I’m not counting paladin because the build/spend rate doesn’t actually require paying constant attention to your resources. If you want to faceroll on ret, it actually works fine in all non-critical situations.
The most popular classes are the ones where you can mentally remember approximately when your cooldowns are available again, so you don’t have to constantly check a tooltip or a resource bar to plan out your next few moves. Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Shaman, Druid.
Evoker in particular was badly hamstrung by the choice to use combo points. Instead of being a cool dragon shooting breath attacks and bouncing between hurting things and doing other stuff, you instead watch your combo points as carefully as a demonology warlock.
The next major overhaul must include at least one or two of these classes (Monk, Warlock, Evoker, Death Knight) getting something a little better than combo points. It’s not like there’s a lot of choice, just make the abilities in question medium length cooldowns, and change their effectiveness accordingly. It works fine for Mages, which is still one of only classes that still works close to the original classic design.
I dunno what you’re going on about but Frost Mage 100% has combo points. What do you think icles into Glacial Spike is?
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It’s not exactly the same because every class has ultra precise rotations at the top skill level. Frost just happens to optimize glacial around 5 icicles. You don’t actually lose the icicle damage itself if you mistime your glacial. You lose far more from not getting a shatter on it.
Rogues being one of the worst cases of this with the constant monitoring, but not being on the list because the players of the class basically don’t exist feels pretty accurate to the state of the class right now.
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It doesn’t surprise me that the more complicated the class, the less likely they are to be played. That’s not a bad thing either. Rogues for example, are nice to have in a group if there’s only one, but if they were FOTM they’d be everywhere.
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I just use Weakauras, or other add-ons to track Combo Points. You can put it close to the middle of the screen near your character. It’s really easy to keep track of.
You can also get Elvui or similar add-ons to track them. It’s not really harder than remembering other class resources.
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I’ve always hated the Death Knight rune system.
I want to defend monks. I think the combo system for monks has generally worked fine even for healing specs. I would rather Monk and rogues be the only two combo oriented classes because I think it fits with their martial aethetic.
people use weak aura’s. no one does manual remembering lol. that would be way too insane to try for 99.9% of people
Destro lock is very popular
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On my small return here, I tried to wake up a rogue. and said nah, I’ll just run the classic versions.
I don’t think evoker is unpopular because combo points, I think it’s unpopular because it’s restricted to 1 very ugly and unpopular race. Very few people want to play a class with such heavily restricted customization.
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There’s nothing wrong with Rogue being played the least, people will always take the path of the least resistance when selecting a class that’s considered easier.
This doesn’t apply to only WoW.
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Not sure how Deathknight runes count as combo points, but I do agree that monk shouldn’t have combo points.
I don’t think chi should be counted as combo points. If you count it you may as well count Insanity or Rage or any other resource generated by attacking.
Closest non-rogue/feral thing to combo points is enhance shaman Maelstrom Weapon and enhance is fairly popular.
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I don’t but man, I don’t even notice the combo resource points majority of the time. You kinda just track it in your mind without worry. Like, OP said evokers are hamstrunged because of it but I get so many esssense bursts that It hardly matters.
I think there is something to it. It can be annoying to keep them in mind when using your abilities.
Not sure I would call Evokers Essence a combo point system seeing as there are no abilities that generates it, and it refills automatically. But I can see where the comparison is coming from.
That said, I don’t think combo point inherently is the problem. Just complexity or lack of clarity. I mean see Ret. They do have combo points, but outside of the opener the spec pretty much just press what is off cooldown at the moment. With a very basic priority system when one or more abilities come off cooldown at the same time. They don’t have any specific timers or debuffs they need to track. Just smash. And I think that’s what a lot of people want along with a strong “fantasy”.
But there is also nothing wrong with having some specs and classes being less popular.
Yeah, I wouldn’t really consider Essence to be like combo points. The whole thing with Evoker is you spend all your essence, then you hit abilities to generate essence bursts which act like a buffer to spend essence while essence was recharging, it’s mostly just cooldowns and procs rather than a build/spend rotation.
