You want another suggestion ? Class/talents related this time.
Noone really like talents like “increase stuff by 1%” or “decrease stuff cost by 1”. But we’re all excited when we finally get a talent that unlocks a new active ability.
At the same time, there are classes who can play hybrid, and some other who don’t really play hybrid. Understand “hybrid” here stands for “hybrid role”, which means “can tank, heal and DPS”. I’m trying to be clear, because there’s another meaning to “hybrid” and that’s “hybrid playstyle”, which means, for example, as a rogue “relying on finishers AND poisons”.
Here, I’m really talking about hybrid roles at first. Then, you can think for yourself how this naturally extends to hybrid playstyles.
So, regarding hybrid roles, the issue is that some players get angry when they see that a class (which is usually not their) can fill any role, and they feel that this makes their own class useless. Therefore, their solution is to introduce an artificial “hybrid tax” on hybrid classes. That tax basically means : “you’re good at nothing but heal. But the priest will be a better healer than you”. That’s how it works in vanilla/classic.
In the next expansions, blizzard slowly changed this to focus on each spec individually instead of focusing on classes. So, an hybrid class had to choose to become either specialized in tanking, healing or DPS. But they basically lost ALL their hybrid capacity, except for the ability to respec to another role. So, for a given fight, any hybrid is really only a specialized class, just like “pure classes”. But… The hybrid tax is still there (just not as worse as it used to be).
That’s the current state of classic/retail.
— now the suggestion —
Remove almost all abilities from the core of the classes and make them into talents-trees similar to vanilla/classic talents-trees.
Keep most powerful spec-defining abilities down the tree. And create requirements (using the arrow connecting talents) when needed to prevent players from choosing abilities that would give them a much too powerful combo.
Now, players who want to play a hybrid class but specialize heavily into one role can do that.
And players who want to play a hybrid class and keep the hybrid playstyle also can do that.
For example, as a druid…
If I want to be some kind of melee DPS monster, I can spec completely into feral cat.
If I want to be a pure DPS with the added versatility of being able to choose between melee and range (and switch whenever I want during the same fight), I spec into feral and balance. But of course, that means I won’t be able to get the most powerful abilities of both trees.
If I want to be a pure healer, I can do it.
If I want to be a healer that DPS as a cat, I can do it.
If I want to be a tank with lazers, I can do it.
If I want to be jack-of-all-trades, I can do it.
Basically, that immediately introduce tons of diversity into this class. Creates tons of possibilities and things to look for.
How to keep all of this balanced ? As I said, the most powerful abilities are deep into each tree. So you cannot get them all.
As a druid, that would mean things like:
- powerful AoE healing is deep into resto tree.
- powerful AoE DPS is deep into either feral and/or balance tree.
- powerful damage reduction is deep into feral, locked behind some arrow requirement.
- etc.
That’s just for the basic aspects of each role, but you can also add utility talents there.