Do devs not realize button bloat is a terrible design?

Community General Discussion
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Yes yes, 0.01% of the population loves complicated rotations with 20+ buttons, but for 99.99% of the player base we absolutely hate it.

Back in vanilla wrath, which is considered the best of wow with the highest amount of players somewhere in the 10 million range, my rogue had this rotation

Mutilate, slice and dice, mutilate, mutilate rupture, hunger for blood, mutilate - envenom.

Simple enough for even grandma. The class rotations were so basic that it wasnt even really a factor in a player’s dps so everyone could do it. Because of this, the difference between dps of the top players in the world and that of grandma were quite small and came mostly from min maxing gear, proper itemization and world buffs.

Look at retail today.

Give grandma a max level and geared rogue. Provide her with the 20 button rotation and have her hit a target dummy for 5 minutes. Her dps would be in the 20k range.

Now give the best player in the world the same rogue. Hell pump out 10-15 times grandma’s numbers.

This is the problem blizzard. You should agree that the max dps rotation of any class is 6-7 buttons. Then work on removing the other 13+ buttons

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thats the fun part, they do, and thats why more is added to the game.

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Like I said in another thread:
Nothing is really complicated about specs and their rotations, some classes might feel better than others but I think that all comes down to personal playstyle.

I think the biggest issue people have is they don’t read their class trees or abilities and that’s on them.

Don’t dumb down things for people who actually enjoy playing games.

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Phone games can be found in the apple/google play store if you’re so averse to some depth in a PC game.

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You’re part of the problem. You convince wow devs that button bloat is fine.

I’m sorry but the player numbers don’t lie.

Every 5 buttons blizzard adds to a rotation, 20% of the player base leaves

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It’s all about perspective brother.
You think my opinion is the problem and I think yours is.
:woman_shrugging:
Like someone else said, you want braindead games? Try your phones app store.

If people leave because they don’t like it I’m totally okay with that.

I’d rather have people decide this isn’t the game for them than try to change it into something a kindergartner could play.

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In most cases the “button bloat” is from players intentionally selecting every active ability possible in their talent tree. If they simply swapped some of them out for passive talents instead, there would be no bloat.

But they watched a youtube video or read some guide that said they get max DPS from using only Active abilities, so they don’t even consider the alternatives.

That’s not a problem with the game, that’s a player problem.

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If passives were made more interesting and impactful, sure.

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To some degree there is button bloat, but i dont think the problem is the number of buttons.

Like, when dragonflight came out, shadow priest had access to both mind flay and mind spike at the same time.
With both of these being filler spells, they competed for the same spot in the rotation making it just clunky to play.

However when each ability has its own purpose and natural place in the specs rotation, it does not matter how many buttons you have.
You intuitively know what to do in all situations.

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I want to know which class actually uses 20 buttons in their actual rotation

I would bet that most class rotations are only 5-6 normal use buttons…and then a bunch of buttons you use situationally or on a 2-3 minute cooldown

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Maybe if counting defensives, interupts, and trinkets?

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With every class, I talent around having no more than 10 core skills, which I bind to 1 through 5 and shift+1 through shift+5. Warriors have a lot of cooldowns, but avatar and recklessness are off the global cooldown, so I have them macro’d with ravager for 1 big i-win button.

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  1. The number of buttons varies dramatically between classes and specs. If you want a low-button spec, they’re out there.
  2. They tried “pruning” before, starting in WoD. It didn’t go well.
  3. You can (and should) remap keys near your left hand to abilities, like G, T, F, R, ~, etc. You can also combo them with shift & ctrl to get more easy binds like shift-G, shift-T, shift-F, etc.
  4. It’s surprisingly easy to make functions consistent across all your characters. There’s little need to memorize what all the abilities do when T is always your stun and F is always your CC and shift-G is always your main defensive etc.
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Prot warrior has a lot of buttons. I’d like to see some stuff baked into the spec rather than just added to it.

Something like charge being replaced by shield charge if you talented it (With balancing changes of course).

Having to talent into something to make rend applied with thunderclap seems redundant, just bake it into the ability itself? When would I not want to rend my target? Rarely I imagine.

Things like that, I’d like to see.

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I have 40 keybinds I use on Mythic Sark.

But Brewmaster’s like that.

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You seem to be under the misapprehension that driving away as many players from the game as possible will make it more successful. Basically you’ve just agreed with him that a highly complex rotation will drive away players from the game, and that is what you want to happen.

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The problem the devs face is this…

If they give us just a few abilities and few buttons many will quit the game. Its boring to them. They tried that before and it failed. They gave us borrowed power and it was boring.

If they give us button bloat people get upset and either quit or complain a lot.
The devs cannot seem to find that middle ground at all.

I like having a lot of abilities but I also dont want 50 keybinds either.

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Actually, the problem is that you think people that thrive on button bloat are “many”, and those who are discouraged by it are “few”.

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Keybinds are not necessarily abilities, also.

I have 3 keybinds just for my aoe taunt, for example: 1 to drop the ox statue, 1 to target the statue and taunt (which is an aoe taunt), and 1 to get rid of the statue.

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if you want to play like there is only 2 buttons, go right ahead and play like that. on behalf of those that disagree with you, don’t force us to play the way you want to.

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