Why so many talent trees?

[Lissa]

I was thinking a bit lately, mostly about warriors and priests. It seems like their talent trees are a mess because they just have too many of them. If you don't want a bunch of rambling speculation about class design, now is a good time to stop reading.

Starting with warriors, there are two things that they do. They absorb hits, and they wack things. They don't need 3 trees to cover 2 functions. It may not seem like they really have problems because 50g will put them at the top of whatever they want to do, but to actually make 3 balanced trees out of two functions is almost impossible. Their trees are unsatisfying with nobody taking the 41 point arms talent at all, and every single quality pvp'er going MS.

In my opinion, they would be better off merging arms and fury.... but moving MS about 25 points into prot. Now you would have a real dilemma when deciding to pvp as a warrior.

Labeling one tree as the "PvP" and the other the "Raid DPS" tree is fundamentally a bad design. To make it worthwhile compared to the other tree, you almost have to make it overpowered.

It seems like priests are in the same boat. Disc just totally lacks focus, because right now priests are either healers or face melters. I would guess that the focus of Disc was going to be the MC/soothe controlling aspects of a priest that never seemed to work out. It leaves Disc as a mishmash. Splitting it up between the other two trees could open up some real possibilities.

Thoughts?

Bad idea IMO...by your logic, then Rogues, Hunters, Mages, and Warlocks would all have a single tree and nothing else because all these classes do one thing, DPS. Sticking with three trees is far better because each tree does things through different ways whether you see it that way or not.