Rogue 1.12 Preview

[Lissa]

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.

I think Blizzard will need to go back and revisit some of the classes though. For Warriors, Arms and Fury are very well layed out, but Protection still has some glaring holes that need to be remedied.

Warlock needs to have Blizzard revist the Affliction tree (either redoing some talents or making some talents automatic, like Improved Corruption needs to be done to Corruption like was done with AE for mages before and after 1.11) and they need to add in a talent somewhere to decrease threat for Warlocks since that is now the biggest obstacle to Warlock DPS in raids. (You have to spend 30 points in a raid unfriendly tree in order to get 20% threat reduction which in turn lowers your effective potential DPS, really this should be in Affliction as Affliction is the subtle tree of the three.)

Blizzard really does need to go back and relook at Protection for the Paladins. Holy is done for all practical purposes and doesn't really need tweaking, Retribution could use a little tweaking, but it pretty well layed out, but Protection is a horrible, horrible mess without Blizzard having any concrete idea on what the Protection tree should be about.

Mage seems to be love/hate. You either have Mages absolutely loving the changes made to the Mage talents or loathing them greatly. There doesn't seem to be a real middle ground between Mage players on the talents.

When it comes to Hunters, Beastmaster hunters are kinda left out in the cold for raiding. For the most part, most Hunter raid builds are either Marksman/Survival or Survival Marksman with a smattering of Marksman/pull a few tier 1 and tier 2 talents from both Beastmaster and Survival. Beastmaster needs some work for the Raid aspect, but overall Marksman and Survival are well suited for raiding and PvP to some extent.

Druid would require minor tweaks to a couple talents, but they're done for all practical purposes. I think Priests are in the same boat, couple talents could use tweaks, but they're done.

Shaman I'm not going to comment on since I haven't played a Shaman beyond level 24 and that was during beta before Shaman talents were out.