The State of Talents

Talents are one of the biggest ways to gain power for your classless hero, offering stats like damage, haste, critical strike, and more to support the foundations of your build.

However, many of these talents are restricted to school specific bonuses: for example, Winter’s Chill offers 3% frost critical strike, and Darkness increases shadow damage done by 3%.

These school specific bonuses are at odds with the idea of classless: for example, if you were interested in either of the above talents for a Shadow-Frost build, the school specific bonus wouldn’t benefit a portion of your build. The frost critical strike only benefited the frost half of your build, while the shadow damage only helped the shadow portion. That sucks!

This type of school-based investment limits you: if you invest those three points into Winter’s Chill’s frost critical strike and its Winter’s Chill effect, you do so at the expense of every other spell school regardless of the classless combination you’re trying to play. There is a large opportunity cost to these kinds of choices. In the current state of the game, if you spend half of your points in mage and half in shadow priest, you end up just being really bad at both.

Not anymore. School-based bonuses are being opened up to more general effects.

• School-Based 2/2 and 3/3 effects are becoming general
  • i.e. 3% frost critical strike on Winter’s Chill is becoming 3% all Critical Strike (spell, melee, AND ranged)

The following changes begin a shift in the foundation of talents by opening up Damage, Critical Strike, and Caster-to-Melee Haste on many talents and making them general, improving whatever classless combination you’re playing.

Damage Talents

• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Darkness now increases all damage done instead of just Shadow damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Enhanced Weapon Mastery now increases all damage done instead of just Physical damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Playing with Fire now increases all damage done instead of just Magic damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Chilled to the Bone now increases all damage done instead of just Frost damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Intensity now increases all damage done instead of just Magic damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Crusade now increases all damage done instead of just Physical Holy damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Malediction now increases all damage done instead of just Magic damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Focused Power now increases all damage done instead of just Holy Shadow damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Arctic Winds now increases all damage done instead of just Frost damage.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Shattered Barrier now increases all damage done instead of just Magic damage.

Crit Talents

• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Unyielding Faith now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Holy spells and abilities.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Winter's Chill now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Frost spells and abilities.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Arcane Instability now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Spell spells and abilities.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Killer Instinct now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Melee spells and abilities.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Master of Elements now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Spell critical strike chance.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Healing Grace now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Spell critical strike chance.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Lunar Guidance now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Spell critical strike chance.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Dreamstate now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Spell critical strike chance.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Backlash now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Spell critical strike chance.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Blessing of the Eternals now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Spell critical strike chance.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - A New Dawn now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Holy spells and abilities.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Improved Divine Star now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Holy spells and abilities.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Sharpened Claws now increases your critical strike chance with all Ranged, Melee and Spells instead of just Melee spells and abilities.

Haste Talents

These talents will now all affect Spell, ranged, and melee haste. These were focused on opening up caster haste to melee and ranged as haste is a lot less powerful for melee and ranged.

• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Nature's Grace now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Nature's Grace Mystic Enchantment now affects the talent, and will increase the Melee, Spell and Ranged haste from Nature's Grace by 2/4/6%.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Wild Felfire now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Time Distortion now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Frozen Haste from Frost Bomb now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Swift Justice now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Infused Gems now increase spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Alacrity now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Healing Focus now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Natural Focus now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Celestial Focus now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Nature's Focus now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Subtlety now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Fel Concentration now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Spiritual Focus now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Eye of the Storm now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Nature's Guardian now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Frozen Core now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Enlightenment now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.
• [Elune] - [Area-52] - Gift of the Earthmother now increases spell, ranged and melee haste instead of just spell haste.

The details

By unlocking schools, you have a LOT more freedom to pick powerful talents that benefit your ENTIRE build. You can pick powerful capstone effects that are meaningful to you without missing out on power for your whole build. This unlocks talents to be more beneficial to more specs and gives you more freedom to successfully build the cross-class archetypes you want to play.

The scope of these talent changes to start is primarily targeting the following: 

• School-Based Damage (like talents that specifically increase Frost damage)
• School Based Crit
• Caster Haste -> All Haste (because haste is better for casters than melee)

Secondarily this update is targeting where appropriate and looking for opportunities to open them up. 

• Magic Damage
• Physical Damage
• Spell Crit
• Physical Crit 

These changes will certainly have some short term balance implications, but these will be dealt with by specific tuning of the cross-class enchants, talents, and abilities.

This change begins the process of opening up talents so that they have both a specific and a general component to them. A good portion of the power of these talents is still in the specific effect or capstone, but the rest of power is made more general, so that it benefits your entire build regardless of what you’re playing. This allows you to, for example, grab Winter’s Chill in your Evoker Build because the critical strike benefits Arcane and Fire spells as well, or you may even grab it in a frost melee hybrid you’re making.

Talents like Critical Mass that give 2/4/6% Fire Crit, will be left alone for the time being as a meaningful way to invest deeper into what makes fire damage interesting. BIG CRITS!

Keep in mind that a notable portion of the power remains in the specific: the Capstone Effect from Winter’s Chill is still the reason you pick it. This helps prevent these talents from becoming a non-choice or something you just always have to pick up.

This change may cause some weirdness on Elune because you can get these talents for 1 point. To help mitigate this, 5 pointers will be skipped and done in a later update. Limiting the change to 2/2 and 3/3 talents for now should make most heroes on Elune stronger while not raising the top end much.

This is one of several steps planned to begin the process of reducing the need for bridges between specializations in the form of epic and legendary REs: with more classless power in talents, the need for heavy-handed ‘bridge’ RE’s is reduced. Currently, these cross-class enchants are absurdly powerful out of necessity to bridge the gap between specializations that are very far apart and have no synergy. If more bridges are created in talents, then classless will be more foundational to Ascension as a result.