Am I a minority in feeling like the game is more fun when class damage is more consistent across the board where you CD’s raise your damage a little bit as opposed to how it is now where your consistent damage is garbage until your pop your CD’s every few minutes where it SPIKES hard and DIPS hard when the CD’s are over? Gameplay being centered around cool downs is not fun imo. I used to be a guy who LOVED PvP many years ago but since MoP I’ve only came to try out each expansion only to quit not long after. Shadowlands is the first expansion I played majority all the way through and I’ve done nothing but PvE because current class design is actually not fun whatsoever for PvP.
I feel like the game was at it’s peak during original Wrath because class design was at it’s peak in both PvE AND PvP. It got me thinking about why this is the case.
Playing Classic, a little bit of TBC classic, now Wrath pre-patch and also playing retail over the past couple of years made me realize what retail WoW is lacking. Fun class design. Too many classes can do similar things. The homgenization of class design over the years is too much. Self healing over the board is out of control. Playing strictly around cool downs is so boring. The game was more fun when you DIDN’T have CD’s and you were still able to potentially kill players. Now? If your opponent doesn’t have big CD’s up you really don’t have much to worry too much. It’s not like this for EVERY spec but it is for the majority.
I feel like Dragonflight talent trees is a step in the right direction but class BASELINE damage and healing needs to be higher. Your talent points shouldn’t increase your dmg/healing by A LOT, but a little bit sure. I think talent trees should be made in mostly having fun/cool utility options and maybe a couple of talents that increase player power instead of trees that increase player power a lot. I’ve seen some talent trees where there are options to increase damage on some abilities by 10-30%… That’s way too much.
As I stated before, baseline damage and healing need to be higher for all classes and cool down damage and healing need to be much lower. You should be able to FEEL when you pop your trinkets and major cooldowns but it should not be the CENTER of your class design/game play.
Regardless of which feels better, burst damage almost always is functionally better to have due to mechanics that create uptime limits or vulnerability windows.
I personally feel like 1 and 2 minute burst windows are ideal and am very annoyed when class design has multiple dps cd’s that don’t divide evenly (looking at you, early SL 2minute convoke and 3 minute celestial alignment / berserk).
A few classes, including moonkin and feral, are seeing their burst windows get a little flatter in Dragonflight.
I like classes that have a few shorter CD damage cooldowns. It makes it where you always have something you can press and your damage doesn’t sink too low. Some classes do really high damage during CD’s and then very little damage without them and I try to avoid that situation
I think there’s a healthy balance between the two. The problem is it feels like the pendulum has swung too far with a lot of classes getting a lot forced into burst windows to the point of overflowing.
100% correct. There definitely is a healthy balance and the pendulum has been on the side of cool down damage for 3? 4 expansions now? I’d love to get back to a place where when I press my buttons without cool downs up that I actually can still do damage instead of waiting on cd’s all the time.
Yeah, like I said there’s a couple of specs this doesn’t apply too. I mained ele all of shadowlands and they are the same way. It’s the reason why I’m playing Ele on retail currently, because I actually do damage when I press buttons and my cool down damage isn’t insane.
It’s a bunch of things. It’s that CD stacking is a thing now. It’s that every over spec has some type of immunity. It’s that casting is no longer meaningful. The game literally rewards specs for tunneling. Think about that. It’s rewarding players for ignoring everything else…
I’d rather have mediocre cooldowns with good sustain damage outside of them than be cooldown reliant. Just the playstyle I prefer. Part of the reason why I enjoy hunter is the fact that my DPS outside of CDs still feels good.
Yeah, I’m not quite sure what it’s about. Tunneling is definitely not rewarded, unless you consider being able to AFK while waiting for a rez rewarding.
I’d consider “committing” different than “tunneling,” and committing is definitely a thing. It’s like ignoring Shuri on the last boss of streets because he’s so low you may as well take the “he dies or we die” gamble.
Playing my frost Mage I do roughly equal damage as my destro Warlock on a long fight, but because it’s consistent damage rather than burst damage, it feels weak. Especially on short encounters where the lock’s burst damage hits like a truck and the Mage feels pathetically slow.
The exception to me is healing, where I want steady, predictable output.
I’m a huge fan of more consistent damage profiles.
Having a button to make damage go through the roof temporarily feels nice, but centering class designs around that is a mistake because it means that your spec is garbage when the cooldown isn’t available and in situations the cooldown isn’t well suited for.
I would trade current mage design for the more consistent WotLK/Cata versions in a heartbeat. Would take the MoP version if I had to but I hate how MoP was the first step in neutering cross-speccing.
Ok. Some of those aren’t immunities as generally seen. Some are very niche immunities.
I mean. You might as well add shaman there with reincarnation. Which isn’t an immunity.
If you want to imply everyone has an immunity, but you are equating movement immunity with cc immunity…thats an inherently dishonest discussion. Because you are trying to imply one thing, while pushing something else much much different.
Cool. A healer in pvp is a very narrow aspect of WoW gameplay.
Cool. Fury and Outlaw are very narrow aspects of WoW gameplay.
Cool. This isn’t a pvp thread, and pvp gameplay is a very narrow aspect of WoW gameplay.
So I guess long story short, when you say WoW is all of these things. What you really mean is a small part of WoW is some of these things under very narrow confines.
So yeah.
I stand by my initial statement. I disagree with nearly everything you said.
I can see this for ret paladin and fire mage given both do absurd amounts of damage during wings and combustion. Then do nothing at all outside of either ability which means they both suffer for that reason as a result.
As for other classes the core issue is how CDs simply do not line up well at all. Take affliction warlock, you had dark soul: misery which was a 2 minute CD, soul rot that’s a one minute CD. Then you have summon darkglare that was on a 3 minute CD. The biggest issue was back when I used to play affliction you literally had to map out whether you could use everything on CD, or hold things intentionally to line them up. Like for instance in the case of aff lock you used everything on pull, then depending on the fight length determined whether or not you held misery for darkglare and vice versa. In which in some cases you lost casts of misery or darkglare given you pretty much had to lone both up with each other. Along with some CDs having a 1.5 second CD, trinekts are the worst offenders for this…Which simply felt really bad, in which they need to make CD’s line up better.
Like having 2 minute and 3 minute CDs is a terrible design, in that they do not line up well at all ever, compared to like 2 and 4 minute CDs, and then 1 minute CDs that will always line up well.
To me most classes are fine burst and sustain wise, minus ret and fire. Yet the lining up issue with CDs has been horrible honestly and needs to be redone to line up better.