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Bald Bull
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There are a couple of different issues floating around here. I can enumerate them, but I don't think they can realistically be disentangled for discussion.
Respecs The gameplay impetus for talent specs being cross-applicable drops considerably when people can switch to a more optimal spec when they change venue. However, regardless of respec costs, there are people who will want to stick with one spec or another because they identify their character with that spec, or because they like the playstyle so much they're willing to take the performance hit to keep the game fun (I fall into the last category myself). Personally, I think respecs should be much more difficult than they are now, but I realize that can't feasibly happen until some of the other issues are addressed.
Optimality On the one hand, there is always a "best" spec for some situation. On the other hand, what spec is best may vary only every tier of raids, or it may change every fight, or it may change depending on who else shows up for the raid that night. On the other other hand (same side as the first other hand), despite what some people seem to believe, a marginal performance will not always be the goal of hardcore theorycrafters. One needs only look at the theorycrafting effort put into the performance of arcane, frost, mutilate, and demonology on the raid scene, despite the acceptance of them not being able to meet fire, combat, or destruction (respectively).
The major question is how far down from "optimal" can you be, and still be "viable." Can, say, Mutilate be a build that gives viability in PvE and PvP but optimality in neither? Or Arcane? It's not an easy question to answer, nor an easy issue to settle. Whether something is flat-out better or worse can usually be verified easily (assuming everything is working as intended), but whether it's good enough can really only be demonstrated by guess and check on the live servers.
Buffs, Stacking and Composition The correct number of Arms warriors is exactly one, because their PvE viability mostly comes from providing an essential non-stacking debuff. This means that, rather than allowing DPS warriors to be Arms instead of Fury if they want, you are also on occasion forcing warriors to respec from Arms to Fury for the sake of the raid, as well as still requiring some Arms warriors to respec Fury if there's more than one of them. I'm hyperbolizing here somewhat, but the point stands that somehow, Arms is necessary without being viable, which means the element of choice this was supposed to allow isn't really present. Rather than presenting choice and flexibility, it replaced one compulsory decision with another.
Blood Frenzy is not particularly anomolous, except in degree. They're probably the least-PvE-viable spec that brings a necessary buff or debuff, and their debuff is probably the least necessary. I'm just going to mention Enhancement Shamans, and leave it at that, since we're all aware how that story goes. Other examples of viability coming through buffs that turn some off-spec from optional to required: boomkin aura (WLK raid version), shadow priests, Battle Shout.
Providing raid-viability through buffs instead of personal contribution is problematic. Unless the contribution of the buff is tightly tuned, it makes the difference in effectiveness between different raid compositions unreasonable. The goal is that off-specs are viable, not required.
Bloat Most trees have too damn many talents that contribute to the main purpose of the tree. If your tank build has, say, 55 of 61 points being spent on tanking talents, there's no character customizability. You can't give him backup healing power, or grinding power, or raid DPS talents, or PvP enhancements, unless those abilities happen to be riders on the cookie-cutter talents. Your cookie-cutter combat raid build doesn't even have enough talent points for Riposte, the spec-defining grinding and PvP ability that's 11 points into the tree, without sacrifing some DPS talents from poisons. Having less than 41 DPS talents, and valid choices for the other points, would allow some choices for performance in different venues.
Trees Believe it or not, 30 trees doesn't necessarily mean 30 specs. Warlocks have cookie cutter builds for 40+ points into all three trees, and a fourth viable build that sits balanced between affliction and demonology. We might have had five builds, if 41 demo was worth a damn anywhere. Warriors have an MS-fury hybrid build, so only have three builds because deep arms is trash, and because shallow prot doesn't offer enough to be a valid off-spec for a DPS build. With Incite this may change in WLK, and we could fury or arms builds that build for the occasional offtanking or instance without sacing too much DPS. And it looks like the two primier mage PvE specs in WLK will be arcane-fire, and elementalist Frostfire Bolt, with the three "pure" builds being for different types of PvP.
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