I can only do this for Shamans since I've only specced them, not Pallys, but here is a good summation of all of the problems with shaman talents:

You can go in cold, never have played a Shaman before, and I could tell you to spec 30 in Restoration and 21 in Enhancement or Elemental, and you would know exactly how to spec because of the amount of worthless talents there are in seemingly every tree. The improved totem talents are garbarge (except MAYBE Totemic Focus, but only because you need to put 4 points somewhere to get to Purification.)

Mana Tide would be an awesome talent, but requiring 5 points in a talent that increases the duration of your Healing and Mana Steam Totems, PLUS 5 more points in a talent that increases the effect of your Mana Stream totem by 10% (a whole 1.2 MP upgrade!) makes it worthless, because you have to either skip the good talents in the tree, or spec so hard in Resto that your other trees basically have enough to let you use 2h Weapons.

The Enhancement tree has a 30 point talent that raises the Agility from GOA by 15%, and another 30 point talent that acts like a Windfury Totem, plus the excellent! bonus of giving your target 20% nature vuln for 2 attacks.

The list goes on and on, and I could make fun of a lot of talents in a lot of trees, these are just two glaring "what the hell were they thinking?" examples.

Basically, the Devs were drunk when they designed half of the Shaman talents, and had bursts of genius when designing the other half. You could take the dumbest person in the world (in this case, me), who knows nothing about the dynamics of the game and he still would laugh at 2/3 of the Shaman talents.

Understanding what is wrong with the Paladin talents requires no more than a cursory glance at our talent trees. For instance: placement. Anticipation (+2, 4, 6, 8, 10 def) and Deflection (+1, 2, 3, 4, 5% parry) are halfway up the Retribution tree, Divine Strength (+2, 4, 6, 8, 10% strength) is near the end of the Holy Tree, etc. At times it seems like the talent trees were designed with absolutely no overall vision for the class in mind. In fact, I think that was the case.

Of course, there are also worthless talents. Seal of Justice, though quite useful for it’s judgment, is useless as a Seal unless you are in a race with another paladin to see who can have a stun-immune target faster. If that’s the case, you’ll want Improved Seal of Justice to increase the chance of the two-second stun procing. Unfortunately, you must put five points into this talent to access the top-tier protection talent. In the end, though, most of the paladin talents are actually pretty good. They are just horrendously placed.

The real problem with the class, though, isn’t in the talents. The talent trees merely reinforce the core issues. For example, Blizzard has tried to cover up the lack of depth in Paladin combat (Cast Seal, maybe judge, maybe don’t, auto attack for 30 seconds, repeat) by forcing us to spam buffs constantly on a raid due to a 5 minute duration. As a buffer, Paladins are the most versatile in the game. Unfortunately, we pay for this versatility with our sanity.

But wait, maybe talents will give us new options! No. How about Reckoning? Overpowered? Inarguably so, and especially versus rogues. What does it require us to do? Get hit. Auto attack will take care of the rest. Blessing of Kings. Fantastic buff, same five minute duration. There are plenty more, but I’m already pushing the limit of what anyone is willing to read regarding paladins, which isn’t much.

Basically, in 1.9 Blizzard needs to do more than just revamp talents. Seals need to be more interactive / combinable / useful in general. Talent trees need to be reorganized with additional, interesting talents added that actually give paladins the options they need to play their class like the hybrid it is supposed to be. As it is we are a secondary tank who doesn’t tank, a secondary melee who can’t do crap for damage without sacrificing group viability, and a secondary healer that is quite good, meaning that is all we can really do endgame. My idea of a hybrid class is one that can specialize in one aspect in ways that are unique enough that there are viable reasons for them to fill that roll in a raid as a primary tank/healer/dps when needed. A hybrid should really shine, though, in their ability to swap roles on the fly. A warrior goes down mid-fight? Send in a paladin to take over, etc. Of course, now we get into the issues hybrids face with no armor swapping while in combat in a game where gear defines progression and role viability, but that’s a whole different discussion.

So basically, Shamans just want to replace some worthless talents and Paladins want to have their entire combat system revamped.

Not only do we want non-shit talents, we want to have all these useless totems (Windwall Totem, anyone?) reworked or just removed or SOMETHING. Mana spring is marginally useful, Healing Stream I don't even have on my bars, etc. There's just a LOT of garbage, and stuff that we just can't replicate that a Paladin can do (and that's fine and all, but when you get hunters having essentially infinite mana on a raid boss, it gets to be a bit crazy).

Oh, and Shaman melee is auto-attack and pray for WF. It generally always goes off at least once per fight, but standing still just waiting for WF to go off is boring as hell. The only actual attack skill we can get is Stormstrike, which is the 31 point enhancement talent, and well, it sucks. So we're sort of in the same boat, in that respect. They really need to do something to make melee combat for both of us somewhat less monotonous. I have shocks but they're on a 6 second timer and are best saved for when you need them (i.e., to interrupt).

After that, it's not like I'm going to start casting lightning bolt or something. It's all auto-attack, which is boring. I can literally get up in the middle of a fight with some random mob (the ogres in blasted lands, for example) and do something else for a bit, come back, and the result will generally be the same as if I had sat there diligently the entire time. That's just stupid, really. I shouldn't be able to just let auto-attack do EVERYTHING. :kaubel: