i think a lot of people hate that the games abilities in majority have been pruned
but a lot of people seem to not mind
so my question to the community, do you find having utility that can address specific situations unfun? do you find utility hard to manage? do you find yourself forgetting your abilities often?
examples of ‘utility’ and how they can be used dynamically
i noticed personally 99 times out of 100 players outright refuse to use their (already limited) utility without it being demanded
doing a key, HUGE pull everyones dying
2 demon hunters ZERO darknesses
why?
or same scenario rsham or ele sham
outright refuses to press earth ele
oh man
even better
purge
demonhunters outright REFUSE to acknowledge they have a purge
dps shaman/druids or mages hex dispels on atal’dazar
monk legsweep is another really good one
is
‘if it doesn’t do damage it isn’t worth the global’ a better or more fun mentality to you? or the opposite?
Be in a raiding guild, buttons fly everywhere! You even have organized interrupt orders and prioritized dispels, Mages get first crack at stealing a buff then demon hunters who can devour it.
No the player youre reffering to is what people call “plebs”. There is no saving this type of player, even with classes being dumbed down to 2 buttons.
Damn here I am lucky to see another Frost Mage cast Frostbolt while leveling, I see so many mages hardcasting Flurry or spamming non-shatter Ice Lances even in the upper sixties.
No matter how dumbed down this game gets, somehow, people will always screw it up. So it’s best not to design around the lower echelons for that reason.
the issue is a MAJORITY of players i come across play this way
granted it’s the 1k-1400 ish io bracket i dont do big keys
but i think in the 100 or so 10-14 keys ive done this season i’ve had 2? max dhs use darkness on like a big pull with void, or on 6+ bursting stacks ect
points that it just makes sense
but i ask because the wow dev team seems to balance around this mentality
every time ion mentions pruned abilities he mentions how some players dont even put said abilities on their bars or never press them
This is why Ion and his team shouldn’t design around peabrain players. The peabrains will screw it up nomatter how simple it gets, while also making it more boring for the high-end. Everybody loses.
I understand i have the same issue on my ww monk that has a 1432 io score. Honestly dont know i think people get so tunneled on dps they forget they have other responsibilities.
Did TD15 the other day and the first tide emissary with the 2 water castera comes up. Tank asks for an aoe purge from the blood elf pally. Pally says its on CD…why you ask? Im still asking myself that today. I get its not the example youre reffering to, but still…
this is actually part of it. they went WAY overboard with slapping stuff onto the GCD. then they went WAY overboard on giving every freaking ability in the game a proc modifier that changes your situation. a lot of times, my finger’s already hit that button to take advantage of whatever effect has proc’d to activate the requisite ability before the proc expires. hitting that cleanse/dispel/brez/defensive etc is often messing up not just the current GCD cycle, it may screw up some spec’s entire rotation.
sometimes, leaving you cc’d or dead is going to result in more dps as a group than taking the time to fix you, when it’s going to wear off, or kill you, in 3-5 seconds anyway.
i’m not saying i agree with that from a design standpoint. a lot of these cooldown abilities and debuff/cc removal skills should never have been put on the GCD in the first place.
As much as I support the unpruning movement, I have to think that perhaps we shouldnt give players more buttons. Most of them cant even use their silences…
there’s a reason console controllers stopped adding more buttons several evolutions/generations ago. d-pad start select AB wasn’t enough, then they added the L+R bumpers, now we have ABXY, L+R bumbers and L+R triggers, a D-pad and two sticks, and then whatever legacy specialty buttons come with that flavor of console.
this is not coincidence. the more complex the control schema of your game, the more you limit your playerbase to only those people who can innately take advantage of that complexity. with a game like wow it will always be a balancing act. unfortunately, they’ve tuned and retuned and adjusted and added and changed abilities, skills, actions, the GCD and so on and so forth with every expansion. we may have fewer abilities, but i have to smash my keys far more frequently than i did in cataclysm, and WAY more than i did in vanilla.
the faster the pace of combat, the less time people have to detect, analyze, and react. having less skills means you can do that faster because you narrow your subset of possible action solutions to your current situation, letting you optimize that split second decision making.
while the most skilled players can handle a broader skillset and more buttons to choose from when deciding what to press next, if the gameplay -requires- that, then your average player will fall far behind and then lose interest in the game and move on, spending their money elsewhere
WoW’s fluid combat was what set it apart from every other MMO. Now we’re back to mashing keys multiple times trying to get an ability to activate.
I do understand what you’re saying, though. But the players who are having difficulties making split-second decisions aren’t raiding outside of LFR anyway. The GCD isn’t enough to bring them up to par and serves more to upset the players who do raid.
if they would simply take some abilities back off the GCD i think that would go a long way towards fixing it. battle rez’s, cleansing and debuff removals should not be on the GCD. give them their own internal cooldown if they need to not be spammed.
one example of it screwing up a rotation is for example, my breath of sindragosa. it’s damage is ENTIRELY dependent on me not missing a single keypress in my rotation in order to generate runic power and keep it going as long as possible. if i miss a GCD, that’s not a hiccup, that’s just screwed up my DPS cycle for the next two minutes.
it’s even more critical for tanks and healers than DPS.
I don’t like having a ton of main rotational buttons but I like having utility. FFXIV is the only MMORPG where I can manage all of the rotational buttons and then only when I use a controller (I can hear you guys snickering, this game was built around controller usage, bar swapping is very comfortable).
If I had a ton of rotational abilities I would stop playing WoW. Utility that I still can keybind to slightly off to the side but still accessible buttons is fine and I like feeling useful so I do use these abilities.
Also, in terms of not having a lot of rotational abilities: I still like the rotation to feel fun and impactful and unique to each class. To me right now a lot of classes just feel like “use your different colored blobs in this order”. Basically, I just don’t necessarily feel that the complexity and immersion people want will come with having a whole bunch of keybinds.
To be honest, if I am on the phone or talking to someone else in the room and I’m still playing, I become distracted and most likely won’t use my rotation. I’ll just screw around until the mob is dead because I’m focusing on someone or something else and not going for maximum DPS, lol.
I won’t judge my fellow player for not being 110% in the moment bc you never know what they’re up to IRL, lol, and many a time you get hysterical running off of a cliff situations. How I miss Hellfire Peninsula…
