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.