They replaced talents that actually improved your character through dmg / healing / mitigation with a bunch of perks that are trying waay to hard to be utility. All you end up with is a choice between 3 things that are practically the same perk.
- - - Updated - - -
Lol, what amounts to a choice between 2 passives and a healing cooldown.
I just wish the talent system, whatever it was, would allow niche builds like tanking moonkins. The Panzerkin was a fun concept in TBC.
How's this, can we go back to a vanilla esque talent tree?
Playing around with Rangadin on Isle, because fuck you Blizz with your "let's shit on Melee all the time" design for mechanics, and I have to say I do miss some of the aspects of the older system. Literally, if Wrath (Via Symbiosis) generated CP, as it replaces Crusader Strike in your rotations effectively, and WoG with Glyph of Harsh Words benefited from Mastery I could probably see it being remotely used.
I think the current system is OK, but I think it exists more out of homogeneity than usefulness. What I mean is, in BC/Wrath you could do all sorts of silly talent specs that were varying levels of usefulness. I liked that and I also liked that alongside that there were cookie cutter specs that were pretty normal for raiding. The reality is the latter is still the case and the former just got clipped. I liked in BC when I was Hemo/Swords spec, and didn't go all the way down any trees, but cherry picked useful talents. That's interesting to me, so I would like something like that brought back. But maybe just ignore the 5 pts in each talent and just make it one. So you get to go down a tree, but it's less hectic. Less points, but still lots of choice.
I think the biggest advantage to the current system is that it allows you to swap builds more easily. But we still have builds now like we had builds then. You can find a tier here or there that might be an exception but for the most part there are still right and wrong choices.
The only difference now is that we get 1 point every 15 levels because they took all the other points and either baked them into the specs or they made them talent choices. It can be argued that the new system is better but I don't think anyone can convince me it's much of an improvement over the old trees.
In the next expansion I'd like to see another revamp along with a drastic reduction in base abilities.
While cookie cutter is still the case but we have got many more than 1 cookie cutter now depending on encounters and some of them change your rotation/how you play. This is already an improvement over the old talent.
The old talent, you had 1 spec fit-all for serious raiding and MAYBE switching some talents you either do more dmg or tougher but it would't change how you play because all it did was giving %. Noone will use all those silly builds in heroic raiding too.
Unfortunately, Blizzard ignored people who like unconventional builds, interesting leveling builds, hybrid specs.
Blizzard thinks everyone needs to min/max for current progression and there can only be one cookie cutter.
Not true!
Now we do have the cookie cutters, because the talent tree has very few choices.