This game is not hard enough by any reasonable measurement to merit having totally baked in rotations.
RNG, as much as people like to hate on it, is what makes an MMO interesting. It’s why you have crit chance, dodge / parry chance, and etc in older RPGs too. If your gameplay is constantly changing and evolving based on random procs in your kit, interactions between abilities, and etc., then it takes a higher level of skill to pull it off properly, and skill factors majorly into your DPS – unlike now, where your DPS is 95% gear, 5% minimum competency.
It also makes the game more fun when you actually have to think about what you’re doing, rather than just turning your brain off and drooling while mashing out some rotation that’s become muscle memory and requires next to no thought or effort.
I came back to WoW after quitting at the WoD prepatch because of the talent system coming back, and Activision promising I can customize my build to play how I want – and yet every patch we’re simplifying classes, taking away talent diversity, and forcing builds I don’t find enjoyable. Why do we need to make Shadow into a 3 button drooler, instead of the frantic proc fest it was? Why do we need to take away a significant portion of Fire Mage’s RNG? Why do we need to make Holy Pally extremely slow, with minimal RNG? Why can’t I have, you know, the OPTION to keep them how they are now? And others can have the OPTION to have a simpler, more controlled spec?
It’s getting to the point I don’t even want to play anymore. Every class I pick up and enjoy gets gutted a patch later.
We can keep the talents, but i rather we have more actual input (the kind that actually requires thinking and effort) then the game automating elements of the game though RNG without any of our input. Especially loot.
Even if it means WoW becoming a bit like Dark Souls.
Okay but now imagine you have multiple of them, and they interact differently, their usage depends on target number and other procs going on, and you have an ever-shifting priority list, yeah? You never really know what’s coming up next, and how well you can adjust what you’re doing on the fly dictates how much DPS you do (or healing, or whatever).
Not every class has that much RNG going on, but Fire Mage did, for example, so did Shadow Priest. Both are being reworked to not do that, and now I’m dropping both classes – past tense for Shadow.
All that wild RNG is much more fun for me, and Activision is obsessed with taking it away. At least leaving the OPTION to keep all that RNG would be nice, you know?
Sure, make the raids and dungeons 20x harder than they are now, and that’s fine. As it is though, game is pathetically easy and that’d be very, very boring.
No, it happens on its own. But you do have to think how to use it best, and you have to do that quickly or your DPS tanks. I’m not talking just one button resetting, I’m talking old Shadow Priest, or current Fire Mage, where you have multiple layers of RNG all firing off at once.
Sorry but no matter what I’m going to look at all things that are going into the damage. Playing a “hard” classes is nothing if the fight itself isn’t breaking your focus constantly because you can just focus on doing damage. Similarly a lot of “easy” classes have niche points where the player’s skill makes a bigger difference. Keen eyed players can catch these with parsing.
Historically, I would point to Cataclysm’s arcane mage for the latter of that. The rotation and understanding was very simple, but the job got increasingly harder the less in tune a player was with their mana bar if that makes any sense. Like if you’re constantly aware of where you probably are just by second nature you did a hell of a lot better than the guy who took the “Spam Arcane Blast” mantra so seriously they evocate then burst back down to 0 mana without entering a conserve phase.
I don’t care how “hard” a rotation is, as someone who has played many classes across mmos to a fairly competent degree as far as raiding, any rotation can be performed with exposure and practice essentially to near perfection. That said, the difficulty is in keeping that going while the boss is throwing mechanics. Your Fire Mage might have a lot of procs, but if you have to move you’re not as punished by movement because you have those procs going for you. The boss isn’t randomly eating your hot streaks, they don’t last 3 seconds. Fire Mage has some of the tools it does now to guarantee crits because the spec being purely random was pissing off high level players for being the best spec that you had almost zero control over past “Stack more crit”
Okay, I’m the same story as you bro. Played a ton of MMOs and a ton of classes in every MMO in higher end content, and did good at least up to really, really well.
And there is no such thing as hard content. It can’t be done in an MMO – even Wildstar, as much as people love to whine and meme about it, was not that hard. It was engaging enough to not be boring (most of the time), but it wasn’t hard.
So I like my complexity to come from my class. Whether it’s super high APM (which doesn’t count if it’s just 2 buttons like Combat / Outlaw), or a ton of RNG, or whatever… there needs to be something to keep my attention in my class, or the game becomes extremely easy and extremely boring. That’s why I quit when the WoD prepatch came out and gutted fistweaving (which is even worse now, btw).
I tried a bunch of classes in Dragonflight (all but DH and Druid at this point) because most of them are still boring, and I found a couple I kinda liked: Hpal, Shadow Priest, Fire Mage being the big ones here.
Now? Shadow is a joke. Hpal is being dumbed down next patch to be much slower, less RNG, easier healing (a lot of it automatic now!). And Fire is having several of those layers I mentioned peeled off.
And yes, some of the guaranteed crits are nice for Fire, and you can work into a really nice flow because of them, but the whole appeal of the spec is the randomness. So why get rid of it?
??? There have been a number of historically hard fights in modern MMOs, and I mean mechanical difficulty. Not “lol the boss can fully heal and takes 20 hours to damage through because true challenge is time investment with 3 mechanics tops!” but genuine flawlessness is necessary.
As someone who got to enjoy raiding with Blood Legion during Dragon Soul and having a pretty bleeding edge background since honestly early on in the game but most pronounced in Wrath and Cata, I would easily say Dragonsong Reprise from FFXIV is the single hardest fight I have done in an MMO. The ultimate they released after (The Omega Protocol) I feel was a harder fight to learn, but executing it I would say it ends up easier than DSR…
Yet those 2 fights alone are probably the breadwinners for hardest fight I’ve fought in an MMO and that is not an unpopular opinion in gaming as a whole, pretty much just here is it unpopular. THD from Limit got a lot of flak when he retweeted something saying DSR was the hardest fight in an MMO then followed up with “Mythic doesn’t compare to this, Mythic is numbers, this is mechanics.”
I tried raiding in FFXIV when Stormblood was current. I fell asleep in O3S. I then tried UCOB just to see if it was any better, but it was more of the same – just more telegraphs at once. That was when I quit FFXIV and never looked back, though I do like the music and how the armor is its own model instead of a texture like in a lot of MMOs.
See, in FFXIV, the fights are scripted to the literal T. Everything that happens will happen exactly that way every time the fight is done ever. So, unless you have some kind of problem with memory, once you do the fight a time or two there’s no reason to not be able to do it – especially considering the classes are so braindead I could put on a blind fold and 95 parse just listening to the sounds.
And this is on top of FFXIV fights having like 5 second telegraphs.
No. One of my biggest complaints with this game since at least Legion has been the ridiculous amount of proc-reliant DPS specs. I hate it when my abilities do pathetic damage in between random procs that allow me to cause ‘real’ damage for a short period.
It’s unfun to hit like a wet noodle 60% of the time, especially when you go for a while without a proc. Procs are fine if you want to take talents that cause them, but I personally prefer to play specs that have a minimal reliance on procs and can deal decent damage on a reliable and predictable basis.
It’s not really complicated enough for this argument. It’s always going to be a flow-chart that’s already solved and invariable: “If fewer than 3 enemies, use single target proc. If 3 or more enemies, use AoE. If X buff is active, use the charge. If both X and Y buff are active, use Y before X.”
The fact that you’re constantly pressing different buttons doesn’t actually make it complex, it just makes it whack-a-mole with a bunch of annoying rules. It’s not “difficult,” it’s just annoying.
That’s always been my stance on this issue, and I’ve held it pretty steadily since at least Legion. I don’t remember WoD’s specific playstyles well enough to say whether or not I felt that way back then, too.
I just know that Legion ruined hunters for a while with all its procs and damage vulnerability window reliance. Yeah, I want Aimed Shot to deal 50% less damage at all times except for when I get a proc to use marked shot and THEN Aimed Shot to deal its intended damage. That sounds super fun.
Random procs that actually significantly change the rotation, and aren’t just a button resetting that you push the moment it does? All that’s left is Fire/Frost Mage.
