Everyone agrees the game is complicated to the degree that using third-party resources is frustrating. It’s not frustrating that we have to go get the third-party thing, it’s frustrating that things are so complicated to begin with.
This is literally why “band-aiding” became a term, because this is addressing symptoms not the root problem.
Here are some of my past posts talking about the same thing over the course of the last year:
Player navigation is too complicated
PvP is too complicated, including abilities & rotation
Need for Social/Fun elements focus instead of competitive overly designed systems
I feel like I’m just talking to a brick wall here.
Honest truth, what you’re doing with these two changes are taking the easy way out. It’s the lame, boring, and lazy way of trying to fix a problem. Players deserve better. They deserve an actual fix to the problem of the game (even beyond rotations) being overly complicated.
Also I’m sorry to the developers that have to maintain these things now instead of doing actual work on parts of the game that will help the core playerbase or help correct the new player experience.
I’m so frustrated because I felt like Blizzard and the community were finally on the same page in Dragonflight - we need evergreen features, and to strat to clarify and simplify the game. Let’s make the story easier to understand – boom, World Soul Saga. We don’t like dead content, boom evergreen everything. We need more fun metas, boom Player Housing. How could we stumble so hard after that? Players think the game is too complicated - boom… we’ll try to help explain it and maybe even do it for you a little? Like come on.
I tested this system yesterday and today on the PTR, and I came to the conclusion that it’s essentially an improved version of the /castsequence function, which has been around in macros since Classic — but now enhanced and without the character limitations that used to get in the way, especially when customizing in other languages.
Players who aren’t into instanced or competitive content, like Mythic dungeons, PvP arenas, and raids. Players who prefer to live in the world, explore, and just enjoy the game at their own pace. Players who like playing retail with a controller…
…and the group I call the Warriors of Light (how I like to refer to people with disabilities), like Ibelin, Amara, Pedro, and so many others who didn’t have the same privilege as us to experience the game to its fullest. For this specific audience, games offer access to worlds they long to be part of but cannot in real life. I’ve read many posts on WoW forums around the world from people asking for something that could help them achieve even minimally satisfying performance in the game — something that, until then, relied solely on outdated addons or macros.
Basically, they removed the need for players to create a 255-character sequence to program their One Button rotation and simplified the whole process into a single button. That’s it!
As for the game’s complexity, it’s a much deeper topic, but if I had to point out the root of the issue, I’d say it’s much more connected to the RPG genre itself than to the presence or absence of features like these in games.
This is the classic One Button Rotation macro, which has existed in the game since ancient times through the /castsequence command — something that’s been in WoW for over 10,000 years, or more precisely, since patch 0.5.5 during the beta. Back then, the macro had a ridiculous 36-character limit, which was later increased to 120, and in the current version, it’s 255.
An Affliction Warlock at level 10 in retail can pretty much run a one-button rotation using a macro.
An Affliction Warlock at level 10 in retail can already perform a one-button rotation using the new feature.
Let’s take a look back at how the “simplified” version of the game was during the Lich King era, with the classic /castsequence function — or as some called it, the TWO button rotation?
After watching many videos from content creators across different countries and reading countless posts in various WoW forum threads around the world, I’ve come to the following conclusion:
People don’t want the overwhelming number of abilities we have today, but they also don’t want the overly simplified small rotations from Classic. In the end, they’re making a huge storm in a glass of water, blaming a new feature that, in reality, has existed in the game — in a different form — since the beta.
What the development team did was basically this:
“Hey, player! Now you no longer need to create a bunch of macros every time you roll a new character or change your game’s language. And you also don’t need to worry about character limits anymore, which varied depending on the language and how spell names were written — something that could take up more space in macros depending on the region.”
This isn’t going to create a perfect rotation, it won’t change the experience for players doing harder content, and it definitely won’t reshape how people already play the game today.
Honestly? It feels like a whole lot of drama from the community over something pretty minor.
This is a misunderstanding. The 1 button assistant is not just a cast sequence, it’s a priority list and as such much more powerful. Making a bunch of cast sequence macros is not even in the same universe as what the 1 button assistant, because WoW has not actually had fixed “rotations” since Cataclysm at the very latest, earlier depending on the class. Specs can’t be boiled down to just a fixed sequence.
The 1 button assistant’s priority list also needs to actually be good, because it’s also used by the “Blizzard Hekili” thing they’re adding, and as a learning tool (at least in theory) that absolutely needs to press buttons in a mostly correct priority. So there needs to be an extra penalty on the 1 button assistant (like the extra long GCD, although that’s not a great way of doing it), because it should never ever be correct for a player who wants to play “manually” and has no disabilities etc getting in the way to use this functionality.
There should not be a level of “bad player” where using it is a DPS increase, because that would be insulting to those players who are trying their hardest and just happen to not be super good (yet?).
It existing as an accessibility option or for people who don’t care to play their spec is fine, but nobody who is actively trying (and able) to play should be encouraged to use it.
I hear a lot of people say that MoP was when abilities and the flow of the game felt right. Yet, since Cataclysm every class has had nearly every utility to remain “competitive” for an e-sports environment, expanding the number of buttons and complexity significantly. Since those expansions, many more abilities, buffs, and passives have been added that has made (at a competitive level) any sort of WoW esport completely unwatchable for 99% of the player base and (at a majority level) the game entirely confusing. This confusion for the majority of the player base (and for the optimization of the advanced players) is why WeakAuras and other addons were created.
It’s not a surprise that in Cataclysm, when all of the extra abilities and a lot of these problems were rolling out that player subscription numbers tanked. Everything just got too complicated and the nominal player was not having fun. Now Blizzard is in a situation where they can collect and see data from current players, even top raiding players, but it is difficult to collect feedback on people who have quit, aside from an exit survey that I’m sure nearly zero people fill out. It is my belief and preference that this game needs more new players, and so it is frustrating to me when (time and time again…) Blizzard chooses to deepen an existing problem instead of addressing to better restore the game.
Everything typed above was mostly in the headspace of PvE, raiding & dungeons. If we read it through the PvP lens, things are even more dire and dramatically poor. PvP is wholly too confusing and the amount of soft-cc and other passives that have made PvE confusing are entirely mystifying when you’re on the receiving end of it in PvP.
We can take even the most recent PvP tournament for example: (timestamped)
It is almost entirely unwatchable, aside from maybe just looking at health bars and them moving around, to understand what is going on. Even if you’re in the top 1% of PvP players, you can understand all the abilities and who has what, but at the end of the day there are an enumerable number of passives, gear decisions, and talent choices that make knowing what’s going on almost a mystery.
In the past, or in most games, having this criticism is met with “oh keep practicing” or some insinuation that you’re not good enough to handle hard content. Yet in WoW even the best players agree that it’s too complicated. Since we seem to be so deeply concerned with the feedback of the top 1% of players, here’s some feedback from Venruki and Pikaboo - some of the best PvP players in the game (timestamped)
Since that video was created two years ago, even more soft cc, abilities, and talents have entered the game. Yet, year-over-year, Blizzard has sidestepped the problem all whilst developing new class features that have deepened it.
So with all of this above history in mind, the esports craze, development, player (and top 1% player feedback), PvE, PvP… we get to today where the problem is finally acknowledged by Blizzard (through Ian) but instead of making an attempt to normalize and reduce bloat, they are making tools for us to manage it. This (to me) reads as a decision to not simplify the game and seems to ignore the true problem because of it - and that is frustrating and where some of the drama is coming from.
I’ll just say more bluntly what I’m feeling - MMORPGs do not make good esports and Blizzards insistence to make it one has killed the game for a majority of players. The majority of players are defined by the subscription numbers and culturally. Talk with any ex-WoW player off the street, or randomly select any previous player and they will tell you that they stopped playing in Cataclysm and it was because raiding was too complicated and that their class changed too much. Having the game more simplistic is enjoyable by a wider audience, as evidenced by the Classic WoW boom. Competitive players will always find their niche and find complications to leverage. Yet, Blizzard seems to have it backwards, where we design the game with the top content (mythic raiding, etc.) in mind and not for those players who have quit or are not in said content. The mistakes of Cataclysm have festered and lasted so long that we’ve reached a state of “that’s the way it’s always been” when it has not and we’ve just reached a critical crossroads where (yet again) the lead game designer has avoided the fact that this element of the game is cannibalizing itself - and there is no cure planned. Maybe if we feel the need to have one button aid, or our rotations explained to us in-game - the game is too complicated and needs redesign. The most popular esports are those that are easily understandable by audiences and people who do not play the game, if we insist on WoW esports then look no further than the massive success of Classic WoW duelling tournaments. These tournaments have over-quadruple the amount of viewership than the retail equivalent. Classic’s success is not driven by “hype” or “nostalgia” but because of the simple fact that it is simple and easy to understand and enjoy - and given that the player base is in their 30’s and 40’s… simple and easy to understand sells pretty well.
Totally agree with the “should” there, but “will” is a whole other story. If I’m a raid leader and members of my raid could obviously have a DPS increase, or even just navigate mechanics better, by having the rotation covered for them - I am likely to encourage players to use it as the easiest, least resistant solution. Would that be wrong of me? Yep! Is it likely to still happen to many raids in the game, totally.
One button raises the skill floor significantly to the point where if you’re learning and doing worse than someone with a garage door opener I imagine players will feel discouraged.
