The Thrill Of The Wild: Celestalon Tweet Recap: Balancing Talents and Hunter Utility CD

@Lolzormon All of which are on different rows, ensuring a choice on each row.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 18, 2014

There was a somewhat interesting conversation going on between several people and Celestalon on twitter this morning. This isn't really anything new, but it does somewhat clarify Blizzard's position on talent "choice". Choice, to them, means there's at least one that will work for you.

Over on the forums a lot of people seem angry that they can't have Lone Wolf and all of the utility that comes with having a pet, which doesn't make sense to me. It'd be like if a prot warrior asked for a talent which let them play without a shield, but then complained that they couldn't shield slam.

I do realize that fantasy video games don't have to always be totally logical, but having master's call when you don't have a pet, or having spirit bond when there is nothing to be bonded to, these things just don't make sense to me.

It went on:

@Spiattalo @Nogz__ The problem is when one talent mandates another. It's OK if *occasionally* two talents are incompatible. Still a choice.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 18, 2014

@LukasIdea @Spiattalo @Nogz__ I think you may have misread. The point is that you do still have a choice, between the other two talents.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 18, 2014

What Celestalon, I think, is trying to point out, is that there's no build, no individual talent that will mean that you miss out on an entire other tier. So if you choose to not have a pet, no, Blink Strikes won't work, but you'll still have a choice in a Murder of Crows.

They also got into the different effects on different specs:

@LukasIdea @Spiattalo That's... not actually true, you realize? It doesn't matter if a row is stronger for one spec; row is still balanced.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 18, 2014

This came out of the same chain of tweets. I get what Celestalon is trying to say; BM isn't the only hunter spec that has a pet. All of them are designed around using pets. So long as the total damage output is close, then it doesn't matter if all three tier 75 talents are better for BM than any of them are for Survival.

Where he somewhat loses me is in that there is significant disparity between the three specs. Having a tier which is clearly stronger for the spec that is already doing the largest numbers doesn't seem like the best idea.

In theory, however, I don't have any problem with entire tiers being better for certain specs. BM has been a terrible spec for a long time, I'm glad to see them get their day in the sun.

And finally, from a totally different thread where they were talking about Mage healing utility CDs, there was this hint that they're looking into putting a hunter raid-wide cooldown.