, for Blizzard.

[Schizoide]

Yea, that and Den Recovery are all it has going for it really. But both of those could easily be BM spec tree talents.

I think they should have saved Huntmaster's Call and based the hero talents around that ability instead. It feels heroic to summon Hati and Fenrir, and it would have given Survival the ability to use them too.

Totally agree. You can't put freaking amazing QoL in a single hero tree and expect people not to take it. I don't care if it's a 15% performance loss, I am never, ever, giving up that beast cleave duration extension thing while I have breath left in my body. I will NEVER spec dark ranger.

And that is a problem.

[Kyux]

The hero class trees are easier to balance around so I think we will get more options per point in it. Eventually we will run down to the usual +5% mastery talents in some places.

Or they make trees fatter instead of longer on the class/spec side and we get nodes that branch off of early/mid game talents into new choices that expand down, but then they must balance each class around potentially using their new points to get every choice in the final row and ignoring the new ones.

Definitely interesting to see how they handle it.

What do you mean by "more options per point in it"? Like, multi-point nodes?

But I agree, I think the trees will get fatter before they get longer.

[Schizoide]

Neither will happen, they'll add entirely new ones instead. Mark my words!

I mean, we're all just guessing. But I hope I'm right.

[huth]

What do you mean by "more options per point in it"? Like, multi-point nodes?

But I agree, I think the trees will get fatter before they get longer.

What does that even mean? With how they are designed, whether the points get added sideways or down is largely irrelevant. At most, it'll affect when during leveling you can pick them.

I don't think they're going to significantly up the number of options though; limiting the amount of variations is part of the design.

[Kyux]

What does that even mean? With how they are designed, whether the points get added sideways or down is largely irrelevant. At most, it'll affect when during leveling you can pick them.

I don't think they're going to significantly up the number of options though; limiting the amount of variations is part of the design.

Fatter would result in choosing between an AOE focused branch / ST branch / utility branch while a longer tree would mean you continue down the same branch and inevitable pick up the next talents, whatever they are.

[huth]

Fatter would result in choosing between an AOE focused branch / ST branch / utility branch while a longer tree would mean you continue down the same branch and inevitable pick up the next talents, whatever they are.

It's going to be 10 more points with no extra options beyond more choice nodes. Whether they are going to be sideways or down is going to be more of a visual choice than anything.

[Al Gorefiend]

It's going to be 10 more points with no extra options beyond more choice nodes. Whether they are going to be sideways or down is going to be more of a visual choice than anything.

More options per row, maybe people could always use the points to fill out currently unavailable variations, depends if they like the new options or not. The system is easier than ever to balance around. If a sub rogue taking every option on their final row is too much they can always adjust. I doubt there are any issues sort of some balancing work to make it happen.

(Just because I am currently on my Brew rn), think of a new branch appearing off Breath of fire in row 6 that has more choices and goes down a few rows with more options. But if you never picked breath of fire as a talent you'll still get those points to put elsewhere

[huth]

More options per row, maybe people could always use the points to fill out currently unavailable variations, depends if they like the new options or not. The system is easier than ever to balance around. If a sub rogue taking every option on their final row is too much they can always adjust. I doubt there are any issues sort of some balancing work to make it happen.

(Just because I am currently on my Brew rn), think of a new branch appearing off Breath of fire in row 6 that has more choices and goes down a few rows with more options. But if you never picked breath of fire as a talent you'll still get those points to put elsewhere

Oh, sure, they can always adjust. But there's more options how things can break and more possibilities that need to be considered for each additional option you add, and that grows exponentially, not linearly. At some point, it becomes so much work that they have no hope of catching up. Hero talents are specifically intended to delay that far enough they never actually have to deal with it.

[Highlord Hanibuhl]

Has there been any word on them turning the Hero Talents into titles?
Because they've turned the icons into B.net-avatars....

100% this. Similar to Class Quests in Classic WoW

Exactly!

[Eurhetemec]

I think its a missed oportunity to have hero talents not be auto-available, but tie them into a nice little quest chain, similair to the legion artifacts.
Let players feel they earned these powers and worked for them.
Sure, there van be passives, but at least give 1 new spell or replace 1-2 spells.

And once players have reached 80, let there be a mastery-quest chain that ends in the player earning the title of said hero talent.

This way, the whole hero talent-road, feels like its a reward - not a given. And, every class gets a little bit more flavour and replayability!

I think I know why they didn't do this, but I also think it was a mistake to not do this, at least for this expansion.

As for why, I'm pretty sure it was down to three things:

1) Having a required quest chain that isn't at the start of the expansion, but rather level-related, interrupts gameplay.

2) Unless the quest chain is absolutely mandatory (i.e. like you can level past 71 without doing it or something), loads and loads of people will attempt to skip/ignore it, causing serious balance problems (not just casuals either - a lot of relatively sweaty/hardcore people like to try and skip stuff - we'd no doubt see loads of people in 71-79 dungeons who didn't have their Hero Talents, for example).

3) These are designed to be future-proof and continue in use for at least the rest of The Worldsoul saga, so the quest chain would have to be unrelated to The War Within, because in future expansions, you won't necessarily be doing 70-80 in The War Within, it could be in any expansion. This is a big issue that people tend to completely overlook.

4) People will be more reluctant to respec because they will then have to do yet more questlines just to try out a new spec. If you were a druid, for example, you might need to do four entire questlines and mastery quests. You can say "Oh well that's how it was in Legion", and like yeah, that's the problem - loads of people in Legion didn't unlock all their spec-artifacts, or got pretty angry about it, even though it was essentially just one short-ish scenario each, not an entire questline followed by a mastery quest.

All that said, I think they should have had a quest-chain and just:

A) Made the quest-chain required when you hit 70, i.e. not even letting you hit 71 until you did it. Forcibly teleport people to go do it if necessary!

B) Made it so if you'd done the mastery-quest for a set of Hero Talents for a class, you didn't have to do the quest-chains/mastery quests for the other ones for that class - you could just respec to them - but instead positively incentivize people by giving a title and some kind of cosmetic for doing the quest-chain and mastery quest for each.

C) Designed the quest-line and mastery quest as relatively timeless or literally Chromie-related - perhaps from people in the past and/or even the future! I.e. not tied specifically to TWW-era events or characters.

I think they compromised too much and left things in a weird place.

[Fantazma]

Neither will happen, they'll add entirely new ones instead. Mark my words!

I think it's very unlikely. My biggest guess is that midnight will give us 10 more hero talents and "the last titan" 10 more talents...! And this will complete and finalize the hero talents that are here to stay. And both in "midnight" and "the last titan"... they will bring us something that will make us forget that hero talents exist (new race/class).

And I agree with those who are saying that Hero Talents deserved introductory quests. The player's immersion and satisfaction would be much greater. However... it's quite obvious why this didn't happen: Lack of time and people. Not even the talents themselves are ready yet... imagine creating a "micro lore" for each of them...!

[Schizoide]

Hopefully not, as that would just reintroduce bloat. But it certainly isn't unlike the WoW dev team to repeat past mistakes.

[prem23]

It's interesting to think about where Hero Talents could be headed. I think balancing and refining them is key, as they add a lot of depth to gameplay but can sometimes feel uneven across different classes or specs. It would be great to see more variety in talent trees or the introduction of new, more dynamic talents that adapt to different playstyles. Hopefully, future updates will focus on making them feel more impactful and accessible for all players.

[jbombard]

Most likely replaced by new hero talents in the next expansion. That or somehow baselined into current trees. The reality is they want and will always want the current expansion to feel new and for new expansion abilities to feel powerfull and meaningfull. You can only have so many powerfull and meaningfull abilities before they stop feeling powerfull and meaningfull. This is why every expansion your shiny new is some new form of borrowed power.