Illusion of choice.
https://www.pvpleaderboard.com/pvp/shaman/enhancement
What choice is there, really? You pick a talent that really should be baseline for your spec to work, and you feel good about yourself, having made a meaningful choice in “customizing” your character?
Right.
Just ditch talents altogether, give most of them baseline and make sure class design is enjoyable at its core.
Thanks.
Eh, still more choice than covenants. I mean I get and I agree, it’s extremely cookie cutter and some talents need to be baseline in order for the spec to function, but atleast with talent system (unlike the exciting and fun thing we got in SL) I was able to mix up and experiment with my talents when I was reclearimg and not pushing.
Im gonna one up you, redesign talents people dont use and improve on covenant abilities, stuff like variations and more actual abilities.
Think the problem is it became more cookie cutter than it was in mists. at least flexibility existed then, same for WOD…but now they’re just awful. Because the talent rows make -0- sense for a lot of it why some talents are on rows with others with not even close to similar scaling.
Yes, in MOP-WOD, you had one row with 3 mobility options.
Now, the same row makes you choose between mobility, defensive and crowd control.
Kind of silly.
Not really… If you only play a certain content like PvP then yes, you may be very limited to one set of talents. However, I switch talents all the time depending on content, whether it is M+, raid or PvP I have different talent builds. Also for some classes/specc some talents will be better than others depending on your stats, legendaries etc. Really, talents can offer quite a lot of choices and brings an interesting complexity to the game.
If they would baseline most talents then we would have massive balance issues and a more boring game imo.
Edit: Not saying the talen trees are perfect… there is a lot to discuss in this regard xD However, I am a big fan of talent choices in general 
Well I certainly agree the talent trees are awful and outdated. The important thing is to have choices in combat not a choice between a couple of uninspired talents that don´t see balancing for years and years.
I still prefer the talent trees of classic-Cata though, those made you feel like you progressed every level.
Basically my main complaint about them. For paladins its only one row that makes sense - HoJ CD vs Long cc vs AoE Blind.
Legion had the best iteration of talents to date… And it wasn’t even through the talent system.
It was the artifacts. They had a talent tree and eventually you unlocked all of them where you could grind to buff a lesser talent three times.
Unlike what we have now which is, do you want x to be stronger/more frequent or an ability that breaks the flow of your spec?
Looks more like a case where enhancement talents are not well designed, not the idea of talents being wrong. It’s not the only class which suffers from a poorly designed talent tree, and perhaps all classes have at least some dead talents which should be reworked.
This is just PvP though.
Won’t be much better for pve.
The fact that for PvP different talents are chosen than for PvE makes it a choice though.
The damage related talents here are mostly picked for the same reason as pve, either because of ease of use, maximises burst or just best dps.
I agree that there isn’t much variety in most talents. But on resto shammy I have different talents from M+ and PvP. For Fury warrior I switch 2 or 3 talents based on what is best for raid or M+.
That is one factor, but for some classes there simply is no choice. Look at arms warriors, for one.
Then: You want chocolate, vanilla or Potato flavour?
Now: You want ice cream, a car wreck or dancing gnomes looking at a rubber duck (don’t ask)?
Not really true. There was always a BiS it just was a case most people back in the day didn’t know what was BiS.
Imho talents don’t need to be removed but do need a big redesign.
Talents should be a option to improve abilities not give your class abilities.
Active abilities shouldn’t be in talent trees. Passives which change the way those abilities interact with one another should be in talent trees
Remove covenants and all other borrowed power and improve talents and core class design would be better.
Are there any areas you want to apply this logic?
For example if you look at warrior representation in pvp ~92% play Arms, ~7% play fury and less than 1% play prot. Should specs be removed aswell?