In all my years playing WoW, the developers seemed to have this refrain with each new expansion: “we wanted to avoid cookie cutter specs, things that everyone had to go for in order to min and max.” This is understandable–it makes the game more inclusive, but also less predictable and therefore more interesting. Still, in Wrath of the Lich King there were ways to set up your talent tree to do end-game PvE content as well as PvP. Then in Cataclysm, it was the same, and with Mists of Pandaria they rolled the situational specialization of the old glyph system into the new talent system that, last I checked, has stuck around ever since. So that was a win for “not a cookie-cutter system” but even then there were only a couple of talents that players would commonly switch, and during Legion the inclusion of legandary items granting different abilities added another element of surprise, but the manner in which various drops were more likely to come first set most players on the same path and the legendary rings that granted one of the tier 5 talents (typically one of the later drops a player would get, if I recall) was a sort of admission that the mixture was not as fluid as they had hoped. The Azerite armor, essences, and finally corruptions in Battle for Azeroth were a system that took awhile to get right but ultimately, I think, struck a good balance between investment of time and the returns / benefits a player could get for it.
The “cookie cutter” refrain came out again in Shadowlands, and while I don’t know how it played out it seemed that even at the beginning of the expansion the top guilds had already decided what the best combinations of class and covenant would be–pending patch changes, of course. But, I think the goal of the Blizzard developers, if we grant that they are trying to make an interesting game beyond just an engine of profit, is to make something that doesn’t just see all players flocking from one combination to the next as they introduce buffs and nerfs. Or, a least, if we accept their sentiments about “cookie cutters,” they would want the buffs and nerfs to introduce multiple equivalent optimums.
Still, even with many variables, functions tend to have global optimums. Players will find them, and then everyone else will seek them. There will always be a Devilsaur, even if Blizz can find ways to make it accessible as a function of play time rather than your ability to camp the one mob and tag it first.
I feel that one thing Blizzard hasn’t explored as much would be some sort of raid-wide collective variables. Their AP system from Legion and Battle for Azeroth was good in the sense that it granted diminishing returns for extra effort, but the developers seem to have realized that it’s not so great to build in a system where there is no limit even if the returns get less and less. Better is to give each player a system where a nominal amount of effort will get to some “raid ready” break point and a higher amount of effort will reach a definite maximum (they thought about capping the AP in Battle for Azeroth but unfortunately scrapped the idea). What I think might do very well is a system that buffs players abilities based on some power level distributed over the raid. It would have to scale with the number of players for normal and heroic modes, and the system would have to be simple enough to reconfigure with each raid group and automatically adjust as members came and went, or as different players came in from the bench.
Perhaps something like this: all members of the raid contribute an amount of “Pazaaz” based on personal progression, and the amount they contribute is subject to diminishing returns and ultimately capped. The total raid “Pazaaz” is an average over all raider (or dunegon party) contributions, and the raid or dungeon leader can allocate that Pazaaz to tanking, healing, and DPS specializations. Each class’s abilities are in turn affected by the raid or party Pazaaz and receive bonuses based on the level that goes into tanking, healing, or DPS specializations. Furthermore, different quests and activities could let players unlock ways to enhance their abilities as a function of the Pazaaz alloted to their specialization. This would create some interesting effects on the WoW meters, but I think the websites (which are not part of the game or the responsibility of Blizzard to maintain) would just find ways to factor in the effect of max Pazaaz in DPS, and of course towards the end of the expansion various nerfs and accelerated mechanics would let all players unlock their full potential to benefit from Pazaaz.
But it would remain a variable throughout the raid, perhaps changeable through the use of some crafting profession akin to putting down a new cauldron of flasks. Even with max Pazaaz contributions, how will the raid leaders decide to allocate the limited quantity that they’ve got? Perhaps at max Pazaaz there is enough to put 100% into one specialization and 50% into the other two (or 67% / 67 %/ 67% spread across all three). They might also make it so that the raid leader can put up to 125% into one specialization, subject to diminishing returns on the way it benefits various player abilities, and such that the 25% over-investment comes at a premium–a 125 / 25 / 25 split might be accessible at max Pazaaz (the raid sacrificed some of the total Pazaaz to over-invest on tanking).
My point here is to explore what Blizzard might do at the party and raid levels to add variability and avoid “cookie-cutter” specializations by making the group’s overall power a function of all members’ participation (they each have to pull their own weight to bring forward a nominal amount of Pazaaz), and the raid leader’s decisions. By making this something that could be changed every few fights, it could become part of the progression mechanics, creating multiple pathways to solving each PvE encounter. It could also add an element of surprise to PvP gameplay. As a side benefit, it might make it easier to carry a character that has been playing the game to some degree but may not have the best gear, whereas a fresh character that smeone just wants to buy a kill on would be a harder lift (the price of your carry depends, to a degree, on the amount your presence can contribute to the group).
That might be combined with a system whereby dungeon and raid weapons and trinkets proc with buffs not just to the player, but to other nearby group members as well. Like Ti’tahk, the Steppes of Time from Deathwing, but having every weapon do things like that to some degree, granting buffs that scale in part with the item’s own level and with the overall stats of the target. Bind the players together!
Thoughts?
and I have not been playing Dragonflight. It does sound like they went back to the drawing board on a lot of things, shook off a lot of the annoying aspects of the game, and as I noted elsewhere, introduced fundamental aspects of the gameplay, even in open-world content, that discourage abuse while making the game more engaging for actual humans. From what I’ve seen, dragon riding is a system whereby you must be attentive to your surroundings even as you fly around the world–no more of this hovering over an area and going AFK. Neat.