There was an article released recently that was very interesting on Blizzardwatch.com. It's How cookie cutter builds discourage player customization. It's a good read going into how player perceptions effect the choices that players overall make. Give it a read, I'll wait.
For those who have played World of Warcraft for a long while, you remember Talent trees. Instead of one defined spec, you could take points in all three moving up as you leveled. In order to take full advantage of a spec, you had to put a large amount of your talent points into it, but by picking and choosing different abilities in different trees you could make some very interesting choices.
In theory this meant that folks could have some very customized options in their characters. You could stick to the bottom half/third of all three specs at one point and never advance to end talents. Or you could take your fire mage and then give him a bunch of power in frost once you topped off the fire tree. This should have lead to a bunch of differently balanced characters doing really cool things. Instead once some number runner figured out what talent point configuration put out the top DPS in the trees the community would all start to adopt that talent point spread. If you wanted to be taken seriously pugging raids or finding a team you had to be running the popular choices.
What should have been customization was in fact an illusion.
As time went on Blizzard started putting constraints on the trees. The first was that you had to put X amount of points into a specific spec before adding points to a different spec. Then the trees got pruned and simplified taking out pointless choices, like add X damage to ability B. Things that they knew everyone in the talent tree would take. Then eventually the talent tree got the boot out the window and we were given essentially what we have now. The talents tab.
By simplifying the system and giving choices that where meaningful when it came to the feeling of game play Blizzard wanted to get rid of the cookie cutter build. I would say they have been mildly successful, but overall people still depend on which choices are rated the best, or are the most popular. There are some good options with choice, but most people stick with the popular track.
I will admit I'm in that pack. When I level a character I haven't picked up for a year or so, and decide to make that jump to level 100 I normally go to Icy-Veins.com and see what talent choices are rated the best, and which ones I can choose without a DPS loss etc... I even do this for characters I know will probably not even make LFR. While the idea of switching and testing different talent choices sounds fun, a part of me just wants to make sure I'm doing things "right." This is the part that often wins.
I guess the question then becomes, is it possible to escape the cookie cutter build? In legion we will be able to run all three specs and if I read correctly won't need to spend points to switch talents. I think part of the goal has been for people to swap abilities for different fights, but I find myself only doing this in the rarest of circumstances. Apparently you won't need a resource to do this swap next expansion which is probably another step in the right direction, but I still think folks are going to mostly follow the crowd.
This makes the question what can you do to make your game play feel customized? If talents are just another illusion of choice does it really matter if Blizzard includes this mechanic rather then just giving you the abilities to use as needed? Is there anyway to beat this Illusion of choice and make it meaningful to game play? Obviously if the talents had to do with things non-combat related (mount speed, character's dance etc...) then it feels like choice, but it doesn't matter in the over all scheme of things. How do you all feel about it?
Lag.
