I think people underestimate the number of keybinds you can assign to a controller in wow even currently. On an XBox controller, leaving the left analog stick for movement and right analog stick for the camera, you have 14 total buttons you can re-assign: 4 directions on d-pad, “select” (“back”/“view”) and “start” (“menu”), ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘X’, ‘Y’, left trigger, right trigger, “L3” (left-analog click), and “R3” (right-analog click). Combined with left shoulder button and right shoulder button as button key modifiers (individually and with both left shoulder and right shoulder in combined presses), you have access to 56 keybinds on one XBox controller (and other controllers may have more available buttons, don’t know). Now…you most likely want some of those for menus, targeting, etc., but it’s still not a huge cut down from the 5 action bars (60 total slots) I’ve always used though it is admittedly quite a bit less than the 8 action bars (96 slots) we can use in DF. Fifty-six is mostly enough for casual play though.
If WoW came to console, I would hope they would allow the trigger-as-modifiers to be double-tapped like FF14’s double-tap W-cross hot bars. That would expand the number of possible button+trigger combinations by 14x3=42 for a total of 98 bindable button/button-combinations.
Because of a shoulder problem, I used a controller, much of the time with just my left hand over the past few months. I’ve gone back to using keyboard+mouse more fairly recently, but I’m still using the controller sometimes. Although I just defended the number of buttons available on a controller, I really don’t enjoy using one in this game much (even some casual content is annoying with one just with how the game works…good luck doing any of the climbing world quests without throwing the controller through your screen), especially if you want to heal even in very casual situations. Ally targeting in WoW is not a very good fit for a controller though DPS or tanking in a casual setting is a bit better. I think the game would need changes to targeting and maybe other areas to be good enough for even all casual content let alone more challenge content. However, I’m not a game designer and have no opinion on how to get to the state it needs to be for controller-based play to get to the spot where it would need to be to minimize complaints. Also, a lot of the good with using a controller in WoW/Wow-Classic is because of the improved setup with using the Console Port add-on even…and not Blizz’s own bare-bones implementation.
Here’s a post a bit over a month ago where I talked a little bit about how I felt after about 4 weeks of using a controller and trying to do some random battleground healing: