Dead tree = as intended?

Q u o t e:
This statement, to me, really shows a lack of understanding of the class and the tree.

Whenever we see comments like this, we immediately assume that you have a different vision for class / spec / whatever than we do. If that is the case, you are likely to find yourself frustrated and scratching your head a lot when our changes never make the design converge on what you think it should be.

Now, we do want Subtlety to be more attractive. All of the pure dps classes have a spec that isn't as popular as the others. Mages may be the closest because at least Frost has a viable PvP use, but there are also plenty of mages who want to be able to use Frost in end-game PvE too.

Subtlety (and Frost for that matter) are specs focused around utility. The problem is that players understandably nearly always choose damage over utility for raiding and often choose utility over damage for PvP, unless the damage is really high or the utility just doesn't cut it for some reason.

What we are talking about doing is sharing more of the utility among other specs, or the core class, so that there aren't "utility trees." To do that though, we have to make the way the different specs do damage different enough so that players might choose a play-style preference over highest damage. This is particularly challenging for rogues, who have a history of giving up a preferred spec or play style for one with a sub 1% dps increase.

I think we are closest with the Arcane vs. Fire mage specs at the moment. They play a little differently, which goes beyond just the type of magic damage they do. While Fire might still do the highest damage overall, Arcane is close enough and plays different enough that even competitive players don't feel stupid for playing that spec. There are a lot more Arcane mages out there than I think a lot of players assume.

That is harder with rogues. "I'm the sneaky one" doesn't translate into sustained raid dps. Assassination feels like it emphasizes poisons more and Combat feels like it emphasizes weapons more, so we're a little closer there. Subtelty needs a stronger yet damage-oriented niche.

HaT, sadly, is not a niche. HaT has scaling problems. It's appropriate for a 5-player group, but gets too in larger groups with all of their raid buffs. We don't want HaT to be the one talent that pushes players into Subtlety.

Q u o t e:
I'm pretty sure that's not what he (and Blizzard in general) means by utility. I think he includes that stuff, plus virtually anything that isn't DPS: personal survivabiilty, control over targets (not limited to raid boss targets), etc. Things like reduced energy/mana costs, reduced threat and indirect buffs to personal DPS (e.g. pushback protection) are more of a gray area, but some or more of that stuff may be included as well.

The issue is that most of this stuff doesn't fit into the bucket of useful utility when in a raid context. Players define utility as contribution to raid performance. Blizzard traditionally has not used such a limited definition. So he's talking about addressing the very problem you raise, by spreading around or baselining the various "flavor" utilities that aren't really valued in raiding but are maybe quite valuable in other contexts. This could go a long way both to making trees like Frost and Subtlety able to do competitive damage, and to making currently-weak PvP trees stronger.

Yeah. This.

Let's consider two talents. First, Ice Barrier. Great spell and pretty fun. Would you give up raid dps to have this talent? It depends. If the fight is so deadly that you're going to die without it, well alive mages can out dps the dead ones. But how often will that situation arise? Would you get this talent for pvp? Yes. Second, Camouflage. Great for leveling. Useful for 5-player runs if you're sapping a lot. But is that talent a dps increase, even in PvP? It's pretty hard to quantify, but I bet most ROUGES would say no.

Okay, so then let's compensate those two trees for the fact that they have "isn't a dps increase" talents. Now Frost and Subtlety can do the damage of Fire and Combat, but also have better survivability, crowd control or other utility. Why be Fire or Combat again?

A better design is probably just that trees aren't designed around "I trade dps for other stuff." That older design may have worked when few players raided, but it's something important to a lot of our players now. It's fine to have talents like this mixed in all the trees, as long as they don't make up the tree.

Incidentally, the mastery pitch for Cataclym also helps with stuff like that. Frost can get Ice Barrier and ROGES can get Camo while still getting some dps boost for the investment.