What purpose should talents serve?

With the upcoming mastery effects, which talent tree you invest in is, more than ever, going to be the indicator of what role you are spec'ing for. Players will be forced to spec one way to perform a certain role, although this might not apply as much for the pure-DPS classes. This is not a break from the norm. For almost as long as WoW has existed, each talent tree was associated with a specific role, with the exception of feral combat and the earlier incarnations of discipline. (Tanking/DPS and DPS/healing, respectively) Each spec played differently, and even though you may have pined for protection to feel more like fury, or for restoration to feel more like elemental combat, there wasn't much you could do about it.

Death Knights changed all that. The three death knight specs are all viable as tank, DPS, and PvP specs, though some more so than others. The thing that set DK's apart was that, rather than use their talents to pick their role, they chose which presence they would use (similar to the warrior's stances), and the bonuses of each presence were what differentiated a tank from a DPS. This was a pretty big departure from the other classes, for while the death knight specs certainly had talents that hinted at the intended roles of each tree, each spec catered more to a specific play-style than a specific role. Blood is centered around grinding and self-healing, frost is centered around snares and defensive talents, and unholy is centered around diseases and your ghoul pet. Because each tree contains both offensive and defensive talents, it is not too rare to see frost DPS or blood tanks. In the end, the process picking which talents to take as a DK is all about play-style.

That got me thinking: is it possible for the other classes to play that way as well? What if other classes simply used their talent trees as a way of adjusting their play-style while using something like presences to decide which role they would play? It would certainly require a general overhaul of the talent system, something I doubt Blizzard is ready to do, but the possibility is still there. Some classes already have the abilities they need to make such a thing possible. Druids have their shapeshifting forms and warriors have their stances. The other classes also have abilities that could be expanded upon to serve the same purpose. Priests have Shadowform, and I imagine adding some sort of Holyform couldn't be too difficult. Paladins have Righteous Fury, which could evolve to give more tanking bonuses, and Blizzard could add a healing and a DPS equivalent; perhaps Righteous Wisdom and Righteous Vengeance. Shamans are a bit tougher to figure out. They currently have no self-buffs that give them a bonus to their DPS or healing. Perhaps their weapon buffs could be expanded to fill the purpose. Windfury would be the melee DPS one, with Flametounge, Frostbrand, and Earthliving being the spell DPS, PvP, and healing, respectively.

You may notice I did not include Hunters, Mages, Rogues, or Warlocks in my ruminations. What you need to keep in mind is that the purpose of the talent overhaul that I am considering is that it would make a player's role (tank, DPS, healing) independent of their talents. Since the four aforementioned classes can only DPS, such an overhaul would only have a minor effect on them.

So, suppose we were able to tie each of the multiple-role classes's roles to a self-buff. What purpose would the talent trees serve, then? Again, I look to the DK talents as my model. Because the DK talents are based around the kind of play-style that accompanies their implied role, the other talent trees and class abilities could be changes in a similar way. Here are my ideas for the druid talent trees.

Druids would be able to learn all of their forms, including Moonkin and Tree of Life Form, from a trainer. Because Balance has long been considered the PvP tree, it would contain a lot of PvP talents, including the ones in other trees, like Infected Wounds. Because PvP is all about controlling your opponent, that would be what this tree is concerned with. As such, a Balance tank would perhaps focus more on kiting his target than simply standing still, while still causing a lot of threat from far away. Feral combat is currently associated with all of the druid's melee combat, and as such, ferals currently end up take more damage than the other specs. Thus, this tree would become more of an all-around defensive tree. It could thus get talents like Improved Barkskin. Resto is currently associate with healing, but this could be expanded to include any sort of survival, making it more applicable to tanking and PvP. Whereas a feral tank would be focused on taking less damage, a resto tank would be focused on healing his own damage to assist the healer.

I know I usually save posts containing ideas for Monday, but I just wanted to include that example and the examples in the third paragraph to show that a change like this feasible, even if it isn't probable. Still, is a change like this even necessary? Now that we know what kind of changes we are talking about, I can start answering that question.

The main issue that determines whether such a talent overhaul is called for is whether the changes is would bring are necessary. There are two changes that I can see happening as a result of this overhaul:
1. Tanks and healers would be able to do moderate DPS without switching specs. Inversely, your DPS could switch to being a tank or a healer in an emergency or when the first requires it.
2. Picking which talent tree you choose to invest in would be less about what role you wish to perform and more about which nuances of the class your play-style emphasizes.

Let's consider the first one. I know there are raid fights where it helps to have multiple tanks sometimes, while other times you only need one. The same can be said of healers, in that some phases of a fight require more than others. On the surface, a change that lets you change your raid line-up on the fly seems like a good thing. However, you need to consider the pure DPS'ers: the hunters, mages, rogues, and warlocks. These guys are all DPS, no matter what their spec, so they are already experiencing the reality that I am talking about. Thing is, they can't become a tank or a healer in an emergency, so any change to make the hybrid classes more valuable than the pure DPS classes could see their representation in raids drop. Blizzard could prevent this by giving them better raid utility than the hybrid DPS'ers. As I found in my post on what classes bring what buffs and debuffs to raids, the pure DPS classes, especially mages and rogues, are pretty limited in terms of what buffs they can bring. In the olden days, this was offset by the fact that they brought the highest DPS to raids, but now that every class is on more or less equal footing when it comes to DPS, that excuse no longer cuts it. If Blizzard were to give the pure DPS classes more raid buffs, they could motivate raid leaders to bring pure DPS'ers without needing nerfing the buffs that hybrid DPS'ers already bring to raids. Still such a change probably isn't necessary, since you can only have so many players acting as tanks and healers before you loose DPS, so the roles of the pure-DPS classes weren't really in jeopardy. Thus, the first effect of this talent overhaul would be a positive one. Necessary? Well, it would certainly help.

The other effect of this change would be that choosing talents would be more about play-style than utility. Every class's spec would thus play differently, yes still be able to fulfill the same roles, allowing there to in effect be thirty classes in the game. I know that's a bit of hyperbole, but I can tell you that playing a blood death knight is quite different from playing an unholy one, despite the fact that the two can both be DPS'ers. The same can be said of discipline and holy priests; both are healers, but both play and feel quite different. The same can be said of the four pure-DPS classes and how their specs play. They fulfill the same role in raids and they do them (arguably) equally well. In the end, it's all about player choice. That's really what a change like this would be about; letting players who play a Druid, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, or Warrior choose how they wish to approach their role. I see no downsides to this.

So, should Blizzard do it? Should Blizzard redo the Druid, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, and Warrior talent trees to make them more like the Death Knight trees? As much as I hate to say it, probably not. Think about it: it took Blizzard twelve patches, an expansion pack, four more patches, and another expansion pack to get class balance right. They have said that they weren't very concerned with perfect class balance in vanilla WoW, but still, that means it took them two expansion packs to get it right. Could you imagine if they were to start over? I don't know about you, but I don't want to wait until after Cataclysm and what ever is next (Emerald Dream?) for class balance to be good again.

Still, even if Blizzard were to somehow get it right the first time, a system like this would make class balance even more difficult than it is now. Imagine if a holy paladin could be a DPS'er, a tank, or a healer. That's three times as many sub-classes (which are basically what the talent trees are) to balance against the rest. I won't do the math to see how many more sub-classes that would mean, but trying to balance that many specs for that many roles would be a pain in the neck for Blizzard, especially considering how much people already complain about class balance. As much as I would love to see a change like this, I don't see it happening.

So, going back to the original question, though it would be awesome if talents let you augment the nuances of your class, I think it is better for Blizzard to stay with the current systems. I know it's not good form for a writer to argue against an idea that he himself came up with, so I apologize for that. Here, have some cute to make up for it. Here's some more for good measure.