The issue isn’t how many buttons you have but rather how many buttons is in your full rotation.
Doesn’t matter if we have 50 buttons , each with a situational niche use, so long as rotations aren’t longer than 6-7 buttons at most.
I don’t want to play the piano when i start a fight and although i’m sure there are some who enjoy this, it is mostly applicable in m+ .
In most other forms of content, even open world questing, going from mob to mob with a piano is extremely tedious and unfun, especially if your power is gated behind short term cds (30-45s).
For total keybinds I could do around 2 to 2.5 hotbars (25-30-ish) active keybinds plus the stance bar and extra action button. I want some open slots on my main 3 hotbars for health pots, quest items, lock cookies, and maybe a couple macros as well. For the number of rotational buttons I’ve been happy with DF s3 fury warrior and frost DK. I’m not at my computer to count the exact number of buttons in each of those rotations.
I went ahead and counted my keybinds and I can use a max of 18 with good proficiency after that I just click on the buttons because it’s literally about the same time delay as trying to find it after my 18 are used up.
18 is generally enough without feeling too hampered. Shaman is one that I tend to struggle binding everything I want.
Resto druid was getting up there too surprisingly. I was able to avoid this with just removing the balance spells entirely and sticking to cat weaving. I already play feral so switching between the two different sets of abilities is fairly easy.
I actually prefer having about 12-14 keybinds just so I can have a little wiggle room with what I’m using.
So, I play all 3 Shaman specs and it’s really not that bad (at least for Resto Shaman). I think that most players have separate keys/modifiers for their damage and healing abilities… I don’t. What I do: I use Vuhdo/Clique and bind my healing keys to my damage keys that fit the same spell function so that both spells can be used from 1x key - I have both Chain Lightning and Chain Heal bound to the same key without modifiers, Healing Wave on the same key as Lightning Bolt and Riptide on the same key as Stormstrike while having Healing Surge as a left mouse click on a character pane. Idk how popular this mapping format is but it works for me. It certainly frees up a ton of space for modifiers that you’d usually have for utility.
woah-- how? don’t DH’s have like 25-30 abilities they can learn via level+talents? what all are you binding that you have 30 extra buttons beyond your class kit?
(not trying to be judgmental here, more of very curious)
You’re probably right - everyone kinda finds their own way to play and this just works for me. When I said, “it’s not that bad”, that’s more from the standpoint that there are options to reduce keybinds if you’re willing to play around dual key use. I mean, my healing abilities are all setup as mouseovers so it’s not a wildly crazy idea. But yeah, I agree that explaining it to someone else might not be super enticing up front.
Currently way too much. 1-2 action bars should be the maximum # of buttons imho. I am talking about combat abilities to include damage, utility, healing and trinkets/items that are utilized in combat as active abilities. This does not include spells you don’t use in combat like mounts, profession buttons, hearthstone, etc. Pretty much every class has over 2 full action bars of damage, utility, healing or trinkets/items. This is considering meta builds not underperforming builds that choose more passive abilities and end up falling behind more than 5% from “meta” builds.
The only way to reduce these buttons to make most people happy (both the ones that want less buttons and the ones that want the complicating rotations to stay engaged) imho is to make quite a few of the active abilities passive in a way that causes thought process to utilize that passive. It seems they did that with some specs on a couple spells for TWW, I hope this is just testing the waters and they do more like this.
I would like to see the game move in the direction of leaning harder on thought provoking rotations rather than leaning on the memorization of 25+ keybinds during dungeon or raid fights. I think the ideal #'s are 4-5 normal (damage/healing/tanking) abilities, 2-3 power increasing cooldowns, 1-3 trinket abilities and/or racial abilities, 1-2 defensive abilities, 3-6 utility abilities, 1-3 movement related abilities, and 1-2 items (potions, healthstones, power increasing potions, etc). This would be 13-24 keybinds not including any additional macros you may need for group control like pings or arrows. (This also is hoping they reduce the defensive creep that has forced encounters to be balanced around miserable healing profiles). This would be much more reasonable imho than what we have now which is 25-35 for most specs (maybe even more for Druids).
People don’t like to hear this but bloat is really bad right now for a lot of classes and pretty much every healer. I have like 34+ keybinds on my BM hunter and they’re the “easy” class. I was hoping for more pruning in TWW. Not really for me. I’ve been playing this game for my entire adult life. I want new people to check out WoW or for returning players not to feel overwhelmed. I think it makes the game needlessly stressful for more casual existing players trying to push into higher levels of endgame as well.
Yeah, like. I dunno, it’s always been weird to me to bind 8 more buttons when I can dictate mouseover vs target vs focus vs self functionality all with one macro, and that’s if I ever even need to—which I don’t.
And here I am just wishing I could learn to play with keys. Im a WASD to move and click action buttons with the mouse. I just can’t teach myself to make the change.
or 46 keys when including such things as setting or targeting one’s focus, target cycle, target nearest (ignoring previous cycling) targeting P2 or target scan, P3, P4, P5, and one’s mount, auto-run, etc.,
or 52 when including such basics as camera turning, target selection, WASD, and camera snap.
An unbloated 24-30 action keys is ideal to me for MMO gameplay. That’s enough room for nuance, but without needing to set up binds in any fancy way / to use an MMO mouse, etc.
consumables, professions, 3 different mount types, a few toys, some daily quest stuff, the item locator, soul stone, drums, swap trinkets and weapons. You know, all the bloat.