It’s all over lapping, adds are up, big ground AoE, little poison AoE’s, explosives spawn in impending ground AoE so you got to hope ranged is on their game. Then the run away beams spawn when you’r trying to group up adds. Tank can’t help much because they got to be right on top of the MC interrupt.
The thing is, there is no joy in downing that boss, just relief that it’s over.
Yeah I am just tired of fighting stuff all the time. I almost orient all my play style around trying to avoid combat. It’s why I picked Venthyr for a Covenant. Just so I could use the teleport to skip PvE mobs. (I chose not to level a class with stealth for SL.) At least by leveling alts with fishing and cooking dailies I don’t have to wear out my thumb using my Razer Naga for combat.
Most combat just feels like I am wasting time. I’ve only died twice I think in SL. (I have a shammy and have been bouncing back and forth between Resto and Elemental. Resto means I won’t die but stuff takes forever to kill. Elemental, stuff dies, but you have to watch what you pull.[1])
I especially dislike the bait and switch world quests. Ok kill 8 of these and 7 of these… Only to see after that is done that now you have to empower this guy and go kill 5 more things plus the big bad.
[1] which is why my level 52 pally is questing as Prot. WoG for the win!
I feel like the AoE cap thing kinda showed their hand regarding their approach to combat now. It’s not so much about creative encounters or placement of enemies to add immersion to environments, it’s just busywork for the sake of it.
100% agree. We are in a mechanics arms race with the dev team. As we get better they just throw more at us. There’s only so many unique mechanics they can come up with, so outside of situations where they do something really neat they just layer a ton of mechanics we are familiar with ad nauseum.
Personally, I feel they had it right in Legion, and some of BFA, at least in dungeons. SL? It’s just tiring.
Dial it all back about 25%, or ya know give some easy packs in dungeons that allow your mind to reset for a few seconds.
Some mechanics are enjoyable while other are just annoying at this point. I really hate get-out-of-the-bad and go-stand-over-there, they’re not challenging or interesting and they screw with my rotation. I really like burn-targets though since they take forethought and reward you for bursting.
I am one of those weird people that really like dance heavy fights.
I also play a melee with a long melee range so dancing is probably much easier for me.
But in general, I don’t want to go back to a time where bosses have 2-3 mechanics to distinguish them from trash that has 0-1
The busyness is what makes it fun.
Also, it’s less of a side effect of addons I think, than a side effect of playing a game for more than a decade making people much, much better at it.
totally agree with this and OP. It was around the time Ion took charge and decided that world mobs need to be buffed and we should be in combat with them for an average of 6 seconds each.
I like feeling powerful and mowing things down without a second thought, maybe Ions 6 seconds of combat is fun for him and elitist types but it certainly isn’t fun for all of us. I play games to escape the hard slog that is life, I don’t need a second hard slog in the games I play.
I am beyond tired of mobs that teleport or dash behind me.
If you have to rely on third-party creators to make tools to make your game playable / survivable, you’ve hit a very, very bad point.
Imagine doing a heroic or mythic Nathria without DBM or BigWigs.
You can always go play classic, spam frostbolt/fireball a billion times, and destroy utterly braindead content where you only have to worry about 2-3 mechanics on any given fight.
You can always just go do M+ or raiding if you want hard content, there was absolutely zero reason to whack it on every single bit of content a player can do.
I’m glad I’m not the only one annoyed by this. And the npc cc seemingly got ramped up even more in SL. Being constantly CCed while trying to quest doesn’t test our skills as players, it’s just absurdly annoying.
They do that because they want to be as thrifty as they can with zones (not saying its right that they do it though with ilvl scaling).
Like look at mop. Just the vale and select daily areas were for level 90. Other areas dead with worthless npcs.
Fast forward to legion. All zones have life at 110.
The best approach to mob strength on at least a per patch basis (although more realistically for the life of the expansion) would to genuinely tune mobs to require a party to kill a single mob. And then as the expansion goes on, gaining gear earns you the right to play solo. I at least see that as a better design because it forces people to socialize (much like the first week of classic launch for the leveling process) and it encourages/protects the idea of you getting stronger. In short ilvl scaling needs to go. Level scaling however should stay. Nothing worse than having dead zones with mobs not having any relevance but still existing in the current expansion.
Having to turn around isn’t hard, its annoying.
I’d rather have complex rotations and fewer mechanics. I feel that’s how SWTOR played. WoW is less rotations and more a priority list. Then they pile on a crap ton of mechanics to add complexity and depth.
Is it so wrong to want something in between?
You must become one with your toon to the point where you can play with the UI totally disabled.
The rotation side of things bothers me a lot more than mob/boss mechanics. Every spec now has like 5-10 cooldowns that don’t perfectly sync well together and I don’t enjoy “difficulty” that comes from fighting the user interface instead of the actual mobs. At least not to this extreme.
As a healer, I like having all the buttons to press. I like how it feels like my individual skill matters more than my gear… and the more times you can push the wrong button, the more that becomes true.
At least in theory.
At the exact same time, healing is in a strange spot. I feel like I’m basically there to off-set the standard damage, yet in keys, pretty much the second folks make a mistake, they just die. With so little margin for error… what exactly seperates a good healer from a bad one? Anyone can heal a group not making mistakes… but if 1-2 get made, no healer - no matter how talented - can save the wipe.
So it just leaves me wondering what does a good healer even look like?