Warcraft Class-Homogenization

WoW's talent trees certainly have gone through many overhauls and with each change, classes become more homogenized. I know this is an overused term, but it's a perfect fit :)

Intentional or not, Warriors were the native tanking class. Paladins and Druids were usually healers or DPS. It was simply a limitation of their abilities and stat scaling. Some were clearly far better than others for specific jobs. Then Paladin and Druid tanking talents and scaling were majorly buffed (one a bit too much) enabling them to take the same beating a warrior took and generate threat just as well. Then DK's were added and tweaked so they could tank everything too! So now we have Warriors, Paladins, Deathknights, and Druids capable of tanking multiple mobs and single target mobs effectively. There are some very minor distinctions between the 4 that make them unique and all 4 have abilities that are missed when playing another tank, as follows:

> Warriors are very mobile. Their intercept, intervene, and charge abilities are now their niche.
> Dk's have death grip, which is, indeed, my prefered way to deal with casters or loose mobs.
> Paladins have their shield, which is the best way to pull non-cc'd mobs out of a group wherein others are cc'd. And... it has a built-in silence effect!
> Druids are BEARS!!! They can do just about everything any other tank can do, but get to be big, fuzzy bears whose attacks leave claw marks on your screen! Bears don't have a ranged interrupt or silence, though, which can be a minor annoyance when other people are stupid.

I enjoy playing all the tank classes and feel they have equal capability to deal with almost any situation and are just too similar. With proper cooldown use, they can all take heavy physical or magical damage. With proper rotaions, they can all keep threat on packs of mobs. Cross-Homogenized - Every class can do everything.

They did the same thing to healers. Priests no longer are assigned to the tanks by default which often necessitated greater-heal-stopcasting (/snooze), for instance. Druids have an OOC rez! I have seen healers of all types deal with all situations. Tank healing? AOE healing? They can all do it! I still put Pallies on tanks because their cooldowns and strong single target heals make them slightly less awesome at raid healing, but they certainly can raid heal. I play a priest right now and, unlike tanking, I haven't healed on every class this expansion, so I don't have as much to say about it and what I do know just comes from my experience watching other healers do their thing. There have been people I wouldn't give certain jobs, but it's always been because of limitations of their abilities as a player, not their class.

Anyway, all the changes they've made to homogenize all current classes makes me wonder how the new talent tree excavation is going to work. - self-homogenization? I mean, if the only thing that's to separate one priest from another is whether or not they can aoe fear, that is not enough. I need to look further into these changes!