More buttons != more difficulty. League is proof of that. If anything more buttons = earlier age carpal tunnel. I can only imagine our generation is going to have its own hand version of UFC wear and tear by 45/50. Those poor RTS players are probably already feeling it.
WoW being ludicrously hard is fine. It doesn’t have to be because of # of buttons.
The buttons aren’t anywhere near as bad as they used to be. I’m down from 96 to about 30.
If you don’t like having tools to use in situations that’s fine don’t. But some of us actually do.
shift-modifers are your friend, in fact, I don’t ever touch any button after 4, my 5 is now my z keybind
These are my keybinds.
With a little practice this is very manageable.
There are a few spec s that need looked at, yes. And I still believe that passive choices need to be brought more in line with active talents. Not the same, but closer than they are now.
Reading the whole thing, I’m seeing the first reasonable thread about too many keybinds for some specs. Usually it’s the whine of “button bloat, delete abilities.” This one is specific in that it’s not all specs, just some, that could use a once over. Enh Shaman, Windwalker. Those are the ones that jump to mind for me.
This is especially true when you look at Augvoker. It’s a simple spec to play— but difficult to master.
If you want to play at the top-end then you’ll have to get good, and that requires many keybinds. I don’t see the problem.
/sympathy from someone else who sometimes exhausts their convenient keybind options on some specs. My latest mitigation strategies are putting anything that’s not combat / time-sensitive onto Opie (addon) wheels, and doing more with the couple extra buttons on my mouse + modifier keys.
I don’t really have a complaint about this per se, but I do end up scratching my head while hearing others complain about their “two key” specs.
QFT.
Also shocked expression at a game that prides itself on exclusivity being a nightmare for new players.
As far as I can tell, every decision made for the last 14 years has been towards allowing fewer people to be able to play wow.
Its fine as it is…you can usually one use one ability at a time. Gives you time to move your hand(s) as needed between abilities.
I play Druid and im just fine with practically the same set up as you
I really don’t understand why this game has to be so hard. For instance, what makes FF14 hard is having 8 people perform a dance successfully. WoW has the same exact dance except it also has some over-the-top priorities/rotations on top of it. In FF14 you can develop a groove. In WoW, your eyes are constantly watching buffs, debuffs, cooldowns, and everything a boss/add can randomly do.
I get that folks want a stupid hard game they can rub in other players’ faces. If that’s the case then why not go play some full blown PvP game? Why continue to propel this game into the inaccessible realm for 70%+ of the player base?
I mean seriously, fighting games are right there for anyone looking for a new challenge. Tekken 8 just dropped and it’s still the same ridiculously hard game it was way back when. King of Fighters 13 is right there waiting for more players to give it a shot (14 and 15 kinda ruined the difficulty). Skullgirls is 100% fun and absolute bs at the same time. Marvel vs Capcom 3 is picking up. I could go on.
Why plague this game with extreme levels of difficulty. It’s meant to be a social game and all this hardcore inaccessibility only serves to push players away.
A combination of a Razer keypad, 19 button mouse, and two Elgato foot pedals can cover just about everything.
I could never get the hang of using a keyboard for keybinds so I found a work around. May be easier on the hands too.
The keypad gives you a 4 way D-pad along with spacebar and an extra button above, all used with your thumb. It also has an extra scroll wheel that can be set as key presses. I use scroll forward and back as hotkeys for defensives that need to be hit quickly.
Foot pedals give you 3 extra keys each. I usually find myself sitting back and not using them when relaxing though.
I can’t think of any boss or challenge in any game that takes professional gamers 400+ tries to down it. Even community made ones like iron man/found/nuzlock and similar. “Watch me solo halo legendary difficulty using just the starter pistol” kinda stuff.
Even that guy who throws pins into things from 30 yards away usually gets it in less tries.
Wows difficulty dilation drives people away.
The game isn’t that hard unless you step into mythic or push really high M+ keys.
Most of the content is pretty easy to get around.
Some specs might be a bit too complex but you can still play many easy specs like ret paladin or bm hunter. People just want enough to feel like what they’re doing matter and while some specs might be a bit too far there are many options.
Personally I’ve tried FF14 and class design has been totally destroyed after Shadowbringer rework. So much destroyed that the only variation between parses is how much crit and direct hit you do. Moreover 8 man is kinda boring in my opinion.
Most content is very accessible if anything a problem in wow is how everything is too accessible. They made everything so acessible that mythic raiding is mostly there for cosmetics and the challenge as you can get pretty much as good gear outside of it doing +18s which are pretty easy in comparison.
I’d argue that a big part of being social in this game is playing with your guild and that most guilds that push content are still more social than most players in the game.
I’m not a fan of monolithic posts so I’ll try to sum it all up.
I think you and a lot of folks always like to assume everything is out-geared. Well, that’s not always the case. That means M+ 7 can be a roadblock, then M+ 10, then M+ 13, then M+ 14, and so on. That journey is just as important as the start and the finish. Even more so important I’d argue.
The skill level you have makes that journey easier or harder. If you’re a great player it’s a sinch, albeit annoying. If you’re not so great, it’s rather painful. “Carry me please” painful.
This game doesn’t need to be so hard that the journey hurts the average player.
I only brought FF14 up as a reference. It masters the ability to bring high and low level players together. The same can hardly be said for WoW. We, the players, can remediate that by choosing who we play with. Unfortunately the bitter reality is, this game is way too hard for a good number of us.
More than 75% of characters that do one M+ have done a key over +14. 40% have done a +20 or over.
People have done +20s in 450 gear early on gear matters but not to the extreme a lot of people would think at least in this season of M+.
It is normal for content to get harder as you progress and yes the skill of the player should matter in their journey as you want players to feel involved in their progression.
This isn’t a very hard game outside of the top, most of the time people just do not want to spend as much time playing the game and doing said progression. That’s happening because they have made the game so much accessible so people don’t meet any roadblock till endgame and aren’t ready for it.
WoW is bigger than 1-2 mythic bosses per tier that are insanely hard and get later nerfed.
My son plays Geometry Dash and routinely will put in 800-1000 tries per level. Some of the levels in that game are more difficult than anything I’ve ever done in WoW and all it is is clicking the screen.
Easy way to combat keybind complexity is to just not bind anything and click everything instead 
I’ve done some fairly high level fighting game stuff in my time. 1-frame transitions, minimal frame-buffer inputs (Links and whatnot), 50/50’s, left/right cross ups, unblockables, and all that jazz. It feels great and amazing at the same time even as I get on in my years.
WoW feels like it’s trying too hard to reach that point. Worse, it feels like the players are trying to push it there. I don’t think WoW is impossibly hard by any means (Or even remotely close to your example or some of the fighting game I’ve played) but I think it doesn’t need to be as hard as it is currently. And that’s coming from someone who loves hard games.
First and foremost this game should be some degree of social experience. Difficulty should come second. All this 2024 keybinds, debuff watching, buff management stuff just feels like too much to make the game feel social like it should be.
I mean half the groups I join for high-end M+ are just plain rude. I’d rather M+ 15 be the end game and play with some moderately decent players than all that.
Pugging since crossrealm has always been more toxic, but it was done again because they wanted to push accessibility. Having to form your own group and not having tons of people you can be replaced with does form stronger links but that isn’t something Blizzard has prioritized. What they prioritized is getting you into that content and whatever happens happens. That’s why so many people choose to mostly only play with guilds. I don’t pug most of my M+ keys unless I have to. Even if mythic raiding is hard I have the most social experience there because everything outside of my guild can be pretty bad.