Blizzard
We're going to swap
Haunt (was lvl 15, now lvl 90) with
Deathbolt (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
Nightfall +
Haunt or
Drain Soul +
Haunt 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
Nightfall and
Drain Soul move to level 15, and
Shadow Embrace and
Haunt move to level 90, was to satisfy a different desire (as players mentioned even in this thread) to allow
Drain Soul and
Grimoire of Sacrifice 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
Nightfall 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
Nightfall and Drain Soul on the lvl 15 row, we chose to move
Shadow Embrace and
Deathbolt together (as opposed to
Shadow Embrace and
Haunt) because
Shadow Embrace and
Haunt 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
Shadow Embrace in the future, and support a
Nightfall +
Haunt build.
So the new layout looks like:
Row 15: Nightfall, Drain Soul, DeathboltRow 90: Shadow Embrace, Haunt, Grimoire of SacrificeOn 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.