I’d like to preface this with the understanding that yes, this is early game levels 1-25 and that late game talents and gear may potentially fix this issue.
That being said, the functionality of how basic skills work (Especially for Druid and Barb) makes the gameplay that’s normally fluid and fast paced, feel clunky, slow and boring and I personally think that using talents and gear to solve this issue is just Blizzard shooting themselves in the foot. Classes should feel smooth, rewarding, and fun to play at a BASELINE. Legendaries, talents, and paragon should then enhance the gameplay further ontop of that baseline. Not bring a boring class desing up to something finally playable.
An example I’d like to focus in on is the Druid. All 5 potential basic abilities are not only beyond weak in damage, but force stop your character for roughly an entire second, and deal extremely minimal damage to your main target and little or no damage to other targets. Having to cast these skills 3-5 times to be able to cast 1-2 spells that actually feel good to press is a big negative.
What can be done to make them feel better to use while still being simply a skill to fill the gaps between meaningful skills?
- Make the animations tighter and quicker
-Melee (Druid and barb in particular) need to have a gap close on ALL melee basic skills to get them to their target faster. (Think monk D3 Rainment build with generators that teleported you to the target, or the current talent for Druid that enables shred to teleport to the target on cast)
-Make ranged projectiles fly faster or hit harder+AOE if not. Current skills like Wind Shear are just so slow and often the mob just side steps the cast before it even gets to them.
-Rogue is a good standard to hold to right now with how snappy their basic skills feel with puncture being a good example as a combo point generator.
-Let them generate much more resource for classes that have no passive resource generation. Nothing feels worse than going into combat as a Barb or Druid having to cast multiple basic skills before doing any meaningful damage while a Sorc just goes in, drops a hydra and spams chain lightning before even thinking of using a basic skill.
As it stands right now, basic skills are worse that “basic”. They are boring and make the experience, of what is otherwise extremely fun combat, slow and unimpactful. I’m afraid their solution will be mandatory talent dumps for resource management, and gear to makee the classes function properly. Please don’t do this blizz, make talents and gear interesting. Don’t desing these systems to just simply fix the class.