I don’t really see the culture being set as learned helplessness, more that the game is so “solved” that everything new that gets added to the game gets instantly devoured into the machine of optimization. Players will gravitate towards the path of least resistance and right now that means importing the talent loadout for whatever dungeon or raid encounter they’re doing, what pieces in your gear should be tier and what else you should get from M+ and the trinkets you should be running. Whatever’s the best embellishment and consumables, just go buy those and slap them in. Boom, you’re a blaster now, if you can just press buttons good. And there’s addons to tell you how to do that.
I like what you’re saying about class design and I think its good. What I’m also saying is that when talking about class and encounter design we’re gonna always immediately run into responses like “That’s way too many words to read and this class does better sims anyway. Watch this streamer tier list video lmao dont you know disc priest is B tier at best L take omegalul”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you have to do the latter irrespective of the design at play? I could read guides, up & down, but it’s up to me to execute. I don’t think I can simply read a guide on my class and any given mythic raid encounter to come out on top. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that success is automated for players because of the resources available and that definitely isn’t true.
Yes of course you do have to internalize/adapt in either case. My point was about how intuitive or not the kit is, or at least how well a proper rotation can be reasoned out with in-game resources (and a damage meter, I suppose). The idea that a rotation might have so much complexity, or might have wrinkles that are so counterintuitive and/or performance-hampering that you wouldn’t ever figure it out except by reading a guide based on sims is what I object to.
Just to hilight an example of a wrinkle, surv has a skill called fury of the eagle that channels a mess of aoe hits that do moderate damage, guaranteed crits sub 65% with talents, that themselves apply a dot for critting.
This button conflicts with your 2m cd which causes kill shot to have a reduced cd and apply a bleed to 3 targets. The reason it conflicts is that the kill shot cd is below the fury channel. Is it better to cast fury and cancel when kill shot comes up, channel fury before popping the 2m cd regardless of enemy health, full channel fury and delay kill shot or ignore fury during the duration of the 2m cd even if the enemies won’t survive the full channel?
Considering the number of variables, it can be rough to work out.
I think it’s fine to use external resources, but I don’t think they’re necessary either. At least, not for the average player. This is okay because resources like these are for those that take the game more seriously. Investment like this usually begs research.
If we talk about class abilities, usually there are context clues that teach you how to use them. In my experience, most of them speak very plainly. There are definitely anomalies or elements of bad design, but I’d hardly generalize the game like that.
I think what I mostly disagree with is the severity of the situation you present and that the experience is substantive either way. Those of us who like to learn organically can and those that don’t have resources to improve with.
I think you misunderstand. For the most part, classes do have fairly intuitive rotations, or at least ones that you can reason out well enough (to perform decently in most content) on your own. And then if you want specifics about how to optimize, there are guides, which is fine. There are a few exceptions, but overall it’s pretty good. The OP seems to want more complexity- in a way that would probably necessitate guides as a baseline for acceptable performance- and that is what I object to.
Reclaim your attention span or bail on the thread! We writing bars in this piece!
There are two extremes of this in the game for ranged DPS that are relevant to this
on the easier end you get things like BM hunter where you have what, like four buttons you’re rotating through? Some very simple dot refreshing, get a proc spend it etc. You can pick it up just as you’re leveling it and by the time you hit 70 you pretty well learn what to do just by paying attention and reading what your kit says.
Then you have stuff like arcane mage, who I think has the most moving parts to a spec in the game. The single target rotation for just your opening burn is over a dozen steps long and starts before the pull by fishing for clearcasting and channeling evocation to stack the int buff. Its pretty nuts and not very intuitive at all, definitely not the kind of thing you’d learn to be good at by just dinking around on a training dummy with no outside help.