Originally Posted by Anedris
I don't think it's a lack of ideas, I think it's an insoluble problem given:
- You want the tanking tree to be worth speccing into (and thus to noticeably improve one's tanking ability)
- You want content to be challenging (and thus must assume that the tanks attempting it are tank-specced - if you balance for offspec tanks it's going to be easy with a properly specced group)
If you accept these two goals, you're stuck.
The "way out," such as it is, is to strike a balance between making it worth speccing deep prot and still giving enough tank-related synergies in arms and fury to make tanking the occasional instance as those specs not an exercise in eye-gouging. Given that the position of deep prot is essentially secure due to raid content (i.e., you're never going to go into a progression raid encounter with a tank who hasn't taken every bit of survivability and threat boost he can get) I would agree that arms and fury need a boost (notably in the threat department).
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I think you're right that it's an impossible catch-22, and a very good argument in favor of more fluid respecs (unless something is done to somehow turn into DPS-oriented warriors into an alternative model of tanking, ala avoidance tanks, which pretty much won't happen).
Regardless of what they do to specs, presumably they want DPS-oriented warriors to remain a passable off-tank in scenarios where there isn't a major issue, in which case they're still going to need to offer much better multipurpose talents. While they've occasionally remarked that Arms warriors should function as an off-spec tanking benchmark, they've done relatively little to make that really work; they still suffer from major rage efficiency and threat generation issues, and there's not much in the three that has anything to do with that, unless you consider talents that affect very rare PvE scenarios like Second Wind.
By comparison, Fury synergizes fairly well, given some substitution of tanking gear for DPS gear to leverage Flurry, Sweeping Strikes and Bloodthirst, and of course the hit chance and dodge reduction talents are never a bad thing.
So in this case, you've got a PvE tanking tree that offers passable damage, a PvE DPS tree that functions moderately well as a PvE tanking tree, and a PvP tree that is essentially mediocre at every PvE role, with the exception of bringing a decent raid debuff to the table. So in effect, we've got another factor driving a wedge between PvE and PvP roles, with no particularly good way of bridging the gap.
This might be Blizzard's intention, but we've gotten this recent acknowledgment that the devs aren't happy with this divide (and they shouldn't be). It seems more likely that they're just not able to cleverly reconcile all of these competing motivations, and I certainly can't blame them, because it's a staggering challenge when you look at the the variety of options.
And I think with more fluid respec options, they have a lot more flexibility in creating trees that *don't* have to fill every role, and *can* afford to be more unique (although this isn't to say that they shouldn't still considering cross-purpose talents a second or third priority). They can reasonably expect players to specialize deep into a tree without feeling that they're losing out on major parts of the game.
The only real argument I've seen against more fluid and frequent respecs is the concern that players won't identify their character with a particular role. That argument doesn't hold water when you consider how many players obliterate their attachment to their primary character by being forced to roll alts to engage in the parts of the game they miss out on. And beyond that issue, there's a mountain of other problems that just happen to get resolved by fluid respecs.