Design Stuff

Before you ask or say anything. Yes I realize that the title can cover a broad variety of things. I don’t like the current design of systems and whatnot, but this post isn’t about that aspect of game design.

TL; DR: Stop designing classes/the game with limits in mind.

Hot take. I don’t like that classes and dungeons are more designed around teamwork than before. And no, this doesn’t mean that I want dps solo blowing up 15s or raids. I like the whole tank, healer, dps dynamic. Even though there are past, and more concerning present examples of the roles overlapping in the coverage of their duties such as tanks rivaling dps in dps, mage healing as much or more than healers in PvP with triune which can be seen as tanking, or last xpac when my vers was so high I could tank keys in dps spec. Despite the funny occurrences, teamwork and coordination are becoming more and more required despite in aspects that don’t make sense, and player power has rapidly diminished.

Easy example being dungeon caster trash. Basically every caster mob in a dungeon has two casts now. cough cough Bone Spikes and the pleb cast that Bone Magi have in ToP. Not only can one person not solo cover a Bone Magi for all casts. Even if you decide to eat the pleb casts and kick Bone Spikes only, one person can’t cover on their own with kicks alone just because of the frequency of the cast. It’s worse on fort weeks with casters because then everything hurts, and we can’t stop it because for some reason a martial arts master can’t throat punch someone on a whim, and neither can my buddies who suffer from roid rage or a crippling addiction to space mountain dew.

Continuing on the theme of dungeons, not only has player CC been nerfed which means we can’t stun and bung packs anymore, but AoE caps and changes have really reduced the dakka we can unleash. Sure there outliers that are powered by tier we can all name right now, but no spec’s base kits feel powerful anymore. Outlaw the AoE rogue spec, probably gets pwnt by sub in AoE. (I say that solely based on the fact that I’ve had sub rogues rival me in AoE as a WW) And I don’t even need to get into the travesty that happened to WW. The numbers may look impressive/scary, but the technical side is just wtf.

Then there’s raid design. There’s so many fights that seem to just have passive damage now just to give healers something to do. Whether it’s some random aura or some guy’s oven making the raid room too hot. Rather than forcing heals, there could be one less random constant damage and raid comps could be leaned toward burning bosses.

And speaking of varied raid comps, every fight requiring two tanks because of some arbitrary swap mechanic, but never really deviating from it is boring. I have fond memories of funny raid comps like 3 tanking Kor’kron Dark Shamans making the fight a meme because two tanks and a healer would just tank the guy that gave the debuff in Africa which gave the rest of the raid a lot of space and they just burned the other shaman. Or Garrosh getting 1 tanked. Or when 1 tank and 19 Arcane Mages erased mythic Fel Reaver in like under a minute. The two tank “status quo” is stale and honestly feels forced.

On the topic of arcane mages. Wtf happened? They went from mythic raid boss deleter to what it is now. Juggling ramping into two damage windows in like 15 seconds and then juggling proc reliant ramps into windows every 30 seconds and 45 seconds while managing your mana till whatever you’re fighting is dead, and their pay off is that little? Blizz doesn’t equally reward hard specs anymore. If anything arcane should be deleting bosses even harder than they were in WoD.

Which brings me to my point. Lately class design seems to have been made with limits in mind. Understandable, but misguided. My fondest memories of the game have been when crazy stuff or funny crap happens. Coincidentally, the vast majority of this happened when player power was really high. So let the reins loose with class design. Make classes with fun and flavor in mind instead of how it might blow up 4 packs in a M+ or dig raid bosses six new a*seholes to poop from. Don’t even get me started on the missed opportunities Blizz had with Serenity and WoO.