DB vs Supernova and Ring vs Nova are truly terrible. In the case of the former you have fire locked out of DB if they want to play a crappy hero talent or be forced into one that does virtually nothing…in the latter you have frost locked out of a rotational ability to spec into a utility spell.
I dunno, kind of hate this…
I don’t understand how they can even have a hero talent that requires a class tree talent to even work. There is absolutely no reason why we should be forced to pick between these utility spells, what’s more it defeats the entire purpose of the talent trees which was to move away from the restrictions the talent tier model imposed. This feels exactly like the talent tiers to me.
Talent tiers but more complicated and hard to balance: Classic Nostalgia for the sake of it. #stepbackwords #failure
Great idea on paper, bad in practice. Nobody stopped to ask “Why”, but just went ahead and did. So here we are.
TLDR: Talent trees brought back were a waste.
Fully agree that the talent trees are worse than the MoP → SL iterations.
But would that really change having to decide between these spells?
If OP is implying that Mage should have DB, Supernova, RoF and Ice Nova all at once then you then that is absurd and an offense to the idea of fair class balance.
Damage + Snare verse AOE CC.
Is this not exactly what type of decision a talent tree should propose?
Or do you want it to strictly be Damage event #1 verse Damage event #2?
While I agree that there should be some choice between Mage’s CC / utility spells instead of having them all, new choice nodes are just not it.
Ice Nova vs RoF - Frost Mages use Ice Nova as a rotational spell (not just damage + snare like you wrote - an actual rotational spell to shatter their other spells) and because of such choice node would be pretty much permanently locked out of Ring of Frost or lose throughput to pick it (which they likely would not do). If one of choice options would be harmful / neglected most of the time (even if just for one spec), that choice is bad by default.
Better choice node: Ring of Frost vs Mass Polymorph - both abilities have similar niche with different pros and cons, so this choice node would make much more sense. Mages also usually don’t need them both simultaneously and in beta can still get both, which contradicts recent Blizzard politics where they nerfed duration or access to long duration AoE CC abilities for most classes.
DB vs Supernova - harms Fire Mage Sunfuries, who might want to play with Alexstrasza’s Fury and Gravity Lapse (for example AoE specialized builds), but cannot, since affected abilities compete in a choice node in general tree and whatever of them you pick there locks effect of one of these upgrade talents. It is also pretty much the only hero spec that replaces spec’s main CC ability with often worse analogue instead of improving it.
Better choice node: between Supernova and Blast Wave (similar to knockback vs knockup choices of other classes and that would allow Fire Sunfuries to play with any combination of their talents that affect CC abilities).
My guess is, like many terrible decisions made by the WoW team, Ion was having either a mid-life nostalgia kick about the days when he and his fellow sweaties could theory-craft the old ‘classic’ talent trees, OR he is just incompetent and has proven for over a decade that he should not be allowed to touch any aspects of the game.
Just a huge waste of resources to design and implement, when 10% of the effort could have been put into fixing the ‘cata’ trees to offer actual choice. Hell, with all that leftover time and developer resourcing, they might even have been able to build full pvp-specific trees for people to use…
This is what they should do. How can they be so blind? 
Is this even a choice? 
For virtually all decisions made since the content drought at the end of MoP I feel that it’s been the case where it’s both. I mean, it’s been over 10 years since the last genuinely great expansion (and yes, Legion was just “good” because it took them 12 months to fix it).
relax, DF was pretty good.
having all 4 at once is too much utility compared to other classes in M+ and PvP
having all 4 at once allows for OP CC chains that would be unbearably unfun to play against in PvP.
Not to mentioned that Hunter’s get all CCs, so in TWW for them it will be +1 cc, 1 extra defensive, and 2 heals. No idea how to win against them now
DF was fine, given it was only 3/4 of an expansion. I do however feel that most of the praise was due to the fact that it fixed a lot of the problems that were made in BFA/SL. Sure it didn’t have borrowed power, but it did have the new bloated talent systems, and it took them half the expansion to make Frost playable. It also had fewer dungeons than usual, and these were rotated in/out, and the raids themselves were small. There was nothing inherently wrong with DF, but it was just a bit “eh”.
I think this is what we can expect going forward. Blizzard now is not the Blizzard of old with just about all of the original crew gone.
Glacial spike should cast nova on cast
After looking at other class’ hero talents, this seems to be quite common. On my Balance Druid, I haven’t taken Force of Nature for any of Dragonflight, but it is required for the Keeper of the Grove hero talents.
Well that’s different. That entire tree revolves around summoning treants. This is just one throwaway talent.