Cooldowns, the bane of class design

Community General Discussion
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Once upon a time, classes had far less cooldowns and normal rotations felt more impactful.

Abilities gave direct impact when pressed, the ratio upon which balacing occurred was centered around said rotational abilities.

These buttons felt good to press and were the reason why so many players “mained” classes.

Fastforward a decade or so and the number of cooldowns, both offensive and defensive, tripled if not quadrupled.

To those thinking , more cds = more stuff to press , that’s true. However , is it truly fun? Is this cd meta a more enjoyable experience overall?

Let’s look at it from the pov of toolkit balance. If you’ve got 5 abilities in your rotation and no cooldowns, the balancing will occur with those 5 abilities in mind, so the overall power of those 5 abilities is 100% of your damage.

100/5 = 20% per ability on average, though some might be higher or lower the overall remains 100% of your overall power.

As you insert a cd into this equation you will have no choice but to substract and distribute %s around to accomodate the increased power, your overall power does not increase, it is all relative to the entire toolkit and will always be balanced around said toolkit.

As you add more and more cooldowns, you further dilute the pool of %s within the toolkit, until you reach the point where we are now, abilities outside of cds feel like a light breeze and the only real time you get to deal meaningful damage is during those cd windows.

Now why is this problematic? The reason is simple, you only get to have fun every (insert cd length) mins and outside of that you are just waiting, why can’t we have fun all the time? Well there is your answer!

So long as cds exist in their current form, blizzard will never be able to make classes truly enjoyable again.

Sure, fun is subjective but a quick check into every single class forums, every streamer, etc. Has shown that there are issues with all classes that players tend to voice their opinions about, buff this nerf that, it’s aimless banter towards dissatisfaction with the current design even if these opinions aren’t properly structured.

There is a saying in design, less is more. But currently class design seems to have veered quite off course on that one.

There needs to be far less cds in general, rotational cds should never reach the 30s mark and big cds should never reach 2 mins, there shouldn’t be a world where we have to stack multiple cds to deal damage as it is entirely redundant, having 20 cds macro’d into one is still only one button that is severely diluting your power and enjoyment of the class outside of said window.

Please bring back fun and simpler designs!

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Always been a fan of more modifiers that slightly tweak things rather than a host of extra ability with many cooldowns which force you to macro things together or install extra weak aura to keep track of it all.

It’s all just a bit convoluted and will never pull in newer players into the game.

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I concur wholeheartedly, iirc it was around Pandaria when dumping everything into a CD window started to become a thing.
Blizard made the right move to gut extended melee range, I doubt their competence to balance so many classes it would make sense to de-emphasise CDs and focuse to balance issues, and to a extent, over performers in the defense department.

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Yes they should. It engages players to press new buttons every so often. The actual issue is when those 30s CDs don’t do anything significant. In which case, you are well within your right to not press them.

Then where is the fun? “If everyone is super, no one is” -Syndrome

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Classic Era and Cata Classic and SOD Classic are all available.

Personally, I’m glad that there’s a couple specs that are very simple (BM hunter, for example), but I find joy in complexity, and knowing that I am doing a rotation better than someone else.

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I think cooldowns are fine, and it all depends on implementation and how much damage is tied to them.

Generally speaking I think it’s healthy if you can do like 75% of your normal damage without CD’s and then those windows give you surges. If you were to look at a damage timeline, the best experience should be rolling hills rather than massive peaks and valleys.

Regarding bad design, Unholy DK would be a prime example with current DF design, or venthyr boomkin in shadowlands.

I think they’re moving away from such a heavy reliance on it, so players get this feeling of power with CDs and without making everything else worthless to press.

I do however think there’s a niche place for them to carve out with talent trees where some specs will have options to load more damage into short CD windows. There’s so much untapped potential in talent trees still it’s nuts.

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Let me give you an example as to why i believe you are mistaken.

Using your current class, the warlock, assuming you are doing a dungeon and decide to use whichever sub 1 min cd on a pull, be it vile taint, phantom singularity, vilefiend, soulrot…etc, you will in fact enjoy yourself using the “short cd” rotation of your spec ( assuming your bigger cds have already been used at some point prior and are cooling).

You have cleared said pull at any point in the dungeon and you are now facing a new pull, you still don’t have your cds back and have no choice but to use the weakest form of your rotation.

In this specific scenario, which of the following gives you most enjoyment? The wait between cds or the usage of said cds? Is there , at any point, a situation where you would rather not have said cds up if you could? Assuming you could have all of these short cds a tad shorter to be used on every pack rather than every other, wouldnt that feel better from a fun pov?

Your opinion is based on the cadence of fun/notfun/fun/notfun gameplay, rather than just fun all of the time.

As for the " you cant have fun all of the time" analogy, i disagree. Fun in a video game is largely tied to combat, it is entirely disconnected from numerical values. The rotations create the asthetics we fall in love with, the animations tied to said abilities and visuals, having less of that is subtracting from the overall enjoyment not pacing it.

If you find you are more tied to numerical values than the asthetics then you do not truly enjoy said class, only it’s relative strength in the meta.

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The Dragonflight/TWW talent trees really should be a way to avoid button/CD bloat at least optionally but in many cases not taking a certain cooldown is just a mistake you’re making if you avoid it in the tree.

It seems like they could fix that by adding more passive choice talents that are meant to compensate for not taking certain cooldowns.

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I wholeheartedly agree.

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I actually really like having big-hitters on cool down, that I can’t use all of the time. If ALL of my damage was just rotational, then it’s literally the same damage curve for the duration of a fight. That’s not strategic. That’s insipid, and wholly uninspiring.

It sounds like you want Nascar. The rest of us want Formula 1.

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This was a while ago, but when the devs were speaking of talent design (I believe it was like MoP/WoD era) they said that passive talents should be close to active talents, but always below active talents, as those are a sign of skill and being able to handle more active abilities. That additional complexity should be rewarded and provide the best dps (or healing, or tanking).

The passives, though, should be somewhat close.

I imagine if you went for all passives and didn’t take any cooldowns you could still do normal and heroic raids and mythic+ up to a point. But then you would have to move to a more active rotation where skill is rewarded for complexity. As it should be.

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Honestly even when classes had less buttons (which depending on the class is still not necessarily the case) not all of them were fun…

The further back you go the less engaging a lot of the classes were. Vanilla warrior for example, was just an auto-attack bot.
Mage was quite literally frostbolt spam (and not even max rank frostbolt at that) outside of a few generic circumstances.

I don’t think you are wrong in essence; I do agree that some classes (shaman for example) have way too many things going on.

The problem you run into trying to do that is packing in more and more things into less buttons.
How would you tell a demo warlock “sorry you get less pets, but the rotation is less complicated”
I’m sure a lot of them would not be super thrilled about it. “Fun” is unfortunately subjective.
So, using that as a basis for these changes, the response would be to put those extra effects or abilities and stack them into existing ones. Instead of pruning the abilities that some people may find fun or engaging for that class/spec, they would combine them, leading to more issues and potential balancing problems.

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I cannot disagree with this more. Gutting melee range is one of the worst decisions they have ever made, bar none. World of Warcraft, despite all the hopes and dreams and wishes upon a star, is not designed for ARPG style combat. The extended melee range on classes that had it was a MASSIVE quality of life improvement to gameplay.

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The answer really isn’t ALL damage from CDs, or get rid of CDs all together, it’s about the synergy between them. There needs to be big booms, there needs to be smooth flat sustainable dps too. It shouldn’t be so complicated that it needs addons or a guide to play successfully with it, nor should it be so basic and boring that you could set up some dippy birds to do your dps.

Similarly you want both active and reactive dps options too. I prefer to not watch a buff stack climb and maintain (BM Barbed, for example) because that’s just “maintenance” and is worse IMO than simple rotational dps. It’s not fun, it’s work. But I do like having to react to what I’m fighting with the right dps option(s), be it swirlies on the ground, or the mob changing color, or a cast bar. I don’t like having to save my CDs just FOR that tho.

There’s a lot of these types of threads right now, because everyone thinks they have THE solution as the beta cooks. But most folks’ ideas are simply too extreme one way or the other. It’s about balance.

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I agree with you completely. Quit putting characters into boxes (or in this case, rings). Quit forcing 40% of the raid to all stand on top of each other. Especially when you have other classes (hi Ret Pals) that are basically ranged MELEE DPS on top of being faceroll easy.

If I wanted to play an ARPG I would have.

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Class design has included cooldowns since wrath.

There are two sorts of ways cooldowns were important. One is where you have a lot of your damaged concentrated in a cooldown window. Feral druids were like that in wrath and I loved it. The rotation was complex and you needed to be on your game about when to use the cooldown window and coordinate with other cooldowns.

Ret paladins had a different sort of cooldown system in wrath. They had a priority rotation based on 5 or 6 different skills all with different cooldowns as well as a longer cooldown window for a small period of high damage.

Cooldowns in different ways have been central to many classes since then.

What is different is the amount of button bloat in some classes.

The really high damage windows are not universal. If the window is significant enough that you can mostly kill the end boss in delves during that window then it does give you a solo playing advantage. Dps classes without that may struggle more in that sort of content.

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I agree something like 3-to-5-yard range to account for other hit boxes/latency and doing mechanics be it in raid or dungeon.

On the flip side we have many gap closers but functionally it’s going to be a pain in all content.

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Honestly the minute I hear a phrase like gap-closer, whether it’s intended or not, all I think about is PVP, and how it sucks so hard to have the PVE elements of this game balanced in ANY WAY around PVP. It’s a completely different game play style. And having to compromise between PVP and PVE is IMO what also hurts this game massively.

And yeah, I know, there are gap-closers for PVE, I play a surv hunter a lot, I get it, I just mean that having to worry about those with respect to PVP muddies EVERYTHING up.

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I’m not saying remove all cds, would rather have 1 cd than 5.

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your entire argument rides on the shoulders of thinking being in a cooldown is the only “fun” part of the game

cd usage is a form of skill expression
this game does not need to be dumbed down right now

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