I have been thinking about this lately and of course I am completely open to opposing opinions but I feel like the passives requiring a number of points in some trees is becoming an ever growing limitation to diversity.
Consider last passive points in the masteries. They require 20 points in base class and 45 in the mastery. And themselves usually have 5-10 points. So if you are playing a build that really needs those passives, at least 70 points is locked to certain parts of the passive trees. At first I thought that it is pretty normal but playing with multiple builds that need those last passives, I realized that this locks you into a passive tree that is 90% fixed and maybe 10% of flexibility.
There are multiple things contributing to this in my opinion, such as the fact that early points of masteries and pretty much most of base class can be really far off in benefit than compared to passives after 15-20 points. And since you cannot make that big of an investment with limited points, you are locked to certain choices.
Solution? No idea. But to me it is becoming more and more of a case of sticking to certain passive setups because it is hard to make small changes in most cases. You either make that whole 20 points investment for that really good damage reduction/utility etc or completely spend those 20 in somewhere else. There is no keep 10, be flexible with the rest.
Masteries are a limitation by choice and increase replayability of the game from my point of view. Yes some passives are far better then others and some are completely useless no matter what mastery or build you play but then againā¦ making everything achiveable on toon per class would be a realy bad thing. Right now you only need one toon per mastery and normaly you progressed enough to be able to do everything there is to do arround level 80.
I donāt think there needs to be any change besides making underused bad passives better. The system in place is okay as it is.
Optimal point setup would be a thing regardless of how they make the game,
Really though, certain nodes IN SPECIFIC should be changed, such as the nodes for mage fire aura, which take up a lot of points and are only run in one specific build. I think that the more specific stats should need fewer points to max.
Also nodes that rely on the effects of previous nodes should probably be a little cheaper as otherwise you are spending up to 20 points on just one section of the tree. For example in the beastmaster tree, you are unlikely to pick up all the nodes connected to Savagery because they each individually cost so much, and there are so many better options for melee damage in that tree.
Most of the better nodes are the ones that work well on their own and people usually only pick passive skill lines by putting the minimum required into them to reach the stat they actually care about.
Basically the main problems are 1:Hyper specific stats that only work in some builds cost too many points 2:Passive lines cost too many points to get everything
I would say though, with 20/45 passive spread(absolute minimum to reach end of mastered tree) you are left with 43 points, which is a LITTLE, but realistically about 20 of those points will be spent in mastery tree and on one of the other trees, so you would be lucky to be left with 23 points to spread around.
Iām with @doombybbr on this, there are a lot of improvements that could be made to the passive nodes themselves. I have no problems with the limitations & realistically there will always be meta choices that develop over time.
One thing I would like the devs to do, AFTER they can get more comprehensive data from everyones online saves, is to see what passives are not used at all (and there are plenty across classes imho right now) and make these more appealing or useful. If they dont do this, then we are all gonna end up with the same passive āstringsā and it will limit creativity rather than promote it.
