In Wod i remember blizz did a interview or had a community post where they said they decided to put the difficulty away from classes into boss fights. You said ability blot was too much so from WOD all the way to BFA you pruned and simplified classes.
Personally i think this was a huge mistake, during BFA every single class felt terrible while raiding and doing bosses was fine everything else just felt so boring. Instead of removing useless spells or merging spells you went way to far pruning abilities and nearly every class felt so much worse than it did in MOP.
If you play MOP today and compare them to classes in retail its like night and day,Most classes felt better, more toolkit is more fun, mobility is fun, fun spells are great.
My Balance druid had so many tools for different situations in pvp and world content and when BFA hit you not only removed tons of toolkit but you also removed Full Moon and during a BFA play sesson at blizzcon when hotted was playing druid you where surprised when he said where is full moon and that he missed it (during the player\dev bfa play sessions). Ultimately i think the people pruning classes dont even play the classes they are pruning/simplifying.
Also note, i am all for changing usless abilities\merging abilities that dont feel good. But you gotta replace them. Dont just remove stuff, its been 10 years classes should feel better than they did 10 years ago but they dont, its complete degeneration. More Abilities doesnt mean more fun classes, but Mop was the best we have ever had and you thought it was too much. I Disagree for most cases.
I don’t mind the reduction of keybindings and ability bloat, but there are many better ways to handle it than merely reducing the number of abilities. The key is to make each ability much more interesting and meaningful.
I think where they’re going with empowered abilities, those with charge-up effects, is a good direction to start with. From there, I’d personally like to see combo setups. Make one ability lead into others based on context for more interesting rotations.
Just completely build the classes/specs up with some new core abilities. Push some money back into the game versus settling for mediocre products for the last 10 years. Covenant’s was a good idea but ultimately the borrowed power ruined class identity.
Yea i think fury is far better in shadowlands than it was in MOP. I think over the 10 years fury was the one spec that got a actual good rework and it feels pretty amazing now. However warrior does lack plenty of toolkit in comparison to MOP.
I agree, More buttons doesnt mean a better class but for like 5 of my classes they just feel better in MOP. It was the first time i have played MOP in a while and its just crazy how nice it is to have a good toolkit available.
I think empowered abilities could be a cool idea, but ultimately i think they have completely dropped the ball on classes and specs. There are some specs that feel better like i think Fury warrior has a better rotation but the overall toolkit and fun abilities they are really lacking.
I actually dont think covenants was a good idea at all. Like you said in your post. If blizzard instead of trying to balance 4 abilities for each class/spec to pick one of them just gave each class 2-3 abilities baseline with all the time they would save trying to balance the 4 it would of been far better. Abilities that they can then just make baseline next xpac. I think the covernant abilities nearly all of them are just trash and i would of preferred them to build the core class over them anyday.
I think rotations are not as good in some places, but overall the toolkit in every class was 1000000% better. I think proportionally most specs\classes had more toolkit in mop than in WOD or BFA
Like i forgot all the abilities i had, Like on balance druid i had mushrooms for AOE slows, i had symbiosis for a second defensive, Heart of the Wild was actually OP, i could summon treants that can root when summoned and damage, cenarion ward etc. Its all gone
I have nothing new now, nothing extra compared to MOP on the majority of my specs thati play.
I miss those days, too. I think a lot of people assumed that having all of those abilities meant that they had to use all of those abilities in their rotation, which was absolutely the wrong way to look at it. It was nice having options, but some people apparently couldn’t handle that.
Almost every class was more fun to play in MOP. Only complaints I had were PVP power (it was a stupid stat, especially since it didn’t affect healer damage) and that many healer classes had no AoE damage abilities AT ALL…
Sorry more than any expansion after MOP. Like to a huge degree. You would be in the minority to think classes had more toolkit after Mop than during mop. You cant really argue it without using small edge cases like guard druid and that was only because they split the specs last minute.
