Originally Posted by
Eurhetemec
Contrary to what the OP is saying, WoW would probably be a significantly better-balanced and more playable game if two specs had always been the norm, at least for classes which only have one or two roles (I think you can justify three for those with three roles). I know that's heresy and you guys are going to burn me for the witch I no doubt am, but I'm going to lay it out in Dragonflight terms.
Warrior - Prot and Fury should be the specs, Arms should be stuff they both share - the "Class" spec tree.
Wizard - Ice and Fire should be the specs. Arcane should be abilities both share. Indeed, that's almost how it works, except unnecessarily there's also an Arcane spec.
Shaman - Resto and Enhance. Elemental again can be a shared pool of abilities. You could make a case to flip Enhance and Elemental, but one way or the other.
Rogue - Combat (or whatever its called this week) and Sub - i.e. Swashbuckler and Ninja - Assassination is really just "Ninja but with poison instead of bleeds", and should instead supply poisons/utility to both specs as the "Class" spec.
Hunter - Beast and Marks have the real differentiation - All the traps and utility are pretty much conceptually in Survival anyway, so that becomes the "Class" spec, Marks takes long ranged stuff, Beast takes melee/short-range stuff, and you can spec Beast as either primarily ranged or primarily melee.
Death Knight - Blood as Tank and Frost as DPS - Personally I'd have it as Frost as Tank and Unholy as DPS, but I think we're too far into DKs being the "self-heal" tank. So Unholy becomes the Class/utility spec, which makes sense because virtually all DKs raise the dead, shoot deathbolts, etc. etc.
Priest - Discipline and Shadow. Holy becomes the class spec, because again, all Priests use Holy abilities, and Disc offers actually differentiated gameplay from other healers.
Warlock - Aff and Destro. Demonology has always been awkward as hell, and all Warlocks use pets/summons/etc, so it becomes the Class spec.
Paladin and Monk can probably justify three specs, though if we "turned back time" on Paladins, the two "real" specs are Holy and Retribution, but you probably don't want to lose any more tank specs. Likewise with Monks, despite me loving Mistweaver (my favourite healer), it'd be easy to make the case that the "real" Monk specs are Windwalker and Brewmaster.
Druid is a tricky one because at this point I think it can, just barely, justify 4 specs. Again if we "turned back time" to early WoW, though, you could probably make it just "Caster" and "Shapeshifter", probably Resto and Guardian, with Boomkin as an ability to let Resto DPS when solo or on certain fight phases, and Cat similar for Guardians (but also offering stealth - basic Cat would probably be baseline). The Class tree would probably mostly be Balance/Utility stuff.
Anyway, the ritual evisceration may obviously begin whenever. I do kind of feel like a lot of WoW classes have two "real" specs and one that's much less developed as having its own identity, particularly earlier on in WoW.