As long as every spec plays distinctly, every spec having a similar amount of keys would have no impact on being boring or not.
Generally the people that want lots of buttons aren’t doing difficult content. I’ve never seen a Brewmaster with cutting edge talk about loving all the buttons they have.
You definitely see it in their raid design, where every fight has a different dev. No one at the top bothers to ask the question “how many pulls should this raid take a top 100 guild?” I doubt 1000+ was the answer anyone at Blizzard thought was the right one.
If every spec has the same limit, it would impact how much diversity you can have. It depends on the amount of buttons, but if they have to design every spec to work with 15 buttons we would get a lot of similar specs. Especially when half of those buttons would be some form of defensive, utility, offensive cd, interrupt and mobility.
There is no way to prove this one way or another, but I would bet that top players are less bothered by the amount of buttons they have to deal with compared to LFR player.
In regards to Brewmaster, the complaint isn’t just the number of buttons, but also that so many of them are just set-ups, or require set-ups, so don’t feel impacted.
Breath of Fire doesn’t do anything unless you’ve Keg Smashed.
Weapons of Order doesn’t do much until you Keg Smash 4 times, afterwards.
Bonedust Brew doesn’t do anything at all (by itself).
Rushing Jade Wind doesn’t do much, but you’re supposed to hit it every 9 seconds. That’s a lot of GCD’s for not a lot of payoff.
Spinning Crane Kick gives you shuffle but doesn’t reduce brew time.
The single-target equivalent (Tiger Palm) reduces brew time but doesn’t give you Shuffle. Because why would you want any of it to be consistent and make sense?
Blackout Combo’s cool, unless you click Purifying Brew afterwards, which is deliberately inserted as a “skill trap” to make you waste your Blackout Combo. Which is worse because Purifying Brew isn’t even on the GCD.
I actually think being 42 likely means you handle a larger set of keybinds a lot better than most younger gamers. When I see what my nephews play, it’s usually something along the lines of 5-6 keybinds, not 20+ or 30+.
The recent Plunderstorm event, for instance, felt like WoW wanting to pop up on the radar for younger gamers. Aside from normal movement keys, that mode has 6 keybinds (basic attack, heal, two primary spells, two utility spells).
I can see Blizzard misconstruing all these button bloat topics and eventually all classes having 4 or 5 skills like those terrible Action mmos, seriously, macros exists people should use them.
You’ve articulated how you feel very well here.
I to an extent agree that there are many many buttons. Hopefully they give us a few more passive options or consider your thread.
I actually believe that your comfort level (for number of keybinds) is significantly higher than that of the average player. If I had to guess, I’d say that the comfort level for the number of keybinds of the average player is below 20, which is still more than most other games require.
A tip to make shift or alt combinations more accessible: Unless you have use for the Capslock key, you can rebind it to Shift or Alt, which makes shift or alt combinations more accessible. The easiest way to do this is with Microsoft PowerToys (free from Microsoft), but there are other ways too that modify the registry and don’t require PowerToys to run.
Thanks to all the people who have responded positively and with suggestions on how to deal with it. I appreciate it, and wish I could respond to each one, but for some reason the forum only lets me send one reply a day (or maybe until someone else responds?).
Many of the responses are just one guy trolling me for not being very good at the game, which I already admitted to, but the rest are insightful and I have enjoyed reading them.
I think few things worth clarifying, which I may not have conveyed well initially:
I do already use modifiers (ALT and SHIFT). My main/active/core rotation on elemental shaman is 1-4, ALT 1-4, and SHIFT 1 (not including cooldowns, defensives, etc.)
I only have buttons on my bar (and included in this analysis) that I will use multiple times each dungeon. The only exceptions would be the very situational totems like earth bind and tremor. The vast majority of the buttons on my bar are used every fight (or maybe every other fight). I am not just including every spell that I have.
I am not looking for a “three button rotation”. I enjoy the “bushfire” build of elemental shaman which has around 9 to 10 buttons used in the active/core rotation (not including cooldowns - unless you consider magma totem a cooldown). But this is very close to my limit, and adding two more buttons to that rotation for “mountains will burn” pushes me beyond my limit. This is why I chose elemental as my example.
Some people have accused me of being a troll hiding behind an alt on the forum. I thought I spelled out my experience reasonably in the post, and only posted on this character because it is the one I am currently playing, but if you want to look at my “main” it is Mooshie on the same server. I have it linked in my Raider IO profile as well… though frankly I am not sure why people are wanting this as I am neither trying to claim I am very good or very bad. “Middling” is right in the title
It’s when people make this suggestion that can drive me up the wall. Storm build can be less buttons (no totemic recall or liquid magma totem) but it’s not even viable in the current season or coming season. If a tier set makes a class more complex I don’t think the solution is to reroll.
This is my problem with my shaman (main) also. My main spec is resto, and if I could get away with it, I would play that exclusively, but it’s generally beneficial to have a dps off-spec as some of my friends also play healers.
Enhancement is out of the question, I can’t play that spec at a reasonable level of competence (button bloat is an issue here as well), so that leaves me with elemental. The current (and S4 again) tier set gives me no options at all. It’s bushfire or I don’t even need to play elemental in M+ or the heroic raid. I don’t really like the feel of that build, but it’s that or no dps spec. I really wish tier set bonuses were a little more versatile and didn’t lock you into a specific build.
To clarify, it isn’t about physical comfort. I was just visualizing my comfort/ability based on how many slots on my bar I need to fill up with buttons.
Perhaps bringing specific keybinds in to the discussion was a mistake.
To be clearer:
I am very comfortable with a main rotation that is 7 to 9 buttons. When the main rotation is 10 to 12 buttons it starts to be too much for me to keep track of mentally. It is only when it is also a relatively high APM class that 10 to 12 would also become physically uncomfortable.
I am also comfortable with this main rotation being augmented with an additional 6 to 8 cooldowns, and can easily deal with 10 to 12 if some of them are fairly long cooldowns.
It helps a lot if these are relatively evenly split between cc /self-heal / defensive /offensive. It is harder for me to keep track of if there are really skewed towards one category (e.g. a class that only has 1 offensive cooldown but 5 defensives).
I think this is an important point. It’s not just the mechanical demands of pressing many different buttons, it’s also the “mental bandwidth” needed to track and process all the information and make split second decisions all the time. It’s exhausting. Pressing the buttons is only part of it; it’s the whole package that I feel is just too much.
I want to say that this is doubly concerning because WoW has an older player base than many other multiplayer games, but all the very popular games played by on average younger people all have fewer buttons to press!
A useful indicator for the state of button bloat and rotation complexity (not necessarily the same, but usually tightly related in case of WoW), might also be the popularity of rotation helpers.
Hekili currently sits at 35 million downloads, which puts it into the top 40 of all add-ons, and it is climbing. There is quite apparently a very significant number of players out there who are overwhelmed by some of the current DPS specs’ rotations (including the amount of information the player needs to track) and resort to an add-on that tells them what buttons to press at any given time.
Mental bandwidth is a great way to put it, and the point about visual indicators is an important too.
Part of the reason I like Elemental Shaman so much, particularly the fire builds, is how well the visual indicators convey the most important procs. It is one of the few class I can perform adequately on without WA to help track my main resources/auras.
Frost Mage is another good example of great visualize indicators.
But even those two examples are imperfect, as there are still many rules that you need to follow that are not clearly visualized (such as Magma Chamber).
I think one of the reasons Final Fantasy seems to perform better with players who are new to MMOs (be they young or otherwise) is that you can, for the most part, completely understand the combat in that game without the need for addons. This is achieved through excellent visualization (some classes in that game have even more buttons than WoW - though the pace of combat is much slower). We are too far down the add-on path with WoW for that to be a reality, and I am not sure I would advocate making WoW and add-on free game, but more effort could be put in to using visualization to make rotations more intuitive and accessible. In my opinion should be able to get 90% of the way there in terms of damage/healing output without depending on addons. But I would be happy with 75% to 80% given the tracking required for some classes.
Even BM Hunter - widely considered the most accessible - requires tracking barbed shot and multi-shot if you are going to be competitive. Fury Warrior is a great counter example where you need to track whirlwind but can do this by simply counting to four abilities used (as opposed to multi-shot where you have to track a time window).
But what is the issue with just setting up WA? You can download a premade one or you can make your own, it takes less than 10 minutes to setup your ui in a way you like and it will last you pretty much forever.
I agree button bloat is a problem but for different reasons.
The high end PvE of this game caters way too much to extreme players for way too long. Less capable players should be able to beat content late into the expansion. Not for free mind you, but with plenty of help of buffs/nerfs or whatever as time goes on.
Class skill demand plays immensely into that. With the right PvE changes, EZ specs could be theory crafted, and not so great players could go from 40% damage to at least 60%. Then they could slowly tweak out another 10% and just barely hail mary clear Mythic.
The difficulty is fine. The indefinite inaccessibility is where things seem extreme.
They do this, the last 2 bosses are no way near as difficult as they were at release, they been nerfed a lot, both in making the mechanics easier and less hp/damage.
It was taking top 100 guilds +600 wipes to kill those bosses, if it wasn’t nerfed current guilds getting the kills would never been able to do it.
