my experience: they messed up the power curve post dragonflight and people were overpowered the entire way through current content, which is absolutely trivial.
this impacts slower casters/poor movespeed the most. i ran a dungeon as affliction warlock and didn’t even get to cast a spell once. then they nerfed it, and i’d get my spells off but everything would die before i would do meaningful damage.
“rarely getting to end without getting upset” nah
the popular macro tools aren’t against TOS because they use the /cast and /castsequence functionality.
they do amount to 1 button macros that you just spam, and they offer an advantage over the blizzard macro interface because they have more space for things and not a limited character count.
they are no different than blizz macros that just have every ability in a /cast chain that only stops when something is on cooldown. however, all classes have procs and damage windows so you make multiple macros so your logic is to make 2 macros, 1: “if effect x is not up press button 1” and 2: “if effect x is not up press button 2.”
silly for PVE, as a skilled player is better than hekili or any rotation addon because the rotation addon does not take your gear into account, they use simcraft based on endgame bis. it would be impossible to dynamically reparse a rotation based on every single gear combination. the closest i imagine they could get is via stat % calculation but even that is not going to be accurate. X haste is different than X.75 haste.
in pvp however, there are many classes that can spam 3 buttons for optimal buffs/dmg rotation, especially burst classes like a feral druid.
I analyzed a log and a person who was hopping around in circles perfectly “pressed” 11 actions in 7 seconds. 4 of them were non-gcd buttons press at the exact same time. that’s 1 /cast macro. the other 7 were cast sequenced in order.
the entire point is to be “mindless” you want to do the same thing every time, not “think ok press 1 then 2 then 3 then … 11”
And that was done away with because it led to classes being excluded and certain buffs / builds being not viable unless you wanted to suffer wiping and crying by default.
The mantra at the time was bring the player, not the class. Yet classes had exclusive buffs that had clear advantages. Remember the challenge dungeons in MoP? Remember how a group stealth rogue was required to compete at the progression bleeding edge?
That trickles down into how easy it is at lower levels.
No, the content was already solved and classic is a terrible slog so everyone optimized to reduce that. Rose-tinted glasses aside, few wanted to actually do “real progression.”
ah yes the not anti-social solo runs.
the problem is the tolerance for what “socializing” is is antithetical to “accessibility.”
They destroyed the reliance on others except for niches in the game, ie, if you want that you join a guild to do that. But the game changed because the people who wanted to do that dwindled away (got old).
i got my nostalgia fill and fond memories brought into sharp focus with season of discovery.
I’ll take matchmaking any day over sitting in town whispering people to join a group, and being rejected or not, for hours.
