I've been thinking for a bit about things that I'd like to get to ask at Blizzcon this year (I went last time and probably had the most fun actually hunting down a few of the Devs inbetween panels and asking them things; I had a fun conversation over Enslave Demon and a few other things like Old Crappy Combustion). The big thing I want to focus on this year is trying to figure out what are the dumbest skills / talents in the game to see what they think about them and pick out a few stark examples of bad to talk about.

Prime Example: Volley. Without a doubt the worst AOE in the game. It is typically used as a punchline in raids, but that makes the Hunters feel bad if they don't have a sense of humor. (During a wipe - "Wait a minute, we're fine - we've got Volley!").

I want to assemble a list of what are the fundamentally bad or lackluster abilities for each class.

I'll start off with my gripes on the Mage Class:

Amplify Magic / Dampen Magic
Fundamentally terrible mechanics at their core. Amplify Magic is one of the few abilities in the game that is completely detrimental solo. If there isn't healing available, you're harming yourself by having it active with zero benefit. The tradeoff nature of these abilities makes it so almost nobody ever wants them active unless if you know that there is zero magic damage, in which case people will tolerate Amplify if people remember (sure, it is safe for Gruul at least). No Group cast version of the spells either - Prayer of Shadow Protection type treatment would make 'em at least slightly useable. The only time you see these abilities on NPCs is when they get to cast them as an offensive spell (this would actually make them useful as well - increase damage dealt against your target by spells? Sure! Useful!)

Max Rank Mage Gem
Pitiful increase from the level 68 gem over the 58 one; 130 more mana gained or so. Our pools can easily breach 10k in the expansion, vs around 6-7k in the original retail client at endgame (depending on how much damage gear you wear of course).

Improved Fire Ward (Talent)
Placed on the tree at the fourth tier, two point talent. Compare to Frost Warding, placed on the top tier of the Frost Tree (immediately available) - Frost Warding gives two effects; Frost Reflect of 20% with Frost Ward up and boosts to the effectiveness of Frost/Ice Armor - it was an overhaul of the original talents which were garbage, much like the current Improved Fire Ward. It is too high in the tree and only provides a singular benefit - 20% Fire reflect with your Fire Ward up.

Conjure Food / Water
The endless problem that MAKING WATER FOR A RAID IS NOT FUN. They created the soulwells for Warlocks for a similar reason - it sucks to individually make this stuff for a ton of people. Giving 10 per cast is likewise pointless - people typically make food / water when "safe" and we only need to use one to drink at any given point - giving only 10 is just an inconvenience that makes the experience that much more tedious. That a similar "Water Fountain" or whatever else still doesn't exist is ludicrous - making endless water and trading it to people in a raid is one of the most tedious pointless starts to a raid, but everyone who raids has to go through that experience (and has since they began raiding - yes, it is far better than the days of 4 per stack in Molten Core... ).

Wand Spec
Talents that don't scale effectively at all are garbage. End of the day, the only people who point points into Wand Spec either don't know what they're doing or just somehow had two extra points lying around (aka, don't know what they're doing). Make talents like this provide a useful benefit to the primary role of the Mage - casting. It could be a percent of wand damage to regen / percent of wand damage to spell damage / percent of spell damage to the wand or something that makes it vaguely useful. By design it is a throwaway skill that just isn't taken. Honestly, it could even just go to an "Improved Arcane Intellect" type talent; Mages just don't get one of those - unlike Priests/Druids.

Arcane Fortitude
A replacement to Evocate is great after we got that skill innate, but the replacement they came up with is flawed in multiple ways - as it currently stands it is primarily a PVP oriented skill, however PVP Armor (especially the Arena Armor) is focused on Stamina / Resilience to the exclusion of Int; we get almost as little Int as they could budget; 10, 15, 12, etc - compare to PVE gear with 30 or 40 int (or more depending on slot) - the PVE gear ends up getting more Armor from the talent, but we don't need Armor for PVE. The talent just doesn't provide much benefit at all, especially for being the 11 pointer in a tree (Compare to Cold Snap; resets all your Frost Cooldowns, and Pyroblast; the ever feared 3-minute mage nuke and a great pulling spell).

Slow
Deemed too overpowered when it had a slow to melee in Beta, so they stripped that out. Kept the long cost and short duration. 627-ish mana per cast, 15 second duration. The duration makes sense with PVP balancing in mind, but this is a 41 point skill and has so little effect. I've been specced with it for quite a while now (41/17/3 and I raid extensively - switched into this from my deep fire spec just to mix things up; pros and cons to it, but mostly, a 40/18/3 or 33/28 type spec would perform better on the whole) and it is great for Heroics and okay in PVP - though again, you have vastly reduced mana pools with PVP gear so you aren't able to cast it much at all without going dry. People have done statistics on it and it is one of the least selected spells - right up there with Circle of Healing and Lightwell. I'd like to support the skill - I really would, but there are so few boss situations where it is even remotely useful (Vashj and Magtheridon are about the only ones I can think of that I use it on the boss fight proper) - it needs a replacement or some substantial numerical tweaks - just not cost effective and useful enough for anyone to touch it.

Beyond that, Mages are one of the "best" classes in the game for non garbage mixing up their trees and skills. I can't wait for the heartfelt Warlock / Priest responses.

I'll assemble a list and will take it with me to Blizzcon for some fun. Please, by all means, what's broken, sketchy, or just plain useless about your class?

This really is more of a mage class post than a talent post.

With that said, I think you are off-base on amplify/dampen. While the skills could be better, amplify can be very beneficial to the raid when magic damage isnt flying around. I wouldn't be against a better implementation on these skills, such as making them percentage based, but the concept of the skills is excellent.

As for bad warrior talents, see: improved disarm(worthless), improved sunder armor(used to be awesome, but with devastate, is now relegated to the "largely useless" column once a 5 sunder stack is applied)

I agree with some of your sentiment, but not about slow - its a very well balanced spell. If they made slow too good/spammable on bosses it'd be one of those expected spells people were required to have, like Innervate was back in the day.

Having a spell your forced to spec into because its simply too good, is not fun. Slow is very useful in many situations but comes with an appropriate cost (high cost/short cooldown)

Agree mana gems are stupid. We need one that restores more mana - when we have 11-13k raid buffed with good arcane gearing. Same goes for conjure water. Even if the super water was a 1point talent in the arcane tree for BOP water! Thatd make me happy - and I wouldnt have to summon it for anyone else if it was bop =)

While I agree it might not benefit solo players at all - why does it need to? Theres lots of unique things in the game. Amplify magic is a great buff to raids in certain situations, just because it doesnt encompass every situation (raid, small group, pvp, solo) doesnt inherantly mean it needs a review. I think changing it to a % would be a better implementation, though.

Which I did acknowledge - yes, you use it on a fight like Gruul with no Magic Damage; but this is on Skills and Talents both - I play a Mage so that's where I'd have the most specialized information on it. I leave it open for you to speak on the special things in a Warrior class for example. By and large, Dampen Magic is almost never used except on yourself Solo or perhaps in PVP.

Amp/Damp are fine, they just need group versions for convenience reasons.

I don't think Amp/Damp are broken at all actually. It would be nice to have a group version, but that's all. Sure, Amp is useless for soloing, but that doesn't make it less useful, it just has a "phantom" use that most people discover much later.

I was running RFK last night on my 34 Priest, and this Mage was dampening the whole party. I promptly schooled him on the merits of Amplify when grouping with a Healer, and he was like "Oh yeah, that makes sense."

There are other spells that are useless soloing, but no one would call them broken. Prayer of Healing? Intervene? Righteous Defense?

The other points you mentioned are good, but I wouldn't touch Amp/Dampen at all, unless we got group Amplify (don't need group Dampen).

Edit: This thread is moving fast.

While this seems more like a complaint list than a theorycrafting discussion, I'll still mention that Amplify Magic is a core buff for raiding. It provides an obscene benefit to tank healing in at least 80% of boss fights. The primary reason people don't get the talent is that the rest of Arcane is inferior to deep fire, not the talent itself.

Dampen Magic was also extremely useful on fights like Vaelastraz where the whole raid is taking a frequent and consistent small amount of magic damage. There aren't many fights like this in TBC, but Dampen Magic is a fight dependent spell. Its current lack of utility is more an issue of fight design than ability functionality.

Id like an arcane talent that lets me use all my mana gems simultaneously!

Is there a worse point for point talent than Improved Disarm? Its just so bad.

What is amazing is that the talent has always been pretty bad and has only gotten worse as melee dps classes have gotten more options to become disarm immune.

In the many 'class reviews' how has this one been passed over so many times?

And yeah Improved Sunder Armor is pretty terrible now. It should affect Devastate as well.

When I was Prot, I always found it tough to spend points 21 to 25. The middle of that tree is shit.

Not that warlocks need more, but I'll start a list.

Firestones
These things are still more or less worthless. I don't think any lock in their right mind still considers using them. JUST GET RID OF THE DANG MELEE EFFECT ALREADY. They would be a decent item if all they did was add Fire damage. If they had an on-use effect like Spellstones it would be even better.

Curse of Weakness
While this spell has some limited uses, I personally don't even have it on my bar. It's useless for what my primary focus in the game is (PvP) and unless raiding has fundamentally changed it is largely useless there as well / your raid would be better served by you just casting Agony.

Ritual of Doom
Do I even really have to cover this? 5 people, one of them is required to die, all for this pet that isn't significantly more powerful than a Felguard. Probably worse now that I think of it.

Inferno
It's sad when the best thing about this spell I can think of is the fact that at level 50 it gives a nice blue quest reward. Seriously, this thing needs some sort of actual application.

Enslave demon I'm satisfied with. I've used it a ton in outlands while leveling, it's now an immensely useful spell, props to Blizz!

Somewhat off-topic. Death coil... you got to ask them if we're ever going to get a real escape spell, not a band-aid fix to a fundamental issue with the class

I really don't think anything good can come out of this thread.