The point is that even the best of players don’t want to play the spec because of how bad it is, lol. They were only doing it because they couldn’t do BTM on disc. Instant abandon as soon as BTM was done.
The spec has huge issues. I rarely ever see other holy priests, both in PvP(I’ve met one in the 6 weeks the season has been live) and m+(when I’m pugging as a tank or dps). In raids, yeah, I’ve seen a few more there but seems pretty dead outside of that.
Here is the thing, I dont deny that some people like the game to be simpler or that they think their classes have to many buttons FOR THEM.
But here is a big difference in our approaches…
I point out that there are alternatives for this kind of people… be it another class, spec or BUILD. Again most people that complain about the bloat dont play on a level where the alternative builds do less dmg.
You guys on the other hand want to take away the alternatives from people that dont want pruned and reduced classes. NOT EVERY CLASS/SPEC/BUILD needs to be easy/revolve around a few keybinds.
People like me dont want to add buttons to specs that dont have them in the first place, people like me enjoy playing the classes that allready had them in the first place
So you guys are the ones that are selfish and unreasonable.
There are classes/specs/builds for everyone… so play what you are given and leave us alone.
Since you cant do anything but try to insult me as a bad player even tho I am clearly not, this conversation makes no sense to continue talking to you on this topic.
Therefore I will no longer reply to you, have a lovely day.
Yeah, there is a point where specs become so bad that its hard to justify to play them when you are someone that plays it on a higher difficulty.
I have experienced this quite often myself. I no longer need to play this game since there are many alternatives to play, so when the balance becomes unbearable I just quit.
Sadly, my knowledge about holy this expansion is not on a level I would feel confident to discuss over its short-commings. You are free to explain to me what you think is wrong with the spec, to increase my horizon. 
would be interesting too.
It doesnt help that I used to be a fan of disc myself 
It’s weird how much disregard there is for the players at 2.5-3k, who are in-between of hardcore and casual.
Did you learn in life how to think outside of extremes? Maybe you should discover the meaning of nuance for yourself.
Okay I will bite a last time:
Again there are allready options for both sides and for everyone in between. I am perfectly fine with what is given to me and I enjoy the stuff that is given to me… SO DO MANY OTHERS.
The Enhc community for example is overall extremely happy how it plays atm and think its one of / if not the best designs it had in years. Do you know which is one of the most listed specs people that people bring up if it comes to ‘‘bloat’’? Right, enhc… and it comes from people that do not play enhc/Shaman.
So its YOU who want to take away from people that are perfectly happy even tho YOU have alternatives for yourself!
This has nothing to do with extremes, its all about YOU guys being selfish.
Its like hearing: I might want to play Shaman as my 8th alt, but it has too many buttons plz remove some so I can enjoy it… noone cares about their mains.
Again: I like to play classes with more abilities and buttons, you rather have less. There are both alternatives in classes/specs/builds that both suit our tastes… So there are ZERO reasons to intervene with my prefered style, because you have lots of options you can pick from.
+1
Especially healer and tank roles.
You mean the class discord owners? The main thing I would prune btw from Enhancement is Lava Burst being removed, and totems of shamans in general being stronger, but you can’t pick as many at once. Else Enhancement shaman is actually nice and one of the most fun specs. Maybe instead of writing these insanely big rants, you could have asked me what exactly I would change about a spec you wanna keep as it is.
Main thing I dislike about shaman is the general class tree.
I would trimm Resto Shaman way harder though, or straight up redesign some things, if I had the power.
→ It’s nuance. Wouldn’t make it way different, but just trimming stuff a bit. Only specs I would simplify a lot are resto shaman, tank/heal monk, and Arcane mage. The rest would just be small trimming of useless/meaningless abilities, i.e. removing slice and dice for sub/assassination. With Holy Paladin I would just like to change the number of Damage buttons from 4 to 2
No we are talking about extremes. And it is fine to debate things and agree to disagree. oppinions are personal in the end Has nothing to do with selfish. It is just pointing out oppinions.
But unfortunately you ignore the messages from the players who main the specs.
The OP wasn’t specific and I think it’s two things - abilities and world.
Abilities
Talents are great: they enable to player to decide complexity (actives / passives).
New abilities can also show up here as an option - at the likely expense of something older. Having everything at once can be crazy to balance.
In the past they’ve split and merged abilities. I can totally see these as talents: do you want Earth Shock and Wind Shear together (like in classic), or separately (like in WLK)?
That said, I don’t know many other MMOs but the other I play has 10 buttons. A few more if you have a pet, switch weapons or stances. Shooters are popular and… never mind. MOBAs typically have 3+1 abilities plus inventory. Like for real, what’s the actual point of having Arcane Shot and Steady Shot on hunter. Yes, I can explain, but if I want to hard cast, I’ll play mage.
Oh yes, that reminds me… having to stand still in combat feels very odd to me in this day and age.
World
By now there is a mountain of reputations and currencies. These are mostly visuals, I’d just put them behind a currency, sometimes even merge currencies.
Being Ambassador, Diplomat and Insane may have been sensible during BC / Wrath where that was the only side game, but with soon 11 content sets, it’s a bit of a mountain. Best exposed by the mount and pet collection. Also, many mogs still require something arcane.
I’m also a big fan of just teleport points, and minimizing phasing. Teleport is somewhat redundant with mounts, except it gets tiresome to visit the same portal hubs every few minutes.
Mages
It’s kinda weird because my hunter can basically two shot everything, whereas my frost mage requires 8-10 abilities to take down a single creature. I’m happy with the latter but it’s a bit of an imbalance there.
Dragonflight has the highest player retention in the history of the game meaning more people are playing over the long run than ever. Blizzard just isn’t seeing that massive spike in player numbers at the start of an expansion as they did in Shadolwands.
The raids are also seeing Legion levels of completion. You can watch Bellular’s recent videos where he compares the clear rate data to historical data.
They’re different types of shots that do different things. 
If you want to go into that sort of argument, you might as well say: Why do hunters need more than just autoshot, shots are all just the same. Which would ruin the class and take away any interesting options.
I think talents are the solution. Then you can decide for yourself how many more buttons you want. Of course the ‘baseline’ would have to be very clear.
And people would need to get off the meta sheep bandwagon, otherwise their choice is taken away for them.
So? That’s good. That’s content! Stuff to do.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t start playing an MMORPG all those years ago ‘to be done’. I love the genre because I’ll never be done. Always something to do (in theory anyway; it’s become clear that content needs to be interesting to do; not just ‘there’).
I’m not. Yes I use teleports on my hunter with engineering because it’s very convenient. But it makes the whole world (or universe really, by now) feel a lot smaller.
I don’t mind phasing at all; they can do cool things with it. It’s also nice to be able to actually DO stuff when new content is released and EVERYONE is there at the same time; I never liked that. It ruins immersion and it’s just irritating having to compete for quest mobs and such.
Agree with most stuff @tahra. However, issue is that by making talent trees excessive full of choice nodes, guess what they add… more Bloat. They need to rethink in my opinion how to make things have high skill expression/ceiling, while also making it intuitive. I don’t think people actually have a preference for an exact number of buttons. I think people just wanna have fun at the end of the day, and I very highly doubt that we need to have extremes in either direction to make it fun. Too many buttons though are annoying, because some people don’t like having 15 additional shift/alt/ctrl modified keys.
In PvP though it’s extreme, where some players have about 70 keybinds. I used to have like 60, when I played mainly pvp in S2
Check for example this:
I think this exceeds what is reasonable for a video game considering that there is way more to doing damage than just knowing rotatiom
The only clown here is you.
You literally don’t know wtf you are talking about.
But keep on talking about things you don’t understand at all. And keep making your OBJECTIVELY wrong points.
The thing i’m glad about is that they are not likely to listen to people like you since they liked how the talent system turned out, which i agree, the talent system is great for gameplay, and there is almost no spec that is worse than before.
But keep coping, and pretending that your points are correct. They’re not.
Again, the difference between me and you is that i can point out the problems in a rotation, or with a skill because i actually know what i’m talking about.
You instead just say meaningless words with no context like “ability bloat”, just for shock value and for making it seem like you know what you are talking about, while you really don’t.
Now get out of here.
Pretty sure I allready said this, but most players that play shaman especially ENHC/ELE are happy with the overall design, the things that bother them are usually not related to button-count but rather fundamental problems.
Since I am hanging out much in the Resto-community I cant really speak for them, but the main complains are more towards T-set, lacking of important unique raid-utility and stuff like that from what I saw
And I need to repeat myself, most people that complain about bloat (Most not all) are not playing on a level/difficulty where they need to spec into anything Meta at all.
So they can just not spec into certain stuff and will mostlikely do more dmg like that. So when they have the option but actively choose not to. Why should the rest of us suffer?
That is the thing. You get your information from the extremes. And in your oppinion also the only people who are allowed to talk.
It’s a video game. If this makes you suffer, log off.
You’re hanging around in the resto shaman* discord despite not playing the spec? Lol. Also, you’re purely looking at it from a Hardcore PvE lense. PvP players, and people who are not typing in a class discord chat 24/7 also exist
I am very sure he means the resto shaman channels 
Edit: you edited 
The forums are very good at that
In that case people for the pruning are the other side of extremes.
And there is no reason to prune a perfectly fine designed class, that works great.
The question is when there is an option for people that like less spells, be it in another class/spec/talent-build, why would you want to remove the choice from people that like it the way it is?
You dont like LvB? Dont spec into it. You dont like Ele-blast? Take the passive option. You dont like Prim-Wave? Go for the old storm build (Yes, this season its the T-set, but speaking in general). For 90% of the people this stuff wont make a difference in terms of dmg. People that do gray parses will do them with meta-picks or without.
If Klaus-Jürgen feels forced to spec into Ice-strike to follow the meta in his low difficulty content, than its not a problem of the button, but his mentality. He wont fail a M0-9 because he forgot to spec tremor-totem.
Why should we cather to the people that only do quests, low M+, LFR or any content where you dont even need the buttons or can be done with anything without a problem to begin with. Heck, most of this things wont even affect a 15+
The choices are there, people just have to take them… What people are asking here will remove the choices from people that like to have them.
Nothing extreme about it
I am not asking for a big prune. I am only talking about some extremes, like brewmaster where you do not have a choice to go into talents to even be able to get some kind of threat. Which is not about +2 or +29. And i think it is bad to kick people out of their spec they play for multiple expansions just because blizz keeps adding and adding abilities.
I am fine with the existence of rusing jade wind or bonedust brew. But in the end you should just have threat with keg smash into fire breath and a spin, or something.