9s. The CD was 9s. And you still have to press RF on cooldown. If you fail to do so, or you are too high on focus to do so, you’re losing DPS. Thing is, the rotation back then wasn’t just about pressing that button on CD, because most of our damage still came from Aimed Shot. It just gave us an instant nuke, a bit of a highlight to our rotation. Thing Rapid Fire, except compressed into an instant shot.
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I will have to defer to you as I don’t remember mop or WOD Hunter too well. I do remember a 20-30 second CD shot though. Might have been something else.
Maybe you’re thinking of Power Shot? It had a 45s CD, and was basically a super Aimed Shot. Problem was that it caused knockback on all targets hit, and thus was basically never used, since Glaive Toss (what is now SV’s Chakrams) dealt solid damage and was way easier to use. It was also on a 15s CD, so maybe that’s what you were remembering.
Oh, and in MoP, Aimed Shot could be considered to be that shot, since you had to build up Master Marksman stacks to make it instant.
This doesn’t really answer my question though.
I don’t understand at all why you think it feels less worthwhile. Your reason isn’t well articulated. Being in a situation where you can’t cast a strong shot isn’t a good thing, so I totally don’t get why you would want that to happen.
As a generator, Rapid Fire is a strong shot that lets you string together more Aimed Shots without falling into the filler Steady Shots. Turning it into a spender would just force you to hit more Steady Shots to refill. Being forced to hit more of your weakest filler shot doesn’t make the rotation feel better.
In my experience Rapid Fire feels great to cast between Aimed Shots since it does a lot of damage and replenishes focus quickly, especially during Trueshot, where you need to recover focus fast to spend on more Aimed Shots. Which is why I don’t see the issue with it. I’ve used it and being a generator works perfectly fine.
No, that’s precisely it. Being in a situation where you cannot cast a strong shot is a bad thing, which provides a skill gap between those that properly manage their focus so they aren’t in that situation, and those that do not. Rapid Fire has no pre-requisites, so you can always cast it. There’s no management needed, you simply hit it on CD. In fact, last I checked it’s more of a DPS loss to delay it than to cap focus through it (though obviously you should try to avoid capping focus with it).
It weakens the reward, the benefit, for properly managing focus. It’s literally just monkey slapping an ability for big damage without any thought or planning.
Yes and no. First, focus costs, passive regen, and active regen via Steady Shot can be tuned to avoid excessive Steady Shot usage. Second, more usage of our weaker shots means that our stronger shots can be stronger. A rotation should have high points and low points, where the low points build towards the high points. If everything deals the same damage, the rotation feels unfulfilling and less worthwhile and rewarding for optimizing.
Rapid Fire building and also being a high point breaks that. As you point out, especially with Surging Shots and Focused Fire in the mix, you don’t need to use Steady that much, which makes our entire rotation pretty laminar in damage, with no real “builder” and “spender” portions. Aimed and Rapid deal roughly the same damage. You don’t get the feeling of building up to high damage nukes, because both your nuke and your builder are roughly equal in power. It also means that the “low point” in our rotation ends up being Arcane Shot, which is part of why it feels so bad.
It actually generates less than Steady, even with Azerite traits. Steady is 10 focus in 1.75s, before haste, and Rapid is 10 focus over 3.0s. Focused Fire amplifies the generation of Steady by, on average, 60%, but that still leaves RF generating, on average, about 93.3% as much focus per time spent as Steady (and of course, Focused Fire is gone in SL). The damage is the only draw, and again, if your generator and consumer deal the same damage, the entire rotation just feels shallow and unrewarding.
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Alright, so your argument is about skill, and how being a generator is too easy so you find it boring.
While you’re correct that a spender has more potential to require skill, I don’t quite see the skill cap changing significantly with turning it into a spender, you would need a more drastic change than that to make it more interesting. Because the answer is very easily just use more filler shots and/or take talents that give more focus regen. You just line up the focus regen with the cooldown of your spenders. Increasing the cost of a shot is something that is solved with a straightforward rule and no real decision involved. It’s just as mindless to me.
But to be fair, we just like different things. My view is that it’s better to simplify the rotation instead of overcomplicating it. A “harder” rotation is just a longer algorithm. I don’t particularly care how many rules I have to memorize before I can do my rotation correctly.
In my view, currently Steady Shot is a weak ability that I never want to hit so I only hit it if I’m forced to do so. Rapid Fire is a strong ability that allows me to hit Steady Shot less often. So turning Rapid Fire into a spender would make the rotation worse for me. I consider the skill involved to be about the same.
Eh, ish. Skill gap factors in, but it’s more than the rotation lacks natural high points and low points. When your generators deal the same damage as your consumers, your consumers feel a lot less rewarding, and resource management feels a lot less relevant.
To be frank, rotations in WoW have been oversimplified to the point of idiocy. There isn’t a rotation in the game that requires even 10% of the thought and planning as some of the more difficult rotations in the past. All of them can be performed with only a trivial amount of thought, and while some of them can require a fair amount of effort to properly optimize, none of the rotations is fundamentally difficult.
That’s something we need less of. Easily one of the most common complaints about the last several expansions is that the game is increasingly “dumbed down”.
Let’s consider removing RF entirely, and baking that damage into Aimed and Arcane instead, and increasing the generation of Steady to, say, 20 to compensate. Steady still hits for the same it does now, but now it fuels Aimed and Arcane much more potently, and Aimed and Arcane hit like trucks. It feels satisfying, at least to me, to see resource management and setup effort paid off by huge numbers like that.
Do you think Destruction would feel as good if Chaos Bolt dealt roughly the same damage as Incinerate? Or would Fire feel as good if Pyroblast dealt roughly the same damage as Fireball? Would Frost feel as good if Glacial Spike dealt little more damage than Frostbolt? Would Elemental feel as good if Earth Shock dealt barely more than Lightning Bolt? Retribution if Templar’s Verdict dealt little more than Crusader Strike?
This is what we have right now. We have a strong generator, and as a result our consumer has to deal less damage to compensate, and our entire rotation feels shallow and unrewarding.
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Debatable. I don’t disagree that they are stupid easy. I disagree with the idea that they used to be hard. They were always stupid easy. And since they were always stupid easy, I don’t understand why that suddenly becomes a problem.
I also don’t think rotations need to be hard to make the game enjoyable. It’s pretty rare for videogames to have convoluted input controls because that doesn’t really add fun value, and is more than likely an entry barrier instead. Furthermore, no matter how hard you make the rotations, once you figure out the optimized algorithm, you just follow it and repeat it over and over. And you don’t even need to do it yourself, you can just read a guide and memorize the optimized rotation rules.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to make rotations hard just for the sake of it. The difficulty in the game clearly comes from boss mechanics, not from clicking your spells. I’m pretty happy with that.
It’s not about the controls being convoluted, it’s about skill mattering and gameplay requiring thought and precision. Think fighting games and their combo system. Those types of arcade games were in many ways one of the most significant factors in the rise of gaming as a whole, and they directly relied on precision, sequence, and timing of input. The controls themselves were not difficult (the vast majority used like a simple 8-direction joystick and 2 buttons), but the gameplay loop required quite a bit of skill.
That’s what’s missing in WoW right now. In too many cases, the rotation is just so braindead that it hardly matters anymore. We definitely need less of that, not more.
Ish. The more factors you have consider when making a decision on any given global, the more difficult the rotation. In addition, rotations that require reacting to events effectively are also more difficult. Feral’s rotation, for example, involves quite a number of factors to consider when choosing what ability to press and when to press it, as you want to maximize bleed uptime, but avoid overwriting empowered bleeds, and maximize the percentage of the time your empowered bleeds are active, while also avoiding capping combo points and energy.
On the other end, Havoc is pretty darn simple. Blade Dance on CD, Eye Beam on CD, Immo Aura on CD, Chaos Strike if you can, Demon’s Bite if you can’t. Demonic Appetite adds some additional (and much needed) depth to that, but it’s still pretty simple. And unfortunately, most rotations in WoW are closer to Havoc than Feral.
MM is a good example. RF on CD, Arcane Shot if you have Precise stacks, Aimed Shot if you have charges, Arcane if you’re high on focus, and Steady if you’re low on focus. There’s very little depth there as is. The more dominant RF is, the less depth, because resource management stops mattering. You cast RF on CD regardless, not just to generate resources, so it trims an already bare 5-bullet priority to only 4 in most cases.
That all said, as I’ve said before, it’s not just about difficulty. It’s also about the rotation feeling rewarding. When your consumers are dealing the same damage as your generators, your consumers, and resource management as a whole, feel a lot less rewarding and relevant. What does it matter whether you’re properly managing resources when your highest damage shot has no pre-requisites at all?
In fact, with RF as a generator, all of your Aimed Shot casts and 4 of your expected 7.5 Precise-buffed Arcane casts are handled innately via passive regen and RF. That means resource management really only affects the unrewarding unbonused Arcane fillers. Who cares if you manage your focus properly, when the only thing it affects is whether you’re using a 60% magic Arcane Shot or a 60% physical Steady Shot on those irrelevant filler GCDs? In SL, passive regen and RF covers all of your Aimed Shot casts, all of your Precise casts, and another 4.5 unbonused Arcane Shot casts per minute. Focus management just isn’t even a mechanic for MM with that design.
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