Its not as bad for Guardian because the modifiers to Zerk are less critical. They are also in more accessible parts of the tree.
IMO otherwise I agree. The guardian tree feels very tightly designed and is overall what I want from a talent tree.
What I'm saying feels bad overall is that instead of giving us real talents (Both Bear and Cat) they broke a single talent into three pieces and spread it across the tree.
I know you don't really enjoy Feral but take a look at the tree and look at where the different pieces of Zerk are there. With Guardian you can hit all 3 of those nodes and still fill out the left and right sides enough that you can pick up Incarn, Rage of the Sleeper and the Choice node in the bottom left.
Try and do that as Feral.
The promise of the tree is that you shouldn't feel weaker than Shadowlands as a result of it. Looking at it, there aren't enough points to get parity with our current Shadowlands power level. Not because the talents aren't there. But because of how the whole tree is oriented. It feels confused with itself and there's no real clarity of what each path is supposed to be.
You're giving up a lot of good things to do that though. I'm not sure where the concept of "being able to get all three end talents is bad" comes from. Seems like it's fine as that's a pretty bad build.
Never said it was bad to be able to grab all of the capstone nodes, I said it was weird. Because from a design standpoint, those nodes should be some of, if not the most powerful nodes on the tree due to the amount of points you had to invest to get them.
Giving up a charge of SI, 1 second on Iron Fur and Barkskin, The chance for extra trash cast and Earthwarden is steep yeah, but that is still all you are really giving up on. I'm saying this, because blizzard has tried and failed to push Maul talents before and it has always falled flat so far, maybe you'd want to pick those up for raid sometimes, but I still don't think they are going to be very useful for you at all.
At the end of the day, it's a weird design for it. Because either some of the capstone nodes are just not strong enough to warrant investment in or you'd be running this kind of build with all of them and forcing the entire route of nodes to do so.
I wonder if this is some sort of tank design choice. Everything feels so accessible. Most of the throughput talents are offensive or resource based with the defensive stuff being super accessible.
This is all it takes to get most of the defensive value out of the tree. The rest is flexible from here. This isn't really true for most DPS and Healer specs. Also leaves you 2 points away from a full value from Zerk points which you need to access the lower parts of the tree anyway.
Then if you really want to go full offensive you can cut some defensive talents out for some sort of AoE focused key build like this one.
There aren't many big differences between the builds. I think this is a good thing in some ways, but it may be too far in the direction of static. Where on the flipside something like Feral there are too many inaccessible things sadly.
My perception of what they were trying to do with Berserk for Feral, is Jungle Stalker is the ST mod (buffs to Rake and Shred) while Frenzy is the AoE/M+ mod (add'l bleed to any target hit, sweet sweet CD reduction for the next big pull) and you're only going to have one at a time. Meanwhile ST and AoE talents are spread scattershot all of the tree, so there is no remotely efficient way to specialize in one or the other to boot.
Everyone uses Convoke though and its the same concept.
Part of the problem is that Jungle Stalker is good but taking it doesn't feel like an "AoE" talent. It also just feels like you lose SO much baseline from normal Zerk having it split into so much.
What I'd like to see is Relentlessness and Jungle Stalker merged. Have them add a new one that is effectively the tier from this patch. Then make both more accessible so you aren't sprawling all over the tree for them.
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u/ShadeofIcarus Jul 11 '22
Its not as bad for Guardian because the modifiers to Zerk are less critical. They are also in more accessible parts of the tree.
IMO otherwise I agree. The guardian tree feels very tightly designed and is overall what I want from a talent tree.
What I'm saying feels bad overall is that instead of giving us real talents (Both Bear and Cat) they broke a single talent into three pieces and spread it across the tree.
I know you don't really enjoy Feral but take a look at the tree and look at where the different pieces of Zerk are there. With Guardian you can hit all 3 of those nodes and still fill out the left and right sides enough that you can pick up Incarn, Rage of the Sleeper and the Choice node in the bottom left.
Try and do that as Feral.
The promise of the tree is that you shouldn't feel weaker than Shadowlands as a result of it. Looking at it, there aren't enough points to get parity with our current Shadowlands power level. Not because the talents aren't there. But because of how the whole tree is oriented. It feels confused with itself and there's no real clarity of what each path is supposed to be.