I’ve felt this way since DF dropped because the talent trees have massively bloated almost all the classes and specs in the game. The choice talents provide is largely a lie in terms of how complex you want your spec to be, at least if you care at all about your performance.
The build with more active buttons and complex interactions does more dps 8-9 times out of 10, and this is rarely a 5% difference and more like a 20% one. It’s impossible to make any generalized statements because of all the variance here without someone compiling all the data and running the sims which I’m too lazy to do, but that’s been my experience so far.
I wanted to try the no mover Havoc build from Icyveins that would make the spec not be as mouth-foaming and maniacal as it has been this whole expansion, and it ends up doing 17k less dps compared to my current 100k with the ignition build. This has been true for all specs I’ve tried so far, which is like 8 of them, and not all even have a simpler alternative. The result is that we have like 7-12+ active combat abilities you’re using all the time for most specs including baseline rotational abilities, and those with short short cooldowns that you’re actively using.
This is imo, too much when the content itself is at the current level of complexity. The visual language the game is using is terrible especially with trash encounters in M+, there are so many frontals with no indicators and no way to tell where the mob is facing when you’re fighting 10 of them, especially with something like Havoc where you’re blitzing through and around enemies all the time to be able to do any damage.
We have FAR more active offensive and utility spells that we have to be using all the time be performant compared to a few expansions ago, and the content is about the same level of difficulty which just makes the game much more draining to play overall. In BFA you had at least 30% fewer active abilities if not more, while the dungeon and raid content was on a similar level of complexity.
Dragonflight sucks with attracting new players and bringing back older ones but is good with retention because they have dedicated the entire game to sweatlords that make up a tiny portion of the overall playerbase, who are now happy and actively playing (raid logging) a game that’s needlessly complex and impenetrable to new players.
Unless they’re satisfied with running a comparatively niche game for M+ pushers and guild raiders, the mechanics need to either be drastically simplified and made both less punishing and much more visually clear, or they need to cut back on the complexity on the player’s end and take us back to having 4-6 active spells with a few cooldowns and utilities on top. All specs need to have a simpler alternative that performs nearly as good or the choice these talents provide is pointless. I swear talents were better back in Wrath/Cata days where it was mostly something to progress through during level while your entire baseline toolkit was set in stone.