I'm glad you've come around to my thinking Wodin. Get rid of tactical mastery and get rid of relentless strikes.

Or the Lyceum. RARARARAGGHGH.

But that negates the whole purpose of talents. Hell yes IAE is insanely useful. Evocation is damned handy too. So is TM. And Imp. Sinister Strike. And Master of Deception. And Imp. Corruption. And Bane. And Nature's Swiftness.

I can go on, but I assume you see my point. Just because one ability is useless without talents (or incredibly awesome with) doesn't mean it should be made that way permanently. The same logic is applicable to gear, we pick up STR/AGI/AP, or +Damage/Healing or Mana/5, or whatever. The whole point is that your character sucks without gear and talents, by having such a tabula rasa system you are free to be the author of your character (the other eight billion characters with the same gear and spec notwithstanding. :P ).

agree with the first part but not at all with the pvp part. I can beat guildies again that's been impossible for the last 4 months. not that my role in pvp is 1vs1 but it illustrates I have greater survivability \o/

There's a difference between "good" talents and "defining" talents. A shaman is defined by NS, it's an on/off switch. A warrior is defined by tactical mastery and so on.

You can live without imp sin strike in some builds - And still do your main role just fine. You can not without defining talents. A warrior without TM is painfully gimped. Nothing in the other trees will make up for losing it.

Not to mention RS being broken... unless it's supposed to give you the energy back before you spend it. Yay 1.10!

Moving on. Imp Sinister Strike is really a non-optional talent except for one very specific build (Hemo); sure you could argue BS builds don't need it, but, they really do - you'll always wind up in a situation you can't BS in (and your other options in that tier are less than stellar).

Now, let's continue with mandatory rogue talents:

Opportunity (for dagger builds), which is really a 10 point talent.
Imp BS (dagger builds)
Relentless Strikes (energy efficiency drops significantly without it)
Ruthlessness (CP efficiency drops without it - plus, gotta have it for RS)

Remember that RS and Ruthlessness represent a 25% improvement in energy/CP efficiency for a rogue.

25%.

How is that *not* mandatory? Much like TM prevents fury/prot builds from being particularly viable, the need to dump 11 points into Assassination removes combat/subtlety builds from the mix.

And yes, if Innervate affected energy, I would hump the legs of every druid I came across. Why not? The ones who have innervate are the ones more willing to wait on the gear we'd both like anyway.

That's my point exactly: A mage's role is to AoE. IAE is NECESSARY talent points for AoE purposes.

I can see where you're coming from, as far as stance-dancing being necessary, and I can see how TM is an important and almost indispensable skill. Without the talent, the fact that warriors lose ALL their rage when stance-dancing really is, well, stupid.

That's where my suggestion about the first two points in TM being "class skills", bought at 20 and 30, respectively, with the additional 3 points being talented comes from. TM is a big investment into the arms tree, for something that's necessary to fulfill a large part of the role of the warrior: Swapping stances effectively, in line with the situation at hand.

Evocation is one of those skills that *feels* like a talent, not a part of the class or a class skill in and of itself. It's not like Vanish. It's not like Life Tap.

Anyway, if you were to fix all the trees so that the "necessary" points were made class skills, you'd have a LOT of fixing to do.

Rogue: Ruth/Relentless
Hunter: Hawk Eye
Druid: Imp MOTW (I don't really see the point in this being a talent, just improve the damned base skill)
Mage: IAE
Warrior: TM
Priest: Imp PW:F
Shaman: Tidal Focus and/or Totemic Focus
Paladin: Blessing of Kings
Warlock: Don't really know enough about warlocks to chip in on this one, maybe someone could pitch in an idea.

It would be a LOT of work, and they'd have to go into each and every tree and fix them so that they made sense, and so that greater amounts of variety could be possible.

It's just my opinion on this one, obviously, but I doubt Blizzard would be willing to put all the work into pulling that crap off.

Actually, a better equivalent to Mage's Imp AE would probably be the Rogue's Improved Sap talent.

Sap is almost completely and utterly worthless without the talent, in PvE content. Hell, it's almost completely and utterly worthless WITH the talent in PvE content. But without it, using Sap often will cause add situations, poor pulls, and a dead rogue.

That's something that I can see being added as a class skill. Ruthlessness/Relentless Strikes, or, for that matter, Tactical Mastery, I can't really see becoming non-talented at any point in the near future.

Yes, Sap and Imp Sap are retarded for PvE usage. I don't understand why it would be so unbalanced for it to have a 100% chance of success. Is one-time pre-combat CC that only works on humanoids really that overpowered? "Grats, you only have a 10% chance of dying and/or making the pull a horrible mess" isn't exactly a great reward for talent points expended.

Well, the Imp. Sap talent was balanced back when Sap ran for full duration in PvP - it used to be 100% in beta(and Sap was longer :( ) but they nerfed both duration and added the breakout chance because rogues were chain-sapping people.

maybe you guys wouldn't get nerfed as much if you stopped abusing game mechanics