07-12-2006, 04:05 PM
Quote:That said they often fail. And thematic unity, while giving something for all play styles (raid, pvp, small group) in all trees is what would be ideal. Priests have it, shaman don't. Druids almost do, just some of the underlying mechanics are a bit off, not the talents. Hunter's are probably a scaling pet damage talent away from doing it. Dunno about the rest.
Well, I didn't mean unity in the sense of one raid, one solo, and one PvP tree. I meant unity in the sense of having a "flavour" or theme. For example, the warrior trees are well-focused: they have a tanking/stunning tree, a dual-wielding tree, and a two-hander tree. Things line up within the trees: fury has Cruelty for crits and Flurry to benefit from more of them, Dual Wield Spec to improve dual wielding and Bloodthirst, an attack that's utterly independent of your weapon, to reinforce it. Mage trees are great: a utility tree, a high damage/high mana fire tree, and a lower damage/mana-efficient/snare-and-root tree. In nearly all these cases, talents useful for different aspects of the game are in each tree, but each tree still feels coherent.
I think you're mostly right in saying that druids, priests, and hunters are either there or very close. I would add warrior, mage, paladin, and even the poorly designed warlock trees as ones with definitive flavours to each path. I can't speak for shaman, but it does at least seem that there's a healer tree, a caster tree, and a melee tree, even if they're not entirely effective at what they do.
In comparison, I can't tell what classifies anything as Assassination, Combat, or Subtlety in the rogue trees. I don't get a theme from any tree, except for maybe Subtlety and opening moves (which is like devoting a third of the talents to conjuring water - opening moves are just not that big a part of playing a rogue). There are disconnects all over the place: Lightning Reflexes and Setup in different trees, Improved Backstab and Seal Fate in different trees, Deadliness stranded out of the way of any other talent that really synergizes with it, and so on and so forth. Part of the issue with the required dagger tri-spec in the current Rogue is that since most talents don't synergize with other talents in the same tree, dagger rogues have to go all over the place to find talents that work together. I know I'd be rather annoyed if I got Improved Frost Nova and Frostbite in one mage tree and had to dive thirty points into another tree to grab Shatter. More than anything, I think Blizzard just needs to give the Rogue trees some focus.