That was when there was a lot less stuff to use. Which was fine, when there was less stuff to use… Your point isnt really addressing where we are now.
Back in the day could be anything in the last 15 years. It doesn’t mean vanilla.
Maybe, who knows?
Based on the gist of this argument I’m going to assume he means MoP era. There abouts.
Yep, that’s the general idea. Putting the pacing and rhythm in line with a musical tune tends to connect with people on a subconscious level… and as such, allows them to get better in tune with the game itself. After all, people have used music in some variety to help them concentrate for AGES; even in the simplest form of singing, humming a tune (sometimes even just in their own head), or even just tapping your fingers to a beat while they do whatever it is they’re working on.
It actually ends up HELPING their performance, even if they quite don’t understand why. Conversely, we also have those who prefer to work in absolute silence… well, different strokes for different folks. Though I have to wonder if there is correlation between those who like the GCD change and those who loathe it have and if they prefer working to music or in silence.
And an interesting observation, I believe it was MoP which had the “strongest” musical presence in WoW’s history… or at least the most prominent (and memorable) melodies. It’s also the expansion which is often lauded with having the best gameplay. So does this correlation imply causation or is it merely coincidence?
Back to the subject of adding a musical rhythm to class gameplay, and expanding on this idea a bit, perhaps we can start to connect different different genres of music to the different classes/specs. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a good thematic fit either, but it does give the developers are basis to build off of.
Fair enough, though I feel it’s important to point out these types of changes aren’t necessarily catering to the hardcore crowd. I’m certainly not among them, but I still enjoyed the possibilities and rhythm of the gameplay off-GCDs opened up.
… I might have to track that down at some point, and I vaguely seem to recall it.
Do you remember which year that gag came out?
I’ve played since about a year into Vanilla WoW (late 2005). While I wasn’t there for the AQ gate opening (too low a level), I remember turning in mats for it; that was relatively close to the start of my WoW experience.
That being said, MoP was probably when the core gameplay for WoW was in its best state. Things were a little too disjointed during the earlier expansions to have cohesion with the gameplay, especially for a few particular classes (poor, poor paladins…).
… then again, I also ended up loving weaving in Heroic Strikes and Cleaves between every GCD (the “next melee attack” version of both abilities; with a fast weapon, 1.5 speed if possible, to make the most of it) as a Prot Warrior during WotLK. I didn’t pick up the class until late TBC, but it has been my “barometer” for how fun the gameplay in WoW ever since; regardless of whatever the balance was, the gameplay was ALWAYS fun on a warrior (particularly prot).
Things REALLY started to go sideways during WoD when they removed Heroic Strike (which had become an off-GCD with a 1.5 second cooldown) and replaced it with this “focused rage” filler BS.
… things kinda went downhill from there, reaching a breaking point with the GCD change in BfA.
Put trinkets and cds on their own gcd. That way I can macro bestial wrath to kill command, but can’t pop my trinkets with it.
I really hope they reconsider the GCD changes. This idea of theirs, killed the fluidity of a lot of specs. Instead of blanket nerfing all abilities with the gcd and then unnerfing a few, they should’ve done the reverse and only added the gcd to a select few abilities.
Yeah I HATED MoP for the Daily Gate bs. Otherwise classes were a lot of fun.
The people who don’t want the “bloat” aren’t interested in classes with nuanced mechanics. They just want a 1-2 button spec. So my olive branch to them is let’s handle that in talents. One side is entirely passive the other is entirely on demand / bulk. Like the example I gave of arms.
Left (passive)
- Mortal Strike can’t be dodged.
- Mortal Strike rends the target.
- Mortal Strike does more damage at max rage.
Versus
Right(on demand)
- Overpower
- Rend
- Heroic Strike
Simple enough. They could redesign the MoP talent tree entirely around two options.
I do not want PvP turned into one shot combat.
Legion had a major problem with too many things off GCD and surprise attacks could total even tanks in less than 4 seconds.
what skill that has been added to the GCD makes playing suddenly clunky and slow? I see this tossed around many times… but what skill that was added to the GCD slowed things down that much?
There are certainly some specific examples here and there of things that could be shifted back off the GCD which I would totally agree with but most of the loudest complainers just seem to want their one-button macro gameplay back in the name of that being more engaging- which is funny to me. Not because they’re wrong for liking what they like but because I can’t get my head around how being able to bind everything to one or two buttons is any better than pressing 3-4 buttons. 
I’m not sure why this is an issue unless you don’t know where your wall hotkey is.
They will bring back weaved GCD’s in patch 11.2
“We heard you, and we listened…”
Or whatever that famous quote is of taking in community feedback.
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Add about 10 talent tiers and we might be talking.
Don’t necessarily disagree. Heroic strike is a different case though, in that it empowered your next auto attack. Doesn’t really fall into either camp.
I see no need to take attacks with cooldowns off the GCD. I can’t think of a spec that feels bad specifically because of this, and I have everything at 120 and played to a reasonable level except druid.
It’s defensive abilities and cooldowns that need this desperately. If there’s an attack that’s also a cooldown and gives a significant buff (e.g not whirlwind) then that should be considered too.
I’ve never encountered annoyance at not being able to spam several attacks at once. Blizz have made it pretty clear they don’t want to return to bursty-1shots gameplay. But it sure is annoying doing nothing for several seconds while you buff yourself up. A lot of the time the window or pull you were after is half over by the time you start dps.
I think we have to move away from the idea that every individual class requires an overly simplistic approach… actually, I’d say there should be NO overly simplistic specs. Varying degrees and levels of nuance… but there should be some level of nuance with all classes & specs. Talents can add a range to that level of nuance, but there should still be some.
That being said, I’m looking at FAR more than just removing the GCD change. Fixing that particular problem is only the first move and more of principle design decision to allow for the real work to get started – MASSIVE OVERHAULS.
The classes need to be redesigned and reworked from the ground-up in my opinion… and quite frankly, this isn’t a small undertaking. The approach I’m seeing based on the recent news releases is mostly adding back in old abilities as a band-aid of sorts without really thinking it through how they’ll fit into the game.
It almost seems to falling back to a Vanilla-like class design where they just threw out a bunch of appropriately themed abilities without correlation or context and seeing what sticks, adjusting and tuning based on how well they work out.
… let’s just say I’ve run a little “thought experiment” of how to re-envision Arms Warrior in particular, still in need of some refinement, and it is VERY comprehensive. However, it simply doesn’t work without allowing for off-GCD abilities.
The forum community never ceases to amaze me by how narrow-minded and short-sighted they are.
They see requests to undo the GCD change, they bring up the overpowered macros as an excuse without considering the following:
- Overpowered cooldowns and trinkets
- Too much stat inflation causing damage to greatly outpace health pools
- That these can be accounted for by tuning changes or an internal cooldown between off-GCD abilities which would outright prevent macro’ing all cooldowns together in one button press.
They only see a problem that was brought about by other issues, and can’t seem to fathom that there could be other and less harmful approaches to fixing it.
You know, they wouldn’t have that problem if they didn’t allow their stats – especially damage output – to scale out of control.
I consider that a separate issue from the GCD change, but one which is definitely harming the gameplay with these ham-fisted approaches to fixing it.
Damage scales out of control because specs actually have synergy between abilities now and secondary stats that synergies with resource building or some other mechanic.
Classic has one class that has this type of positive feedback scaling.
Warrior.
Classic has one class where it’s damage spikes crazy with gear.
Warrior.
How thick are people to think this has ANYTHING to do with the numbers?
Or is the WoW community so single-mindedly obsessed with them that they are literally unable to understand that there could be another motive at play here?
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I laughed when I saw the de-pruning of shamans, they are getting like 20 billion totems, how can they not revert the GCD? If they don’t shamans game play will be like totem 1 - wait, totem 2 wait, totem 3 wait, totem 4 wait, totem 5 wait, totem 6 wait, totem 7 wait ok! We are ready to play! Oh i’m dead, amazing game play.