• Keltan

Prior to TBC many classes were limited to a single spec, or possibly two if they wanted to raid.

• If you were a raiding priest, you were holy.

• If you were a raiding shaman, you were most likely resto.

• If you were a rogue you were combat.

• If you were a hunter you were most likely Marks.

• If you were a paladin, you were holy.

• If you were a druid, you were resto.

• <etc etc>

In TBC, Blizzard attempted to make offspec's viable in raids, and in many cases were successful. Shadow Priests, Enhancement Shaman, BM Hunters, Feral druids are all examples of specs that previously would have been laughed out of raids, that are now very powerful and useful. From what we know of WotLK, Blizzard is even more aggressively pursuing this train of thought, not only in raid viability, but also PvP to some extent. A Discipline Priest will not only be viable, but will be sought after as a main tank healer. Assassination looks like it very well could be the new highest dps Rogue spec. Additionally, PvP tools are being spread around to all the trees. Fury warriors have Heroic Leap, Feral Druids have new tools, and Enhancement Shaman get all kinds of toys.

There are 10 classes, with 3 talent specs each, bringing us up to a whopping 30 different "specs" that they are trying to balance for both raiding and PvP. In a perfect world, this would be great. Blizzard would actually have the manpower and time to tweak every single talent spec and make them viable in both raids and pvp, and the players would have a large number of ways to play their class in both the raid and pvp environment. In the real world, we all know that's unlikely.

Is it smart for Blizzard to attempt to simultaneously balance 30 different specs for 2 different venues? Why not simply tighten up their focus to 10-15 specs per venue, and theoretically get the fixes to us faster and reach "class balance" in each area far sooner? Do we really need 2 different dps flavors of warriors both viable in pvp and pve? Why not move Blood Frenzy to Fury, Heroic Leap to Arms, and simply tell warriors "If you want to PvP, go Arms. If you want to raid dps, you are Fury."

Wouldn't is be much simpler to focus on 1-2 specs per class per venue and make sure they do it right?

Warriors:
I want to PvP - Arms
I want to tank - Prot
I want to PvE dps - Fury

Priests:
I want to dps - Shadow
I want to raid heal - Holy
I want to pvp heal - Discipline

Hunters:
I want to PvP - Marks
I want to dps - BM
I'll sacrifice personal dps to significantly boost raid dps - Survival

Looking at just these three examples, do Warriors really need 2 different dps trees viable in both raids and pvp? Do priests really need two different raid healer specs? Why not keep each tree focused on a "job" (pvp or pve) and consolidate all the neat tools in one place, instead of spreading them across 2 trees and doubling how many specs you are trying to make raid/pvp viable?

 

Nezralix

I'm not sure what you mean by "focus on". In general, most trees have one or two things they excel at, with some PvP viability thrown in various degrees. Their approach over the past year or two has been to make specific talent trees less "egregiously bad" at one area or the other. In the specific case of warriors, Prot warriors have been given tools to do damage with, Arms warriors offer less DPS but bring some PvE group benefits, and Fury has gotten some tools to not be completely worthless in PvP. And that's fine, because you really don't want players of some spec to be completely worthless in any one aspect of the game that their spec might reasonably be expected to fill (warriors obviously shouldn't expect to be healers anytime soon). Especially so with regard to viability between PvP and PvE; it's horrendously unenjoyable to feel like your particular spec and class combination has been excluded from being useful in one aspect of the game. I like some of the tools that Protection warriors have been given, that look like useful skills in PvE that also happen to offer some utility in PvP, should a Prot warrior find themselves in that situation. Obviously Arms wins out overall, but Prot shouldn't be a hilarious pushover in that regard.

Holy priests have been given some tools to stay alive, resto shamans have been given some tools to be useful in PvP, and both of them got some itemization bonuses to make them less worthless at doing damage in healing-oriented gear (a trend that will be continuing in Wrath).

In fact, I think that this idea of giving up on versatile classes and instead just specializing everything into discrete trees is pretty awful. Talent specs certainly should excel at some purpose, but none of them should entirely exclude a class from participating in competitive roles, or leave them broken in either PvE or PvP. Even if it might simplify the work slightly, it doesn't simplify it *that* much, and basically concedes an important part of a player's enjoyment of their class for no good reason.

On the other hand, I'm under no illusions that making each spec equally viable and PvE and PvP *would* be a challenge, so I don't expect that out of them. Only that they don't feel inclined throw one aspect or the other out the window. Combined with the "talent stable" option for switching between focuses periodically, it looks like Blizzard is making changes that they will make the game more enjoyable for much of their playerbase.

 

Incoherence

The key issue is that even if the same TREE is viable for both PvP and PvE (I'll use WotLK discipline priests as an example), the same BUILD is not, so I'm not sure how much good it does for all 30 trees to be both PvE and PvP viable when you're going to respec anyway.

As an example, PvP discipline priests have several talents that are critical in PvP but mostly or entirely useless in PvE: Focused Power (comedy option Felmyst), Imp Mana Burn (comedy option Moam), Focused Will, even Martyrdom (which is useful for soloing but generally not in any kind of group).

 

PSGarak

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.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Shakes

I think if you look at "willingness to respec" it's certainly intermingled with the other issues. I know that back in the old days I (like a lot of other mages) raided MC as fire because I hated frost, 100g was a lot of money, and it did a "good enough" job.

Now you have the situation where 100g is nothing (way more gold in the expansion, dailies, most people have epic flyers etc already paid for) and the differences between specs are much larger, and you see pretty much everyone who raids even half-seriously is willing to respec to PvP, or for a different fight, or whatever.

I think this is a deliberate design decision. Talk about talent tree bloat all you like, but if you have non-bloated talent trees, people complain about worthless talents. People have come to the mindset that every single point they spend should help their character in what they're currently doing. So blizzard provides that, and also makes it easy (and in the future even easier) to change that out for another talent spec when you want to do something else.

Also, when you have trees that fundamentally do similar things, it's going to be hard to make them equally as desirable. All mage trees are ranged, magic damage. All rogue trees are melee, physical damage. One tree is always going to be better at doing that for a particular fight, whether by 1%, 10% or 100%.

You can really never make all specs optimal, the question becomes are all specs viable ... and then the answer becomes pretty difficult, because what is viable depends in large part on the rest of the raid. If you overgear content, 0/0/0 is probably viable. If you don't overgear it, but you have 24 other people with optimal specs, again 0/0/0 is probably viable.

PvP is probably even harder to measure: a top PvP player with low latency playing a naked paladin with no talents can probably beat a newbie playing on satellite internet from India who is using the default UI and is a clicker who keyboard turns.

As a subjective judgement, I'd say at the moment balance is "good enough" that a sufficiently good player can spec how they like and do at least passably at most aspects of the game, but not so good that you would always take the better player over the better class/spec. I'm not sure you can ever really take the leap from where we are to the ideal though.

 

Kigale

The ideal is impossible. For the "pure" classes: hunter, mage, warlock, rogue, (even the 2 dps specs of warriors) they are intended to do 1 job, but have 3 different specs with which to do it. The numbers can be fine tuned for years and still the millions of players will discover that talent build A is better than talent build B for a given job. The difference might be negligible. It might be as small as 1%, but that is still huge to a min/maxer on the bleeding edge. The specs can never be equal. There are just way too many factors. Viability depends completely on how finely tuned an encounter is. 1% more dps from each of a raid's dps is the difference between a night of wipes on Brutallus and a clean kill.

 

Calixtus

There are really two points I'd like to touch on in response to the original post.

Why do we have talent trees?
Because customers want the ability to customize their character. Really, a game in which the ability to choose how your character plays like, a game in which you make choices that affect the way your character will play is a better game in the eyes of many customers. Look at other games in the genre; Didn't WAR for example (fairly) recently add the equalent of talent trees because of demands during their beta? I know SWG - after abandoning their originial system and pretty much stealing WoWs - added something akin to talent trees. We have talent trees because people do not like cookie-cutter builds. Cookie-cutter builds is undesireable to the customer base.

A situation in which a very, very limited part of the class is used for a specific purpose, like the one many non-hybrid classes are experiencing in PvP/PvE removes the entire point of having talent trees. All your warlocks are 0/21/40 when they DPS. I havn't checked, but I'd wager the point distribution - with the possible exceptions of points in Imp HS - is fairly uniform. No matter how you slice it, that's a failure. The whole point of having talents is to get away from cookie-cutter builds, but for some classes, the results are the exact opposite; We're forced into cookie-cutter builds for one aspect of the game, and because our balance in another aspect takes into account the talents we could take, we're forced into a different cookie-cutter build for that aspect.

Blizzard's ability to balance
WoW has 11.5 million paying customers last I checked. That's more than the entire pre-WoW MMORPG market, and roughly 5 times as many as the previous largest MMORPG, 22 times as many as the largest MMORPGs in Europe/North America.

I'm not saying any of the pre-WoW MMORPGS were the pinnacle of balance - never played EQ, but I did spend two years in SWG and my confidence for SOE ranks at "boycott" two years after I stopped being a customer of theirs - but with 22 times the resources of SWG and even more than any of the other MMORPGs, I have a whole different set of expectations for what Blizzard can, and can't achieve compared to their predeccesors.

While what we're seeing in WoW is certainly good in terms of balance, with the amount of resources they have at their disposal, saying that they can't make it better because it's too much work... I don't buy it.



I'd also like to point out that while PvE cookie-cutter builds is indeed a result of the fact that DPS is what we do, the solution is the same as the one for moving hybrids away from healing; Utility, not DPS. Make more pure DPS trees create utility/synergy that does not stack - much like what they're ever-so-slowly doing to the warlock affliction tree - and you will see a higher representation of those specs. Sure, those will also end up being cookie-cutter utility specs, but we'll still see a broadening of playstyles and specs compared to what we have today.

 

jilanea

I can't see any reason not to at least try to make trees viable for both. Say someone level a shadow priest for example, there is no indication they want to pvp as a healer which the topic suggests should be the only option. Often a spec will not be viable for both to the highest level, but that shouldn't stop them trying. I personally like the idea that I can play battlegrounds and dungeons very differently without having to make a new character, but have the chance to perform well.

 

Cathela

Even these days, I think a lot of players view a talent spec as a semi-permanent thing. Obviously this doesn't apply to the readers of this forum, but a lot of casual players don't want to have to farm up 100g just to be able to spend an evening PvPing instead of doing 5-mans or whatever. To these players, I think the idea of PvP and PvE talents intermingled in a tree is pretty appealing. "I want a spec that makes me good at healing in 5-mans with my buddies... but oh hey, for 3 points I can pick up this one talent that'll help me in BGs. Cool."

It seems to me that in BC, the developers tried to add some PvE talents to "PvP trees" and vice versa. They didn't really follow through and try to make all trees fully viable for "serious" PvP and "serious" PvE (and I think they made the right choice on that) but there's enough intermingling that a casual player who wants to be able to PvP and PvE without switching spec every time can construct a build that's decently good at both.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Dancing Wu Li Master

Having more resources doesn't necessarily get problems solved quicker. The Mythical Man Month is part of the explanation; the other is best summarised by the phrase that "nine women can't give birth to a baby in a month".

 

Vykromond

Some of the customer base. I'd wager most of the high-end PVE community, for instance really doesn't give a hoot. Personally, I'll spec whatever I need to in order to perform the best. There are many ways to customize my character outside of talent spec.

The reason I bring this up is because high end PVPers and PVEers are really the only ones who care about "viability." Joe Elementalistmage and Jane Trispecpriest don't need to be viable to enjoy the game, yet they're the ones who are likely to care much more about whether or not their character is customized enough.

I believe talent trees succeed admirably at letting you customize your character. "Customize" doesn't mean that every customization you find will make your character have the exact same power level. Homogenizing the value of every talent would not improve the game.

Destro warlocks- uhh, are you forgetting fire destro versus shadow destro?

The point about the resources has already been addressed.

Finally, "utility" isn't as great as you think. First of all, increasing utility in multiple classes makes raid composition more rigid. This means that raids seeking to optimize significantly reduce their flexibility by needing to bring all the various "utilities." Secondly, the fun factor of playing "utility dps" that produces low numbers but buffs the raid is lower than the fun factor of playing "pure DPS" assuming similar game mechanics.

A tank, Vykromod.
Will he ever parry them?
Surely he can't block.

 

Uglesh

I find that most of these issues are being complicated by Blizzards heavy push for "E-sport" pvp. High end PvP will ALWAYS push towards cookie cutter "best spec for your class" builds. There is NOTHING you can do about this... as long as spec A will yeild 0.5% more dmg then spec B anyone serious about PvP will make that change. Unlike raiding, your enemey in PvP isn't a static character that can't think.... other players are always gearing up and improving.

So what can we do about this?? Honestly I think it's time blizzard stopped trying to appease everyone. Trying to fix PvP is like trying to nail a turd to the wall. As long as each class has a viable PvP spec that should be more then enough. Balancing 10 builds in PvP would be a HELL of a lot easier and the spillover wouldn't mess with the PvE world as badly as it does now. Allow people to create 2 builds in their paperdoll that they can only swap between when in a special "arena/pvp area".

With regards to the talent trees, as a prot warrior I basically have about 5 points to "customize" my character with. There are simply too many must-have talents too deep in the tree. I have always said that I would love to see more talents/talent points and a teired talent system (no trees but more linked abilities) where further talents cost more but are considerably more useful and powerful. The first couple teirs could have additional "tweak" skills that make life easier but not game altering... things like longer lasting buffs or increased buff range, or even small amounts of things like resistance to certain elements, charms, fears.

Variety is the spice of life.... we need more gear to select from, fewer identical gear sets, less homogenous classes. Sadly it seems they are going to entire opposite direction in so many of these areas.

 

Calgar

Agreed strongly here. For cutting edge players in either PvP or PvE, the difference between viable and optimal is what cutting edge IS and a large portion of the time it will be "cookie-cutter".

The utility comment. As a raiding arms warrior, i know exactly where you are coming from here. It really irks me when i see a badge geared warlock throwing down 1900 dps without breaking a sweat, where as my sunwell geared warrior is pushing as hard as i can to break 1850. Even knowing my blood frenzy is contributing an addition 500-600 dps isn't enough to make it seem like I'm doing better. Add in the fact that i know i could be doing 2300+ as fury and making myself look better at the expense of the overall raid viability, and it gets depressing.

Basically, optimal isn't always fun, or what we want to do, and short of re-rolling some other class there's no real escaping it either. Re-rolling isn't really an option either, especially considering gear issues.

In my opinion they need to stop trying to make every spec viable everywhere mainly because they can't make every spec optimal everywhere. It's just not possible, and cutting edge players and their followers/copy-cats will always go for the most optimal spec for whatever they are doing.

Eg. Every spec should be optimal for something, and somewhat viable in everything else. Eg. Arms = PvP, Fury = PvE is how it should be, at the moment, it's not like that though, fury is sub-optimal for both PvP and PvE. That shouldn't mean that Arms can't lay down some PvE damage, or fury can't do some PvP though.

 

Malthes

And CHANGING, which I think is actually very desirable. The idea of a talent build "metagame" is something that is exciting, not disheartening. If there were only ten pvp talent builds, then all mages would be frost, all hunters would be MM, all priest holy, etc. By making all talent builds pvp viable, we get those moments at the margins where innovation surpasses the cookie cutter, and the metagame changes. All of the sudden, you have to deal with Fire mages and BM hunters and disc priests, which forces you to change your tactics, etc. This is something that needs to stay in the game if you want Pvp to stay enjoyable, imo.

 

Ja7us

I find this an odd assertion. Whether in PvP or PvE, multiple spec viability is quite possible, as long as those specs aren't trying to do the exact same thing.

Example: Deep Sub rogues vs. Combat rogues. If the difference between the two specs is only one of how much DPS they do, then the design of the talent trees is failed. However, if a rogue is making significant DPS sacrifices for something like Cheat Death or the upcoming Shadow Dance - utility abilities, survival abilities, and so on - then those specs can be balanced against one another, and each can be "viable" in its own right. The gains and losses of a spec don't have to be measured only in DPS gains or losses. Arms v. Fury is a similar situation. An arms warrior's biggest strengths don't stem from DPS at all, they're centered around mace stuns, mortal strike, and so on. This doesn't preclude Fury's viability in the arena of PvP, it just means that it needs its own thing to be good at, and the current 51-pointer is a step in the right direction in that regard.

For hybrid classes, this is even more true. The viability of feral PvP isn't closely tied to the viability of Resto PvP, and it's quite possible for both to be "balanced." Single-role classes are the hardest to balance multiple specs in a given realm of influence, but even there, it's not an unsolvable problem.

 

cutfang

I would prefer it if talent trees had a certain number of 'must have' talents with more room left for talents that do not necessarily improve pve viability, like Fleet Footed for rogues or Surge of Light for Priests. They wouldn't help you raid but gives your character a little extra dps / pvp viability.

 

Alici

How does one quantify the quality of each spec when differentiating them from one another? For hybrids it's one thing, since they each serve a predetermined archetype (Paladins: Healer/Tank/Melee) and each has a base level from which to compare from. But what about classes like mages? Each tree specializes in ranged DPS. Frost has survivability in the form of slows and freezes, so it's unique. Fire is defined by high-DPS, and arcane is defined as...high-DPS? How do you separate in terms of both output and flavor? In my experience their core playstyles are relatively similar. How do you define them?

 

Calixtus

I'm not saying I expect their developmental cycle to be twenty times faster than what I could get from companies working with considerably less funds could provide me, but - and I can't help but to reuse your baby example, apologize if anyone finds it offensive - if I have one women and we don't manage to produce a baby during three years of mutual best efforts, the problem might be with the woman. If I have 22 women for a similar lenght of time and don't manage to produce a baby, I'm hard pressed to say there's a problem with the women (though I believe an English king attempted that at some point).

Do I think Blizzard can whip up a class balance that is twenty times as good, and do it twenty times as fast as pre-WoW MMORPGs could? Certainly not.

Do I think Blizzard can cite a lack of manpower - and Keltan, in the originial post, had a sentence that went "Blizzard would actually have the manpower and time to tweak every single talent..." - or resources as an excuse for not having done so? Again; Certainly not. We can debate whether they want to do it - which leads us into why we have talents in the first place, or a why they look the way they do - we can debate whether it's physically possible to improve balance- myself, I firmly believed that the current balance can be improved upon, even if "perfect balance" remains an idealized dream - but I really don't believe we can debate whether Blizzard has the economic capability to do it.


Or in not so many words; Sure, hoisting resources as a problem might not solve it, but you can't in the same breath say you havn't solved the problem due to a lack of resources.

Some of the customer base being sufficiently large a portion to make SOE decide to add them to SWG, increasing balance complexity, after slaughtering the system they had since release because it was too complex, large enough of a portion for WoW to have it in the first place (it's standard now like many of WoWs system, but it wasn't neccesarily back then), large enough a portion for WAR to add it during their beta process after tester demands (I'd say suggestions, but that wouldn't suit the rethoric I'm throwing around, now would it?).

I'm not looking to debate what an idealized dream version of the game attracting the top ten percent of the MMORPG gaming community and only the top ten percent of the MMORPG gaming community would look like - well, okay, not right this minute at least - I'm talking about the reality of making money. And talent trees, if done right to allow character customization to match your playstyle, makes money, according to both the leading MMORPG and a fair few other major or formerly major players in the market.

And I disagree with viability only being a concern in in top-end gaming, regardless of whether it's PvE or PvP. If Joe Elemantalistmage wants to PvP and have access to any kind of meaningful reward, he will need to care about his spec, because spec stratification will occur in a ladder system: And it is occuring. If respeccing gives you another 50 points at 2300, then given time, you're going to have to start respeccing for those 50 points at 1600 too: And just the same, you are already in a fair few brackets, for a fair few classes, in a fair few battlegrounds. Milling about uselessly in battlegrounds, sure, he can do that, but is he going to like running into a PvP specced PvE geared rogue who passed mere "viable" and is well into "PWN"? Few are the people who like to lose, fewer are the people like being told their playstyle - while technically available for play - is effectively subpar for just about anything.

If Joe Elementalistmage wants to PvE, in say, 5-mans, how's he going to get an invite if he's not viable for encounters tuned for people who are viable? And if he does get an invite, how's he and his group of Roger 61Subtletyrogue, Jane Trispecc priest and William Furywarriortank going to kill anything in a game world tuned for people with viable specs? Or, in reverse, how much fun do the people who do have viable specs in a game world tuned for Joe Elementalistmage?


There's a significant difference between squeezing the last 5%'s worth of performance out of a class if you take this spec, with these talents, and what some classes are seeing today (especially in PvP).

I also disagree with what you said about utility; Increased utility without becoming must-haves is perfectly possible. Not easy, but possible. You hit the DPS class who steps into a utility role with a personal DPS loss in favour of net raid DPS gain. Done right, he or she can come as either, but the border between "overwhelmingly better" becomes far more fluid. And that's just DPS utility, which - shadowpriests being an excellent example - isn't the only kind of utility. And the idea that utility DPS is less fun that straight up DPS because it provides bigger numbers - while a valid personal opinion - is not a universal rule. Look at healers, I've never done a 25 man raid as one, but I'm fairly sure the satisfaction of that particular support role is not neccesarily tied to how big a crit heal you can get. For some people, taking a support role in an MMORPG enhances the game experience far more than being strong singlehandedly.

The primary point I was looking to make with utility was summarized quite neatly by Ja7us; "The gains and losses of a spec don't have to be measured only in DPS gains or losses".

 

Tyrian