Were there any talent trees in vanilla that you would never consider spending a majority of points in, regardless whether you were raiding, or pvping, or farming?
IMO the only one that one might consider broken across the board is the druid balance tree, but I haven’t attempted to play it in a while.
Survival tree before rework was awful because it was essentially a melee tree, but with 2 conditional abilities(based on you dodging and parrying) instead of rotational ones. They also had an awful 31pt talent Lacerate, which did less damage than Rend, which all warriors get from trainer without even any talent investment.
Personally, I think survival melee could be pretty interesting. All they need is to rework counterattack and mongoose bite as melee abilities, add a few melee talents here and there, and Survival will now be pretty fun and unique, even if sub-optimal, Hunter spec.
Depends on how you define broken. there were plenty of talent trees with useless 31pt talents. There were more than a few that had no real useful role in raids/dungeons/pvp (enhancement/balance/elemental/retribution). But there wasn’t anything so useless that no one ever put points into it, it was more of a “ugh, why won’t they spec into something more useful”. The wow equivalent of a hanzo main.
^^
This. Ret is so bad that most people who try to defend ret by putting up that top .01% of player actually show players with more talent points in the prot/holy trees.
As much hate as Ret gets around here, I would actually say Beast Mastery is worse off.
Hunters are already weak on DPS for a pure class, and Beast Mastery puts the focus on your pet that doesn’t scale at all with gear. In PvP, it’s pretty much praying that whatever you’re fighting dies before Beastial Wrath wears off.
It’s okay for leveling and that’s about it.
Ret at least has some PvP builds that utilize a lot of the tree that can do quite well. Plus Reckoning, which is a hybrid build, still does 0/25/26 which is pretty heavy Ret.
Are you asking which Specs has a useless 31pt talent? A lot did. Holy Priest Lightwell was pretty damn useless. And every Affliction Lock worth their salt will be dropping their final talent to pick up Ruin from Destro. Ret wasn’t worth going that deep into, and most PvP Ret builds went half Ret/Prot for Reckoning.
This, once you hit 60 and got some gear, Beast Mastery was totally worthless in endgame PvE at least. I’m not sure about it in BGs, but most Hunter’s were using a MM/Survey build iirc. It could have been useful in 1v1 WPvP I guess.
I’d put Elemental Shaman and Balance Druids up there on the “not very useful in raids” shelf as well, though I know Oomkins were good in PvP, not sure about Elemental.
I think OP is asking for bad talent trees overall, not just bad 31 point talents. Like, holy 31 point is awful, but the rest of the tree is pretty good. Likewise, arcane is lackluster for the most part, except for the 31 pointer. So these trees are out of the running I would say.
As someone said above, pre-rework survival probabaly takes the cake. But are there any that are just as bad in 1.12?
However, that didn’t make the talent tree “broken” so much as it freed up a point for elsewhere, sometimes leading to more interesting choices than feeling locked into getting to the bottom of the tree.
The balance tree wasn’t that bad, end game restos would spend a lot of points in balance because there were talents that helped with a healing touch spam playstyle when they had a lot of crit.
The tree itself wasn’t even bad for moonkins themselves either, it was just their overall low dps and high mana consumption.
Ret is actually fine for questing & leveling, especially considering the fact that /sit macros to gain Reckoning stacks won’t work in Classic like they do on private servers (you will still get crit, it just won’t proc the on-crit effect). This makes Reckoning specs less desirable for leveling. You can heal most leveling dungeons just fine with most of your points in Ret.
BM is one of the best specs in the game for leveling and its good for pvp too. marks is better for bgs if you are geared, but bm is the way to go at first
Hunters of any spec are great at leveling, to be honest. Beast Mastery isn’t really that far ahead of the others, especially if you keep up to date on gear.
In PvP it’s a one trick pony: It has Beastial Wrath and that’s it. It’s outdone by both Survlval and Marksman builds at 60 in every facet of gameplay.