They provided no other information for mages. On a different note, the three Hero trees they provided in the deep dive are: They were decent abilities that had an impact on my rotation, but there were a few that were simply better than the rest. From my perspective, there was almost never any reason to change the conduits. But the conduit system itself just needed some better balance. There were fundamental flaws with Covenants, largely the “once you make a choice it’s hard to change it” problem. Considering 8 of those old conduits for mages became talents in Dragonflight (and several might just be new iterations with different names) I’d hardly call them failures or non-impactful. One of them for sure also became a talent in Dragonflight. They were all boring, passive buffs that almost never interacted with or impacted your rotation and amounted to little more than 1-5% damage increase.Īre we still talking about Conduits? One of the arcane conduits would on average reduce our major cooldown by 30 seconds.

It’s not necessarily a good idea (nor am I sure I’d be happy with that), but it would be an option they could take. Then they could put things that already exist for one spec into the hero tree for the other two. As Fire my choices would be Arcane or Frost. As Frost my choices would be Arcane or Fire. So as Arcane, my tree options would be Fire or Frost. One route they could go is to make our 3 hero trees representative of the three specs - but only share the tree with the other two specs (that way they could balance the talents without having to consider whether or not it’s buffed by mastery). Unless you’re referring to the fact that mastery doesn’t scale cross-element, which is something they’d surely have to address. I feel like that balance between stats is exactly what it should be. For the other two specs, it’s good, just not something that you want to stack without other secondaries. Isn’t mastery technically the best stat (by a small margin) for 2 of the three specs? It looks like mastery scaling is only bad for fire. Does the hero tree get bigger? Do we get another one? Do we lose the existing one altogether and have a new one replaced? I’m curious as to how they’ll iterate as we move into the next expansion. This whole concept feels like they realized that they couldn’t effectively scale our talent trees, so they simply added another one.

If they’re better than that and don’t take anything away from us, it’s going to be a challenge for them to come up with talents that are going to feel worthy of being a “hero” talent and be desired by 2 specs at the same time. However, this time around, it’s possible that the talent or ability you’re losing is going to be in the tree that your spec doesn’t get access to. My fear is that Blizzard will take this opportunity to take existing talents away from us and put them in the Hero Tree (as they have often done in the past).

The reason I’m skeptical is because of an inherent flaw with mages: the three specs are so wildly different that we don’t share a lot of interesting skills or mechanics. If I’m not mistaken, these hero talents are supposed to be more akin to the Legion Artifact Weapons than Covenant Soulbinds - the phrase that specifically needs attention is “ultimately you’re going to unlock the whole tree.” So in that regard, I’m not too concerned. I don’t anticipate this going well for mages - at least on the first pass.

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