The Illusion of Choice

[Shurrikhan]

Illusion of choice is real...Yoshi acknowledges it, WOW has acknowledged it, everyone with half a brain has. Get on our level plx.

It's funny that people reference WoW so often in this regard when at the time of the shift to streamlined talents (which, in Blizzard's words, was as much to move the uninteresting talents that were essentially bonuses for having spent x points in a given spec from actual talent choices to automatic gains based on, again, spending x points in a given spec and to decrease balancing costs as it was about the "illusion of choice") had at least a few specs per class, role, and setting that performed within 3% of each other, and forum-scorned "non-optimal" specs frequently outperforming the FotM specs.

If you want true illusion of choice, look no further than what followed that excuse: Mist talents. One dummy-style AoE, one burst ST, one gradual self-buff. In rare cases, a whole of two of these might be worth considering for the combat setting. Change to gameplay: bring a full-stack of talent-switching items to every raid, swap every fight. "Illusion" of choice gone.

Illusion of choice is not a universal law; it is a flaw in design, most often where differently weighted metas collide without providing built-in variance to make each choice valuable in a variety of settings (e.g. stun talents on unstunnable bosses, without a triggered damage bonus on resist).