Old talent trees "worked" only because people were clueless. Will not ever work anymore in modern wow.
Why? The answer is simple, as long as performance can be measured there is no room for a choice. Obviously having 2 different spells that does essentially the same doesn't really count as "choice".
For example:
Burst1: Deal 100k damage to one enemy, CD 1 minute
Burst2: Deal 200k damage to one enemy, CD 2 min
Even in this case you will simply prefer this one that aligns with your other cooldows.
Even current implementation of talents has some dead choices:
- Active that is behind or equal to passive abilities.
- Awkward spells
- RNG vs On use ability with roughly the same performance
What could work is talent trees for utility. Because it is not really "measurable".
For example having 40 points to spend on:
- Movement speed increase
- Damage reduction increase
- Leech
- Avoidance
- CD reduction on interrupts
- CD reduction on stuns
- CD reduction on movement abilities
- Having more charges of some ulility abilities
- Bonus effect on utility spells (like adding self dispel on defensive cooldown)
- Active crowd control abilities
and so on. This could actually work.
Need more stuns? put points in CD reduction on stuns, need more movement speed? Put more in movement speed. Stationary fight? Put more in damage reduction. There would be a lot of choices here.
But talents for offensive? Lets leave it as it is. Barely works in current state, would be a catastrophe if ever reverted back to "trees".