With all of the discussion lately around addons lately I thought this may be a good question to ask. I have heard that one of the top reasons why people use tracking addons is due to how complex the game is. Personally I like the complexity, but I can also see how it would be really daunting for beginners. Especially for PvP and higher end PVE content. Every class has dozens of abilities with unique effects, there are hero talents and from player to player talents will often be different. Then beyond just the abilities one also has to consider the enemies and what they do, terrain, extra buffs one can obtain.
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I will give the worst but closest to true answer of “it depends”
On you, your goals, who you play with, what you want the game to be, how much time you have, how much time you want to spend learning vs practicing vs playing, etc
For me not really, on my main spec, which isn’t very hard, but I think it is for other people considering how the average pug dungeon goes
For my friend who wants to log in 3 hours per month, yes he will probably just unsubscribe again because he’s spending like 100% of his WoW time learning or sucking no offense
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Depends on entirely on what you’re doing
Like majority of pve needs literally nothing to play at a decent level
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I do think there are too many things that are basically unexplained but expected to either know or look up what is going on.
Just one example of this is the new crafting system, a lot of people seem to get pointed in that direction in some way like if they want to get a new weapon, but then are not sure what to do next since despite being fairly simple once you get the hang of it, is pretty daunting to someone that is basically using it for the first time.
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Personally I think WoW is fine, but I haven’t gone past a 12 or can regularly get past 2/8M.
Personally I think WoW is amazing because I can scale the amount of content I do regardless.
I like the idea that when I’m say 40 I can login weekly and do LFR and Delves and still have fun.
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naw its just right
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It’s an MMORPG. There are many elements to it. But none of them are all that complex. And everyone has choices of how many different elements they want to incorporate.
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my feeling is that only mythic raiding (past the first 2-3 bosses) and very high m+s (past 13) are complex everything else is pretty much a casual fest. (not judging pvp)
i feel like i hang in the deadzone in the middle. very high end raiding/m+ing is a bit too much for me but everything else is not enough. weird.
*i would love a game that has most of its content right where i’m comfy but it would alienate both the uberpros and the ubercasuals lol
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I don’t think this is unique to WoW though. I’d argue Guild Wars 2 is actually even more complex in many ways. Any mmo that has been around for a long time is going to come with homework to do to figure out what’s going on and how to do anything.
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Spells are bloated for sure.
Too many similar spells.
Another problem is there’s too many specs have the same abilities too…
There’s no niches or unique roles anymore.
Everyone can self heal, debuff, cc etc.
One’s that have retained uniqueness have become extremely OP like Ret paladin with its bubble and utility stuff
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Kinda.
I feel like if youve been playing for awhile(probably since legion) it feels like a pretty natural progression for a majority of classes. There are very clear outliers, but most of the ones i played in legion still feel okay to play now outside of anything cutting edge.
But having brought a couple new players in over the years i can tell they get pretty overwhelmed after the leveling process and campaign is over.
They want to play the game with me, but they end up performing really poorly so i cant bring them into anything higher, but they also dont want to just sit down point for point reading off a guide while im explaining all the weird talent interactions they didnt take while leveling over an hour, or if i do have them take whatever endgame build as we’re going the spec isnt as fun cause it depends on endgame stat weights or hero talents so they get turned off a spec early. Eventually they get bored of only doing the lower tier stuff and stop or they try the higher stuff and get burned by pugs while practicing.
So for returning or continual players i think the complexity is okay if you know where resources are and how to use them, for everyone else its probably to much.
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A big part of this I think is also self inflicted.
My other prog guild (Mechanics Optional) can get H Gally down and could probably progress Mythic further if we took only the top few with other ‘high performing’ players.
The option is there but knowing my own time limitations as a shift worker we choose not to.
Yes I think a big part of why I ‘succeeded’ in this game despite starting about 3 ish years ago is I let myself do casual content for months on end getting comfortable with the controls.
Biggest mistake is rushing to do m+ where it gets busy really quick. I still remember being scared to join dungeon finder 
. In my head I was going to try and outgear the dungeon eventually but I was pleasantly surprised.
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As someone who loves complexity, WoW is too complex.
Metroid Dread is amazing and I love it. For me it’s perfect. For a Metroid Prime player not so much. Combat is too fast, Samus is too fast, the game is too fast in general.
This is an MMO. The average player isn’t a twitch-reflex League of Legends, Fighting Game xyz, or whatever type player. Why isn’t this game being made for their experience?
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WoW is complex, but not too complex. FF14 starts out basic af and then as you level, you end up with a simple rotation that just happens to have twice as many buttons as the worst offender in WoW. It really makes me appreciate WoW.
Do I think WOW is too complex? No.
Do I think the developers do a great job of communicating what players need to know when they need to know it? Also No.
If they had better in-game notifications about different events in combat then addons would be less important.
If you don’t think wow is complex (I’m not saying it’s necessarily TOO complex), you’re looking at it from the perspective of somebody who is already well accustomed to the complexity.
Putting combat aside, just figuring out what to do to progress your character (as a new player) is pretty wildly complex.
Figuring out the optimal way to spend your crests requires a PhD in wowcrestology.
Why do you think there are multiple fan sites with thousands of in depth guides? And the current class guides change every expansion, if not every season.
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No, WoW is pretty simple.
If you’re looking for a complex game, look towards Kerbal Space Program, or Victoria.
Not really complex more like bloated which make it seem to be complex.
Some classes is fill with tons of spell they have to add to their cast rotation n etc etc.
Profension rework add a level of complexity which is not really friendly to new players or players returning.
Boss mech is just full of mech bloat, tons of things going off which is why those raiders use weakaura.(When I say raider’s I meant those doing mythic raiding, LFR/normal/heroic raiders not included.)
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It’s extremely rare that you ever need a weakaura to do a boss; the only one that comes close this tier is Mythic Lockenstock.
Which Blizzard could have avoided by just not having the color-coded mines on Mythic. But they’d rather blame everybody else for their mistakes, as usual.
Because those people need views to pay their bills.