A lot of skills in this last patch have been gated behind their respective masteries, rather than the single mastery skill being gated. This has resulted in all classes losing 20-21% of the access to skills they previously had, as each full class will only have access to 2 skills from the 2 alternate masteries, rather than 4-5 each.
This on the face of it seems pretty bad, when is less build diversity a good thing? Unfortunately, it also seems to have been a pretty poorly thought out change.
Here are some examples using primalist, which i know the best:
-Totem shamans and druids and Tempest Strike Shamans have lost access to Frenzy totem. Only beastmaster can use it now, though it still has only Attunement scaling, which pretty much sucks for Beastmaster
-Physical caster and poison Shamans have lost access to Entangling Roots, but they still have access to spriggan form, without all the investment in the druid tree to make shapeshifting actually good
-Physical and cold caster Druids have lost access to Avalanche
Maybe down the road this game will develop some kind of ability bloat and we’ll have more abilities than we know what to do with, but for now this move reduces my confidence in the development of this game, simply for how poorly thought out it is.
This change produces -no- positive effect and does produce negative effects.
I pretty much disagree entirely with this. Mastery choice SHOULD be impactful and one way to do that is to lock skills behind the half-way threshold. In terms of which skills are the ones that are locked, well, some build plan/idea is going to lose out.
Also it wasn’t that long ago that base mastery skills were disparate between the classes and that is now more or less standardized. It could be that the locked skills are going to be subject to a similar pass.
That might be fine vyrzeden if it had been done intelligently, and if the immediate result wasnt a net reduction in build diversity.
You also seem to have your own agenda here, which is fine, but they’re separate issues.
I just want more clarity for builds. I really wish they hadn’t capped the ailment counters or capped it higher than 15, 15 for this game is pretty low, especially when you get into poison stacks.
There are still skill combos and they’ve shifted some around. I think the change to frenzy totem was a mistake as well, I prefer it able to be used by other base units, but overall i wouldn’t say they’ve messed up the skill combos as a whole combining Druid/Beast/Shaman, more like they’ve radically changed over Primalists in general. I’m sure as the patch goes on we’ll see updates. They always are doing mini updates.
We’re still in Beta so it’s time for experiments, it’s time to change things to see if they work well. Any change can be rolled back later.
Masteries need to have a strong identity. A Beastmaster is not a Druid, and vice versa. So having several skills gated behind masteries seems a good thing to me.
Of course we will (strongly) miss several possibilities, but instead of looking at the past, let’s see what we can build now.
I’m surprised by certain choices (the purely Beastmaster skills for example), but I will try and see what I can build and what the result is.
Apart from Sabertooth, Entangling Roots & Frenzy Totem, no. Though all Primalists can now use Scorpion & have easier access to Warcry & Spriggan Form. But letting reality get in the way of a good rant is a waste of a good rant.
I know that on Druid I previously had access to Avalanche.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I believe I could previously invest up to the 35 points in alternate masteries in order to unlock even their most expensive abilities, but now that investment counts only up to a cap of 22 for each alternate mastery.
For clarity I’ll rephrase; you can still invest more than 22 points in trees other than the one you’ve chosen as your mastery, but it doesnt count towards unlocking skills higher than a cutoff cost of 22.
Its been a month or two since ive played because of the incoming yuge rework, but I’m pretty sure thats new.
I -have- a druid that lost access to Avalanche who had 20 points in that skill, and they didnt change avalanche around this patch at all.
I’m pretty sure being forbidden from using skills from alternate masteries that cost an investment of 25 and 35 points is new, and that fits what ive been saying about losing access to some large amount of build diversity.
I’m pretty sure there were like frost builds and poison builds that werent Beastmaster that already used scorpion.
like here’s a quick google: 7.10 Poison storm totem Shaman build
kid made a poison shaman using scorpion, scorpion wasnt gated. Afaik only the 3 mastery skills used to be gated, ie one each for each mastery. Difference is now Frenzy Totem and Entangling Roots are gated, cause the gating lock at 22 is new and this kids build can not exist now cause we have lost build diversity.
At some point between 0.7.10 & 0.8.3 Scorpion was moved to require 30 points in Beastmaster. Skills requiring 25 or more points in a mastery have been gated for a very long time.
