Bringing back class fantasy would solve everything

PVP Arenas
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Title. Homogenization/pruning is what crashed this game to where its at.
Devs should be looking at when the game was at its peak, where not everything was homogenized and pruned.

Mages: Should have the HIGHEST sustained damage in the game. Less armor and HP then everyone else. Think BC era. Get rid of our gimmicks, take gpyro and put our damage through the roof. Also let us multischool cast again, IE fire can cast frostbolt. Shimmer can go with it and give back deep freeze.

Warriors: Should do stupid amounts of damage, go back to stance dancing/weapon swap macros and have intervene/intercept back with it. 5-8 kiting them was the way to deal with them. Prune stormbolt/leap in process to balance them out. Should also have higher stamina, better armor. (I’m also ok with higher repair costs for them once again!)

Rogues: Full mobility weedwhack them. Outlaw/Sin should be moved back to BC era of mobility. Including manueverability removed. Leave 1 charge of step for sub and only sub. Bump Cloak down to a 1 minute cd at 90% resist chance as compensation. Evasion needs to go up to 3 minute CD and 50% resist chance.
Vanish also 3 minute cd. Restore prep as compensation, limit combo points to their target and bring back redirect. Also bring back poisons/bleed/slice and dice for all 3 specs additionally. Rogue armor/stamina should not be homogenized with other melee.

Hunters: Tough one here but I have to say Wotlk MM was one of its better iterations. It hit hard, had arpen and decent utility. I’d say this is a fair version of hunters that best representing class fantasy and what they ought to me. Goes without saying re-introduce deadzone for PVP. Mail armor/stamina needs to be appropiate.

Dks: I think dks are personally in an odd spot. Either one spec or the other is FOTM. They are either overpowered, w.e, or underpowered. I’d personally like to see presences brought back to the class, all 3 specializations capable of DPS again (Ulduar for blood dk dps was the best moment it had. Dks with more experience could probally chime in on what the class needs most to be decent across the board. 2h frost would be a nice start. Just don’t bring back ghoul rezz or early wotlk dk when they were broken.

Paladin (Ret): Damage needs to go way down during burst and sustained needs to be brought up to par. WOG/FoL offheals should be somewhere around MOP i believe it was. Bring back Emancipate as compensation. Bring back turn evil as well to give them counterplay room. Lastly Damage in bubble reduced by 50% and BOP pacify once more.

Shaman: Revert everything about this class back to ICC patch and leave it there forever.

Warlocks: Revert them back to s8 and leave them there forever as well.

DH/WW the 2 newest classes need a complete redesign from the ground up. Delete everything and start over. What even is the class fantasy/vision for these two classes?
They are both hyper mobile self healing melee with alot of damage and disruption.

Give them a role, a purpose and a function and start from the ground up.
Way too much utility, damage and short offensive/defensive cds. They are the post children classes of what is WRONG with WoW to begin with.

Hyper mobility: Check
Self heals/Sustain: Check
High damage + High uptime : Check
Big burst: check
short cd defensives? :check

You can literally go on and on about the specs. DH in particular, melee don’t need ranged kicks, short cd defensives, huge offensive dmg, insane mobility and near unpeelable/inescapable. Ontop of having homogenized stamina/armor

Seriously throw both specs in the blender WW/Havoc and go to the drawing board, have a serious sit down with other devs and decide WHAT these class visions/fantasy should be.

Priest: Revert disc/shadow back to BC. Meaning give back disc its damage/mitigation and mana burn. Let shadow be shadow again and not the dumb void thing it became.

Bottom line tl:dr is. Classes have strayed far off course from what their original design and class fantasy was. In the process they have been pruned and homogenized to keep the PVE crowd happy. Not everyone needs the same stamina/armor. Not everyone needs kicks, self heals, stuns, hyper mobility.

What made classes unique once, what made the playstyle fun is gone. Along with the abilities that might have originally drawn you to the class.

This is something that effects all of WoW. No one is happy where their classes are at, talent tree design, wonky scaling on abilities. Even worse ontop of all this is the failure to seperate PVE and PVP gear. The experiment failed. Bring back resil and 2/4 set bonus on PVP items. Give us the option to buy the piece we want.
IE. Every PVP piece has resil on it once again. You get one other secondary on it, let us buy the version we want, or better have have an NPC that will put the stat on it we want, haste/versa/mast, etc etc.

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i remember watching some skill capped video of Lyric or w/e in cata or wrath and used to think stance dancing warriors that would charge intercept intervene everywhere were so cool

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Yes, class design has been extremely poor for a long time now.

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Honestly thats what originally inspired me to play warrior. It def created quite the skill ceiling in the class. Seeing warriors who were masters of dancing/intervening stuff was impressive.

Class design and class fantasy go hand in hand. In blizzards attempt to have everyone doing (Ideally) the same dps it got tossed into the gutter.

It took away what made specs shine. Wotlk MM was a great example. Even cata mm (barring the horrible damage at release) I miss playing mine personally when you hit that magic arpen number and felt lethal to even plate. RIP readiness and double deterr

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is there any class more c.cked than warrior? They’ve lost everything and now they re just annoying damage bots with mortal strike.

Maybe aff locks from MOP glory days

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Honestly mages are up there with warrs. Were reduced to gimmicks like gpyro/shimmer and spamming no damage fillers for lightup procs.

Fire especially suffers because its been balancing around gpyro/shimmer in bfa.
We do awful PVE dps compared to everyone else. Our damage outside combust is absent. So were left spamming gpyro over and over since if we sat there and dps’d you with flamecannon/controlled burn PVE rotation most hybrids could comfortably heal through it while their healer sat in a full poly/repoly.

Fire lost the ability to cast arcane/frost offensive spells. Lost its slow. Lost its damage. Most of its talent sucks. all azerite traits are nerfed. Fireball is a 2.2 baseline cast that does 6k damage…

People think we enjoy walking around being one tricks with gpyro + combust popping instants + meteor. Sure its nice but the 2 minutes outside of it aren’t enjoyable and I don’t think any fire mage actually enjoys what the class has devolved into. On that note anyone who knows me will tell you i rarely if EVER use shimmer since I detest the talent and pref normal blink.

I’d be more then happy to give up the gimmick its become to actually do damage again and have a niche.

Arcane is a wonky 2 button spec that no mage enjoys anymore. Frost is kinda up there the same with the filler spam garbage.

All 3 mage talent trees have way too many dead/pointless talents so your forced a bit into cookie cutter specs since everything is horrible/pointless/makes no sense

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tbh when i see hansol vs jahmilli video thats what I think fire mages should be

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Seriously look at every talent row of fire. You’ll start to understand. Then we have honor talents like Tinder and World in Flames that make you go ???

World in flames - reduce the cast time of flamestrike by 1.25 seconds and increase its damage by 20% , Flamestrike is a 4 second baseline cast AOE. ???

Tinder: If you have not cast fireball for 8 seconds, your next fireball will deal 30% increased damage and have a reduced 50% cast time. ???

Tinder alone makes no sense when you think about it. Since fireball is our main damage/filler spell we cast over and over. Tinder is useable as it is because of Gpyro and encourages the gpyro playstyle.

All 3 specs also need a mastery rework ontop of the talent/playstyle issues.

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I only recently got my mage to 120 but I want to start playing it

But yea I think the instant cast playstyle is way better than gpyro gimmick

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The last time I heard “class fantasy” we ended up with legion class design

pretty sure blizzard’s idea of class fantasy is what ruined it in the first place

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All 3 mage specs just need a core rework really. Rotation/abilities/talent trees/mastery.

Its just a mess and the dev team has resorted to aura buffs/nerfs instead of addressing whats fundamentally wrong with each spec and the class itself.

Outwardly people who don’t play mages think were op/broken or fun. Then you play one and try to do m+/raids as fire and really get a taste for bottom of the barrel.

You do arena into something like DK/DH/Rdruid 3s or worse an rsham with them and really see how annoying it is to even play a mage. Run around without gpyro just like flamecannon/firestarter or controlled burn and temp shield and you’ll really get a taste for how bad it feels lol. If you wanna experience rock bottom run those 3 honor talents and see how many duels you can actually win vs any class/spec. You might be able to cheese dummys with a combust but nothing beyond that really.

Welcome to gpyro spam or do no damage life

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“Class fantasy” is what led to current day designs.

I agree with a lot of what you said and reading it it seems you basically just want tbc/wotlk class design which is agreeable. Classes are too similar nowadays and lack depth/complexity/uniqueness.

Rogue used to be sooo fun and interesting back in the day. I’d see all these decked out rogues pulling off all these skilled plays and it made me want to be better - the ceiling was so high. It was also my one main and I didn’t play anything else. Now I have to play a ton of alts as I lose interest in classes so fast these days.

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I just miss small stuff, even looking at mop it still had mana gems, mage armors etc… evo heal was also super nice, and just because you were frost, not EVERY single ability on your bar had to be frost.

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Sub rogue was one of the coolest things to me, lost a lot of what it used to be. Seeing people do crazy outplays is what made me want to play sub and never look back. I still play sub but its a former shell of what it used to be.

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Mages have never been about sustained damage.

Like legit never has that been the description. Its always specialized in burst and instants. Its especially why Mages have/Had close to no dots

The whole reason why poly heals your target is because if the mage fails to burst they must set it up again.

Warlocks are the inverse and are suppised to be sustained. Hence DoTs and fear damage threshold while being tanky.

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I agree with class fantasy being a focus. Legion was a MASSIVE lie and had literally nothing to do with CLASS fantasy, Legion was entirely about SPEC fantasy while gutting anything that tied the specs together.

Mage was sort of the preview of that philosophy change back in WoD, when they pruned all the abilities from the different elements. For example, in MoP every Mage spec had Shatter and Deep Freeze. Frost was the best at it because they were Frost spells. WoD removed Deep Freeze/Shatter from Arcane and Fire, along with abilities like Ice Lance and Blizzard because they weren’t core Arcane/Fire abilities despite how situationally useful they were.

Back before Legion, classes were classes, with the specialization adding a focus on a certain element of that class. Legion turned every spec into its own class, and then shoved the “class fantasy” lie down our throats.

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Mages used to hit hard consistently. We had much less hp/armor as a result. Our burst and sustained was quite high though.

IN TBC I had a good chunk less hp then a warlock but I did way more sustained damage if I was free casting. SL/SL locks at the time were just dumb tanky

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frost 100% needs some form of non-spammable hard cc whether its deep freeze or something entirely new like something comparable to lock coil. Just something. No reason for it to not have a stun.

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I made a post a long time on the original forums about this topic OP. I agree with you, but I doubt we will ever go back to those days.

Homogenization was done because of the amount of QQ from the playerbase that X class/spec was being taken to specific dungeons/raids over X class/spec simply because of certain abilitiess/utility.

Back when Bloodlust was shaman only and shaman totems were incredibly useful, Innervate/multiple HoTs was Druid only etc. Not saying I agree with that reasoning that they gave us back then, but that’s what it is. As for pruning, they will always make changes based on their largest demographic. That demographic, whether we like it or not, is primarily casual.

I can’t tell you how many times I read posts years and years ago, where people complained about the amount of abilities they had to organize on their action bars, the macros they needed to create etc.

For people in PVP, this wasn’t really an issue, but PVP was and still is an afterthought when it comes to those topics.

I’d also like Blizz to stop the effing “destroy build destroy” design philosophy. Like they literally have done complete reworks/overhauls to the game/class/spec design for the last few expansions when it was not necessary at all. There’s so many patches where it feels like they are just putting it out to make more work for themselves lol.

Idk, I’ve talked to so many people about this, people who are Multi glad PVPers to the Filthy casuals like myself, and we all come to same conclusion, we’ve gone past the point of no return.

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How about we just revert classes to Cata and move on from there? Guess monks and dhs can go to their original state (with some number tuning).

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