Since I’ve been talking about the One-Button Rotation that hingers players using it into not learning their classes, I’ve thought about something.
Class Trial offer a small tutorial about I think 5 basic thing for their specs, but not everything is shown and it is also always 10 levels under the maximum of that expansion, meaning it is away from the expansion features like the current Apex Talents.
What I’ve been recommending people to help them learn their specs is reading on Archon or their Logs or on Wowhead, etc. But essentially there is a real need for support inside the game directly, as nothing is shown for anybody once you go passed a class trial level.
Thing is said tutorial isn’t even remotely close to what a player needs to do once max level, with tier sets, apex talents and in a real situation like M+ or Raids
The game does a really bad job tutorializing end-game builds. You have really long stretches without important pieces of your kit, and you don’t even start getting apex talents until 81, and a lot of those apex talents completely alter how a spec plays or is built.
You do not learn a lot about how to effectively play your class at end-game by leveling.
The people that can’t be bothered to read a guide on wowhead or a watch a video won’t be helped by any in-game hand holding either. They simply don’t want to learn. Blizz knows this, which is surely one of the reasons OBR exists.
Endgame builds and rotations change with every expansion. I am not interested in paying for 36 different tutorials to be made for every class for every expansion.
Heck, sometimes they change with a patch.
The “support” you’re asking for is, indeed, in the game. It’s the talent trees themselves. Reading the talent explains the talent (except in a few cases where they’re just bugged…)
That is true but the target audience needs to still be those that wants to learn, even just a minimum
Having a small scenario in the end-game about how to play your spec effectively would go a long way towards doing that.
The Proving Grounds already exists as a place for that, what they just need to do is tather to the current rotation which is big work once per expansion and then becomes just maintenance for a year and a half. Even then, some classes barely change with expansions
It’s really big work every expansion. 36 specs. And if they do it “wrong,” then players like you will be all up their butt about it because the tutorial told them to do something that’s 2% less DPS than the optimal way.
The leveling of a toon is how one learns their class/spec. Unfortunately, we have new players that don’t have the attention span, which is why I agree with you.
We honestly have too many choices. Fine tuning and finessing the multitude of talents is really hard for some. There are sites that will take you through your class/spec. But they are third party.
That isn’t true. The talent tree used at max levels are wildly different than leveling ones, and the situations are also very different. Barely ever any real need to interrupt, CC, barely any need of defensive, usually very rare usage of offensive CDs, ect.
Leveling is very ineffective, and with the Apex Talents being unlocked at 81 and the last one at 90, and lastly with the tier sets, it is very different.
This isn’t really necessary. WoW gameplay, at least for DPS, comes down to a few generally universal concepts.
Keep abilities on cooldown.
Overlap as many damage modifiers as possible.
Don’t let the bar fill up.
For at least a competent level of play that’s basically it in terms of dealing damage. What WoW needs is more signposting, in built direct incentives that reward optimal play through ability interaction instead of just a nebulous “Because it does more damage to do it like that”.
It used to be you needed a silver (I think) rank in Proving Grounds to queue for LFD Heroics. Blizzard scrapped it because people complained about how arbitrary and pointless it was to impose such a requirement. Now we know it’s neither arbitrary nor pointless.
Bring back Proving Grounds in some capacity and adapt it to the current content structure.
Leveling is supposed to be where you finesse the talent tree and try new things to make your combat experience tailor to you.
Tuning along the way is how one perfects how they play.
That’s how this game has been for decades. You learn your spec while leveling and fine tune as you go.
Nowadays, everyone wants insta power and will immediately go to the third-party sites to get max out builds and speed level without really understanding how their character is supposed to work.
It always amazes me how people don’t understand this and don’t read their own talents to learn. Then they expect the game to teach them, then complain when the game doesn’t teach them “the right way.”
The issue is these talents tree nowadays literally changes a player from being meh to great.
Hell, just Hero talents can be a 30% dps loss if specced incorrectly, that’s not even talking about the last talents of the trees or the Apex Talents.
If you just ‘make your own’ and yolo it, your DPS will show. Most of the DPS or survivability or healing comes from a combination of multiple things you will not understand while leveling, period. So no, the game has not, in fact, been for decades about learning your class while leveling, as max level is where you start competitively learning
You can’t spec incorrectly in a Hero tree. There are only a couple of choice nodes and the rest you have no choice but to take. No one is losing 30% dps for choosing one type of defensive over another in that choice node.
This is also false. Some people are really good with off-meta builds and there’s a crap ton of loadouts because of different situations.
I think you are focusing on endgame and not on learning and leveling.
Leveling is where you learn your character, but unfortunately we have too many players that want instant gratification and everything handed to them on a nice silver platter. So they go to wow head or icy veins and read up on their class spec, import talents, and copy rotations…instead of learning through trial and error.
What would these types of players do if these sites didn’t exist? They’d have to figure it out.
I’m not incorrect on what I’m saying. You’re just fixated on endgame.
Levelling doesn’t offer anything comparable to endgame challenges on which to practice though. Everything dies in a couple globals. There’s no opportunity to troubleshoot openers or recognise how CDs / abilities are supposed to interact..
What I meant is the choice of hero tree. Some specs right now over a M+ lose up to 50k dps overall for having the wrong hero tree selected, which also usually leads to the wrong baseline talents as they are in correlation
And yet, what changes for 99% of players in the top 5% is a few defensive talents. There is a set meta for a patch that will not change period, and there is barely any talents swaps with those aside from specifics.
