Originally Posted by srljstr
Not every talent needs to be amazing, nor every tree at every point in time. Look at something like Magic the Gathering and its metagame, which through the power of newly printed cards is in a general flux and change and is only represented by what is strongest at that point in time which as people adapt, develop counters and become accustomed to fighting it gradually gets hated out, and new things come up and then those are eventually pounced on or in some cases nerfed because they are too abusive. Yet the ideas that go into those decks don't go away, they often mutate into offshoot decks with the same general idea only with tricks, or simply wait out the printing of something new to boost the overall power of the deck and bring it back to prominence.
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This may be true, but at the same time specs should not be nearly as cut-and-dried as they are now. If you want to tank end-game bosses in BC as a warrior, you really need to be deep protection. If you want to do end-game raid DPS in BC as a warrior, you really need to not be deep protection (one of maybe two or three styles).
I don't want every talent tree and spec to be amazing. But I do want there to be
options. As it is right now, there's "works" and "doesn't work". There's no middle ground at all—it's not a matter of "non-optimal", it's a matter of "no damned good".
I guess my feeling is that roles should be attached to a class, not to a spec. Specs should be able to take a given class in a given role from "okay" at the role to "great". They should not take it from "piss-poor" to "magnificent". The down side of changing this is that it means that each talent point has less impact on your over-all performance. The up side is that the secondary effects of talents (the part that isn't directly boosting your damage, healing, or tanking potential) become much more interesting.
Does this mean you can't min-max? No. There are still going to be certain specs and styles of play that outshine others. There will still be an evolving situation in which abilities are buffed and nerfed over time and the optimal specs and styles change. However, it will be possible to play reasonably in end-game content without having to min-max everything. For example, you'll have a choice of "We're light on healers tonight. Do we ask our paladin tank who has healing gear to go respec healadin to get a bit more healing power, or do we go with the healing she can do as a protadin?" Most people will be specced optimally for their roles, but when you need someone to go outside their chosen role, it won't be absolutely necessary to respec to do it.
Anyway, that's my theory. Whether it's possible or not to make the game more like what I would like to see? Hard to say. People definitely get grumpy when they're not able to wtfpwn quite so much.