Interview with Nobbel and MarcelianOnline - Exploring the Holy & Protection Hero Talent Tree

In an interview with Nobbel87 and Flame of MarcellianOnline, Blizzard discussed the Lightsmith Paladin hero talent tree for Holy and Protection specializations coming in The War Within expansion, answering questions about the tree and its Holy Armaments!

Early Look at Hero Talents in The War Within

Blizzard revealed hero talents for San’Layn Death Knights, Chronowarden Evokers, Lightsmith Paladins, and Mountain Thane Warriors earlier today, so check out their blog post for the newly revealed trees.

Obtaining Hero Talents

Are the hero talents unlocked as we gain levels or will there be more connected to it, like quests?

You’ll unlock the hero talent system at level 71. This does mean it won’t be available as pre-patch content. As you level, you gain more points to fill up the tree, eventually filling up the entire tree at 80.

Are there already plans for adding more hero talents as we get further into the expansion?

Right now, we are focused on developing these at launch. We’re building this out as evergreen, so it’s certainly possible down the line, maybe later in this expansion or future expansions, but nothing to share at this time. Right now, we are focusing on these trees for launch.

Visual Customizations & Narrative Impact

Will we be able to collect new visuals for our new abilities (warlock green fire)?

Nothing we can talk about at this time, but it’s certainly top of mind for us. We’re going to try and make these hero talents visually impactful, so there’s a lot of avenues that we’re exploring.

Lightsmith, Herald of the Sun and Templar as talent names for our kits. Will we also be recognized as Lightsmiths like highlords in the past or is it purely a name used for the talent system?

Currently, no. Right now, this is a system, you’re picking up the teachings of not necessarily becoming one so currently no intend for people to recognize you as the Lightsmith.

Will we dive deeper into the backgrounds of different light wielders, like will we dive deeper into the background of those that follow An’she or the Naaru?

Currently, mostly just the name for the talent system. Might be room for us to explore later to integrate it a bit more into the lore, but right now focused as a secondary talent system.

Design Process

What was the process behind getting this system going? How did you get to picking things like Lightsmith or Herald of the Sun or Templars?

Very fun, but difficult. Sat in calls for hours to decide what makes sense. If we pick Lightsmith for this combo, what makes sense here? A lot of teams working together. Ultimately the 39 we sent in at Blizzcon are the ones we felt good about. Good to start with. Lightsmith you get that you’re going to make something out of light. San’layn, very much Blood Death Knight. What are fun and cool design hooks for unholy as well? Fun, difficult process but also really fulfilling.

Talent & Mechanics Breakdown

Could you paint us a picture of how holy armaments will look in the game?

Ground target reticles that you place at a set location. Cast it on top of a player, nearby them and they can walk through and pick it up. What will Holy Armaments look like? Visually we are still trying to figure it out. How much space they take up. How we can make sure to draw players' attention to them. Adding verticality to them?

It’s not like a Lightwell? You walk over it or spawn it on someone and they auto pick it up?

Yeah, right now it's walking over it. Discussing if there should be a delay so that you don’t pick it up too quickly, give people time to react to it without feeling like they have to stand on top of it or even move out of it. Thinking of how we want to deliver that mechanic fully, but we have an early version in that we’re playtesting.

It rotates between Bulwark and Armaments, Shield or dmg/healing increase. Does this rotate on the ability itself before you cast or does it rotate on the armament itself?

It rotates on the ability, cast it once it's bulwark, cast it second time you’ll get a weapon.

What are your thoughts on how these talents will play and their impact on your rotation?

We want hero talents to elevate your current rotation and gameplay style. Influence maybe a couple of subtle changes here and there. Not looking too upset the balance of what your core rotation is. If we look at Divine Inspiration within the Lightsmith tree which has: Spawns holy armaments nearby, won't spawn 20 yards away from your concentration, easy to pick up for you or for someone else.

• Solidarity: An ally picks up armaments, you get benefits as well so even if it spawns far away from consecration, someone else can pick up armament and you’d still get the benefit so we are trying to take those things into consideration.
• Divine Inspiration: Choice node together with forwarding. In the sense of these choices making them feel like a good choice. The choice node between this and Forwarding makes it feel like it relies entirely on whether or not forwarding makes the armament align with other cooldowns. Since we don't exactly know what the cooldown is. If this would be the case, the chances of forwarding being preferred 100% of the time is very likely. Is this something you take into consideration when designing and tuning cooldown lengths and reductions for the holy armaments and potentially other cooldowns for the paladin?

Yeah, it's top of mind for us. The intent with that choice node specifically is to account for situations when there aren’t immediate obvious uses for the armament. Where a player doesn’t necessarily need or want to plan out these cooldowns or when there are critical moments that are covered by baseline uptime, and bonus proc vs bonuses. It should be expected that a well-timed/targeted armaments is better than a proc, but a proc is better than unused. We’re giving ourselves a lot of tune-ups for these and conversations we have every day.

Divine Guidance

For each holy power ability cast, your next consecration does additional holy damage or healing split across all enemies, up to a fixed total.

Blessed Assurance

Casting a holy power spender increases the damage and healing of your next Crusader Strike, blessed hammer, or hammer of the righteous by 100%.

We’re talking numbers which are subject to change. Assuming that’s the case, currently both specs in the sense of the meta in the current patch, take little to no consecration synergies in their builds. While crusader strike for both of the specs and what it transfers to for protection, is a low impact ability in terms of their dmg output. How would hero talents affect your class and spec talent builds if the dmg increase, 100% to Crusader Strike, would be something impactful enough that people would want to choose Bless of Assurance over divine guidance.

Talents like these are outlets for us to give some tuning knobs for holy armaments. Numbers subject to change as the tree really. Ideally we will make these as close as possible within each other.

Talents in terms of synergy and what's taken in current impact in case of Crusader Strike, we’re looking at the core and base spec trees when looking at hero talents to make sure these things are both viable as you progress. Reworks or updates to tuning are on the table where appropriate. We don't necessarily wanna change existing gameplay, we talked about this with consecration earlier just to make a hero talent tree work. But if there are things that are so obvious, like crusader strike is a really low impact ability, maybe that shouldn’t be the case? Maybe it should be more impactful, a case for us to increase the viability a little bit. Not just for the hero talent tree to work, but also to give you more interesting, ya know even if you're not playing lightsmith, maybe crusader strike should feel more impactful as a paladin. Opportunity for us to one; give us a different trigger for hero talent trees but also give players something more interesting to look forward to if baseline, or core rotationally.

Consecration becomes stronger, I find it interesting when 1 spell becomes a center point to a playstyle or build. And from what I understood from what you guys said, you don't want the holy armaments and the hero talents to effect the core gameplay too much and when this addresses specific spells like Consecration or Crusader Strike, as a prot paladin or a holy paladin I’d wonder if i’d have to talent more into consecration talents to make this synergy more impactful or to make the hero talent more impactful. That’s kind of the area of this question.

We need to find balance in that. Ultimately we’d want you to feel like you play your core class any way you like and hero talent enhances that. That can be tricky. Again, this is great feedback from the community. If something swings too much into 1 direction, and it feels like you kind of losing a bit of your core identity, those are things we want to know. Want to make sure if it feels good/bad if you want to see more or less of it. Make these hero talents as exciting for everyone as possible no matter what hero talent tree or spec you’re playing.

Generating Feedback

If you could throw out anything about this new hero talent system, what would you say?

We want your feedback! A big reason for our push to get this in front of players as early as possible. Our goal is to have the majority of these in and playtestable with the first public testing when this does become available. Some of the good feedback we love to hear is, how do you feel about the fantasy of the tree and how well do you feel these talents embody it? What are your thoughts on how these talents play and their impact on your rotation? What is the impression of how these talents affect your class and your talent builds? Even feedback on the names of the talents or the visuals; are we hitting that fantasy with the visuals you’re seeing? Are we selling the identity of the Lightsmith to you, would love to hear what community has to say.

Best way to give us feedback through our forums. That said, we read Reddit, Discords, Tiktoks, so really it's on you to figure out how you want to present the feedback. Reading is easier to parse but really everything is on the table.

Plan for Public Testing

You mentioned getting these talents on public testing as soon as possible. At Blizzcon, we were told Alpha. How are we going to get people to test these talents? What can we expect for alpha/beta invites or will it be available on the PTR?

Unfortunately, I can't speak on specific time windows for things like public alpha or anything like that. Can’t give specifics there. The goal is when public alpha or PTR opens up, these are playtestable so that people can log in and test them.

We’re doing blog posts for these, Lightsmith, San'layn, Mountain Thane, Chrono Warden. Paper isn’t easiest to get feedback on but that's the first step and we can still get valuable feedback. Feedback you've given is already super valuable, our plan is to roll out more hero blogs in the future as well. Before we get to the public testing alpha stage, everyone will have a good familiarity with a lot of these hero talents.

Will they be available before the expansion launches as part of the pre-patch? No, they’ll unlock at 71, so not available with pre-patch.