The hunter's Ranged Weapon Specialization talent

[savaughn]

There is a fairly massive difference between, say, a mage and a hunter. A mage is a single source of damage. That fireball he'll eventually cast, or the arcane missiles or whatever. When a hunter goes into combat, he may be providing damage from five or more sources at the same time. Half the overall DPS is his autoshot, another 30% is his pet, the rest is made up of shots and stings. Now, imagine if a hunter could, in the same build, substantially improve the pet damage, the autoshot damage, and the shot/sting damage. The hunter tree is designed to allow this. Improving each of these incrementally adds up to be a substantial improvement. If each individual change was a substantial improvement, you'd end up with horrible imbalance. A hunter can increase damage with IAoH, IHM, RWS, TSA, LS, MS, UF, Frenzy, Ferocity, IAS, ISS, and ... get this ... they all stack.

Make any one of those improve a hunter's abilities anywhere near a 2% overall damage improvement, and you're going to create massive balance issues.

<edit: That should be 2% per talent point, ala Fire Power>

For those who are content with cookie cutter builds, there's really no problem.  But I'd rather see Blizzard encourage more versatility.
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I guess I see the exact opposite. If the 25 point skill is a killer end all be all skill, people shoot for it because it makes them the most efficient they can be. You end up with a cookie cutter build. That seems pretty straightforward. You have cookie cutter mages specifically because some talents are so much better than any of the others. IAM and IAE are game changing talents, so every mage out there is arcane/fire or arcane/frost. If all of the talents are roughly equal, then that is EXACTLY what encourages more versatility.

If all skills give a minimal, but noticable improvement then you have a balanced tree and that is precisely what encourages variety. It is the fact that you can choose to ignore Trueshot Aura and RWS that encourages people to explore the Beast Mastery tree which has similar, incremental improvements.