The pruning hit a lot of specs hard, but it seems to have nuked casters the most, especially mages.
Are locks and spriest the only ones with an ounce of complexity left?
TECHNICALLY Devourer is a caster and TECHNICALLY it didn’t get pruned and TECHNICALLY it has at least an ounce of complexity. 
Maybe a milligram, if we’re being generous.
To be fair there is a pretty high ceiling to this class, more than I thought at first. You can play around with stacks and timings to maximize void meta uptime and Collapsing Stars consecutive casts. and that’s an ounce more complex than the average specs I would argue. But yeah the skill floor is under sea level.
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I can see where you’re coming from in that regard, but it’s just not very fun to me to mostly spam consume and then sometimes hit my other 3 buttons before I go back to spamming consume, which is the core playstyle.
It’s about on par with fire mage and bm for the least interesting rotations in the game.
Yeah I also dislike the heavy one button consume spam, it’s the one thing keeping me away from that spec. I feel like it’s missing at least one button that would be like a “big consume” instant cast more fun to press just to add variety in the consume spam, like it still needs to generate balls, but be more cool to break the spam boredom.
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Devourer is intentionally designed to be easy, fwiw
Yeah but easy doesn’t need to be boring. And adding one button to press on CD every 8 seconds or something wouldn’t make this spec go from easy to not easy. It would still be easy.
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I wish it played more like aldrachi vengeance. That’s an actual fun spec, but you can’t really play it as a functional dps.
Something to make glaive worth using in the rotation for more than snare, one or two more cooldowns, and more agency over when to use hungering slash would be nice.
The whole combo thing they’re going for just doesn’t really work in practice and makes dev and frost mage feel worse to play than they would with independent binds on these abilities.
I think they should just make the “beckon” pvp talent baseline, that would help alot I think.
For those unaware, beckon makes it so reap makes your next consume instant cast, and generate additional souls, makes the flow of the spec much better IMO.
Yeah but it’s still the same button. I like actually physically pressing something else on the keyboard (and no I won’t fake it by just putting consume on 4 keybinds).
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It seems like the vast majority of us prefer this, but they are still doubling down on these 3-button specs as the norm.
I’m just browsing general in downtime at work, and I see threads asking for less egregious pruning multiple times a day.
Blizz set a standard for a fast-paced game with rotational depth ever since Wrath, so it’s odd to suddenly change the tune with the expectation of the new players we also didn’t retain in WoD, then they tried that before.
My guess is Blizz already know that in the future they will give more abilities, so they made room ahead of time. So they won’t back down on this pruning now.
People do seem be tired of it, though. I saw very few complaints about tww “bloat”, save a few specs like enhancement shaman, which was insanely overpruned.
I guess we are to blame, though, since we always come back eventually.
Yeah but also to some extent we have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Imagine if no pruning was ever done, would shamans still have to drop 4 totems before every fight? A lot of the pruning done in the past was good in the long run.
Getting Collapsing star off isn’t exactly a cinch.
Wrath made that require 1 button, which was a welcome change.
The issue with midnight is it’s all about taking without compensation.
Why did blast wave need to go, of all things? Shifting power?
Bonestorm?
Brewmaster losing RSK feels awful, too.
I can’t even think of an ability that needed to be removed from the game — the only objectively good changes are applying imbues automatically with lighting shield, as an example off the top of my head of consolidation done right.
That’s just painful design more so than complexity. An ability shouldn’t rely on apex talents just to function.
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See I would have thought it would be the other way around. Melees have to focus more about dodging while maintaining uptime meanwhile we get to freecast in narnia. I thought it would make more sense for us to have more to worry about rotationally.
Having more to worry about increases the skill ceiling, though.
What’s left about something like fire mage to separate someone who just picked it up for a week vs a veteran? Meteor aiming?
Arcane at least retained a bit of its identity with managing stacks, but it’s still incredibly boring compared to dragonflight.
I actually love this change. RSK clogged the rotation, if you played with rushing jade wind you would end up having too many things to do before going back to kegsmash and BOK+palm combo and breath of fire every reset, which are all higher prio than RSK and add to that the free kegsmash you get from the Apex talent, RSK was just too much in the rotation, right now you always have something to press and if you had RSK in there it would make you sit on BOK being ready or full charge of kegsmash or cap on energy or something, it’s not optimal.
I believe their goal with removing Shifting power was to streamline the cooldown management, shifting power made a lot of mage gameplay kind of “improvizing”. I personally liked that and I wish it stayed, same with blast wave, I’m with you on that.