Please be thoughtful about how you are designing SoD and the new abilities you are releasing. To be clear, new abilities are a good thing, but they need to be implemented with care.
The OG WoW Developers understood that utility and abilities should have both Pros and Cons. To give just two examples, Stealth is incredibly powerful, but it can be broken easily, slows your movement, and has other abilities (like dots and flare) to counteract it. Another example is how Hunters deal damage. While dealing physical from ranged is incredibly powerful, they were at least limited with a dead zone and had to stutter step so they weren’t 100% mobile.
I can already see some poor design choices creeping into SoD, and it is going to screw up how the game functions. Right now, I’m playing balance Druid, and so I’ll offer to new abilities from its kit.
First, Wild Growth. This ability really does fit in nicely to the Rdruid’s toolbox, but how it was implemented is going to hurt the game. It’s an instant cast full party heal that does just an absolutely bonkers amount of healing. Since it is a massive, aoe heal, it should 100% require a cast time and on top of that, that cast time should be slow. Like 4 seconds.
Second, Starsurge. This is an instant ability with a 41 yard range and for all purposes costs zero mana. It also hits like a truck. This is actually the perfect example of an ability with only Pros, and no Cons. It either needs to cost a lot of mana, have a shorter range, have a cast time, or deal more damage based on the number of dots the target has (so 1, it’s worse for Rdruids because they don’t have Sunfire, and 2, it requires some setup).
There needs to be Setup and there needs to be Cognizant Thought in your game. When you design abilities like Wild Growth and Starsurge, you then have to design encounters to become more and more ridiculous to meet the absurd power of players. In my opinion, this just leads to one huge cluster in both PvP and PvE where both become just one, long Socker Boppers slugfest. I (and I’m sure many others) like Vanilla because it feels like Chess. You make moves and anticipate. You understand resourse management is very important, as is knowledge of boss mechanics so you can be prepared You don’t just mash buttons without thought.
To be clear, I am loving SoD. The original game 100% needed some sprucing up. I just hope there’s some forethought going into these choices so we don’t end up back at retail. The game should feel slow. Abilities shouldn’t always just have Pros. Long cast times, setup, resource management (the Cons) are important to keep the game steady.
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