Talents

I miss the 3X/2X builds of classic WoW. I think a lot of the game's problems with hybridisation could be fixed by increasing the amount of talent points available while reducing the amount of talents to spend them in. As it stands, it's often punishing to branch out into other trees at all, because of how bloated some talent trees are becoming.

As an example, I recently mocked up a PvE Feral WLK build - http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=0ZxhGsfrzVhoAkAo0Eczb - and it took me some time to choose what talents I wanted to lose from the Feral tree to pick up the core talents in Resto - Omen of Clarity, Furor, Naturalist, and the new Shapeshifting talent. I ended up losing 2/3 Infected Wounds (hopefully the 33% chance is enough to keep a 5-stack rolling), iLotP, Nurturing Instinct, Savage Fury, and Brutal Imapct out of the talents I would have liked to picked up in Feral, without even considering Primal Tenacity or Intensity because I just didn't have the available points.

Problem is, a lot of talents are just too good to consider skipping. Time was, you could get everything you wanted in your tree of choice and everything you wanted up 'till the 20 pt mark in your second tree, and what you wanted changed depending on how you were specialising within your spec. There were only a handful of talents that you really had to take - i.e. the +10% damage talents. Nowadays all the top-tier talents are as good as that or better, so you can't afford to skip them. So specs are more cookie-cutter past the first 3 or 4 tiers, especially in the hybrid classes.

*sigh* Maybe the game's just evolving and I can't get past it. Oh well.