Playing mostly enhancement during SL, for launch and coming back with for new talents, I would agree with the Op's sentiment. There is no reason why WF totem should be locked behind a talent point. It's like as core EH shaman as can be and it feels bad having to talent into it. Better would be some other choice that's retains core feelings but enables more flavor, like giving windfury a chance to proc a fire tornado or some crap like that. It also sucks to see the current state of the Doomwinds talent. The skill used to be baked into WF totem but now it's its own ability, a separate cooldown, and weaker than the legendary item version. That's lame, lazy, uninspired and feels like something was taken from the class. I shouldn't have to spend my points on becoming the class that I was during the last expansion.
Letting us spec into having two shields at once is a cool thing, something I'm willing to spend talent points on, and makes it feel like I have agency in becoming the EH I want to be. It wouldn't have been difficult for them to do that but they chose to be lazy about it. I think it's fair criticism.
Also, if they can bring back mind spike spam, shadow orbs, and keep insanity as choices then they could bring back the mana battery play-style for for shadow priests or 2H EH, something that has been asked for from the community. Just my complaint.
They made a solid foundation with those talent trees, selecting borrowed powers we had since Legion and baking them into the classes themselves. It kinda sucks for everyone to have to talent things that we had before, but I'm pretty sure this is the only time we'll feel this way. It's a big change. Our characters are strong from the very beginning of the expansion this time around instead of relying on external abilities.
Expansion after Dragonflight will add new things to talent trees, and hopefully they'll keep going in that direction.
The true problem with the new talent trees is just a lack of vision.
They are only made for raiding pretty much, and too many abilities that should just be baseline is now talents for no good reason around 6 per tree i would say.
I can get behind what you're saying, but I am not too happy with losing baseline abilities. Yeah the old talents were stale and didnt really have too much impact on toons, and there are some welcomed additions to the talent trees that im very happy about. But im also a bit upset that the new talents have little to offer in terms of new abilites or gameplay changing choices. The strong conduits are now just strong talents, which feels lazy to me.
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Cute, that must be real fun.
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True! Sorry, its hard for me to fully read some of what mr felplague posts because it often times is mostly just vitrolic babble.
A lot of the baseline abilites have been talents before tho, it just returns them to where they were before.
They way it is now is way more healthy. Of course it isn't perfect, and there are issues like the druid class tree and solarbeam for boomies but all in all this is way better.
Link to Bizz or Microsoft quote where they say getting WoW on console is a goal. OH right, there isn't one becuause they never said it and in no way is it a clear goal. Players completely made it up and are now using Microsoft to convince themselves what they completely made up is actually happening.
Mm they recently said that making WoW playable with a controller is expressly a goal in DF, specifically mentioning gametesting Dragonriding with a controller. There's not much of a step from there to consoles, but I don't think they've literally said that if that matters for whatever reason.
Instead of coherent classes with talents allowing you to branch out into different content, we got build-a-spellbook with shadowlands class design.
Anyone who has actually interacted with talent trees and class design has been overwhelmingly positive, with a couple of outliers (sorry Spriest). The new talent trees give you combinations you couldn't have before, choices you didn't have before, and definitely allow you to branch out into different content. Most guides have separate builds between raid/M+ and M+ alone will have different builds per dungeon. PvP will also be using completely different builds in a lot of cases so overall it's a success.
And all of those different builds are just for optimal play, if you don't care about that and just want to build around a specific ability that is also 100% possible. People read a guide, copy it without a single thought, and then complain about how cookie cutter everything is.
I promise you when we see the raid on live, different builds will be used on different bosses, and multiple competitive builds will be present in multiple specs.