Blizzard
We're going to swap
鬼影缠身 (was lvl 15, now lvl 90) with
死亡之箭 (was lvl 90, now lvl 15) in the talent tree in the next build. This fulfills a desire (mentioned several times here) to be able to play a
夜幕 +
鬼影缠身 or
吸取灵魂 +
鬼影缠身 build, which a lot of players think is fun (and is fair feedback).
The reason we made the last round of talent swaps, which saw
夜幕 and
吸取灵魂 move to level 15, and
暗影之拥 and
鬼影缠身 move to level 90, was to satisfy a different desire (as players mentioned even in this thread) to allow
吸取灵魂 and
牺牲魔典 to be taken together, as both are identity, feel, and greatly gameplay changing. That also seemed reasonable.
Separately, that also had the benefit of allowing
夜幕 and Drain Soul to be acquirable earlier at lvl 15, since they are both great leveling talents and good to have early.
To make room for
夜幕 and Drain Soul on the lvl 15 row, we chose to move
暗影之拥 and
死亡之箭 together (as opposed to
暗影之拥 and
鬼影缠身) because
暗影之拥 and
鬼影缠身 are pretty similar - they both provide a damage taken debuff with or near 100% uptime. That's still true, but it seems better overall to live with that, look for opportunities to improve/replace
暗影之拥 in the future, and support a
夜幕 +
鬼影缠身 build.
So the new layout looks like:
Row 15: 夜幕, 吸取灵魂, 死亡之箭Row 90: 暗影之拥, 鬼影缠身, 牺牲魔典On the topic of talent tree layouts in general for all specs - it's always a list of competing, sometimes contradictory desires, all of which are valid to some varying degrees:
- "All talents on a row should be equal"
- "Some talents should better in some situations"
- "Talents on the same row shouldn't clearly be better in single target or AOE vs other talents on the same row"
- "Difficult to use talents should be a little more rewarding than easy to use talents"
- "Talents shouldn't be too similar to each other"
- "Players should be allowed to pick whatever talent they find the most fun"
- "The strongest talent should probably be the most fun one"
And so on. It's often not possible to satisfy all requirements, so it becomes sort of finding the best configuration that satisfies as many desires as possible, and iterating on improvements for the future.
As usual, we're always open to feedback.