No thanks. I’m bored of seal twisting, I’ll unsub if they do.
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Having a bunch of start / stop attack macros for when you mess up a global or boss got moved, was sooooo engaging…
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In TBC Classic it was not a bug, it was a literal intentionally hardcoded mechanic. It wasn’t “tricking the game”, and I don’t understand why you are so focused on this semantic detail anyways. Blizzard intentionally changed the code for Seal of Command to stay active for 0.4 seconds after swapping seals, it was as much a feature as any other passive like your 5% base parry chance or the auto-crit when attacking a sitting player.
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The change was made to accomodate the fact that they removed batching, and it was an attempt to “preserve” some of the authenticity of the classic experience.
It was, and still is, based on a bug, and is a really clunky system. Anything that needs third party tools to consistently achieve is poor design.
Make something better, like strikes that give you a one-time seal effect that trigger on your next auto attack, rather than making us play rhythm games in an mmo with latency.
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It was, and still is, based on a bug, and is a really clunky system. Anything that needs third party tools to consistently achieve is poor design.
So melee weaving, something they have specifically said they are going to add rune support for, is poor design? Powershifting is poor design? It seems you think every somewhat interesting rotation is poor design in one way or another.
Neither melee weaving nor powershifting are based on bugs in the game, and neither are binary pass/fail mechanics, the better you do them, the greater your throughput
Twisting isn’t a bug either my friend, it is intentionally hard coded into the game for every single seal except SOC/SOM. You’re grasping at straws.
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“Seal Twisting” IS a poor game design.
You wouldn’t have to rely on cheap tricks such as “Seal Twisting” if Blizzard had done its job back then. Namely, designing a rich and interesting offensive gameplay for the paladin.
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its BASED on a bug.
As I said, it was hard coded into the game when they removed batching purely for preservation purposes, because it required batching to work in the first place.
Just because they hard coded it into the game to allow people to experience it in era, doesn’t make it any less of a bug at the time. The fact that it was eventually fixed is pretty much proof of this fact.
Well Blizzard has never developed a more rich and interesting offensive gameplay design for any class than TBC Classic sealtwisting, so given that they’ve had almost 20 years and haven’t ever produced something “better” I think I’ll take seal twisting, thanks. It isn’t “bad game design” unless you’ve got your nose stuck in a textbook and are incapable of understanding that what was “originally intended” != fun. Retail rotations where you’re just mashing buttons completely GCD locked are far less interesting than Classic’s timing based rotations, of which seal twisting is far and away the best (Vanilla/TBC hunter is probably the 2nd best).
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What… ?
I love the originally intended.
No it was not, it’s just a consequence of spell batching nothing more.
Blizzard never encouraged the seal twisting trick, they let it happened and then made it disapear.
Seriously if Seal twisting was really their intention do you really think Blizzard would have removed it when WotLK came ?
Now if you want to speak about rich and interesting offensive gameplay from vanilla you can look on warrior and rogue side.
Why ? Because they have a variety of active offensive abilities to meet specific needs, which is not the case with the Paladin.
You really feel that the development team looked into warrior and rogue gameplay for more than 2 minutes and that they thoroughly tested both classes at the time.
Paladin was scrapped 2 weeks before vanilla release with no real testing behind it.
And whatever you may say it’s a total failure (even Kevin Jordan admitted it).
Vanilla Paladin has a boring offensive gameplay you press seal and judgement and then seal again and… You wait until judgement is up again.
You used seal twisting not because you chose to but because you had nothing else to do even during BC you only had CS with a 10 sec cd until 2.3 and Judgement with an 8 sec cd if talented. OOOOHHH What a thrill !!!
So tell me where is the rich and interesting offensive gameplay here ?
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You seem to have misunderstood my statements about Blizzard’s original intentions. My point is that their original intentions were garbage and unfun, while the accidental emergent gameplay of sealtwisting is incredibly fun, and IMO better than any rotation for any spec that they have ever intentionally created since. Hence my statement that “original intentions” != fun.
The TBC Classic version in particular was great because it took what was once an inconsistent accidental bug and turned it into an intentional, hard-coded, and consistent feature.
As for your statements about how Blizzard’s original intended designs for Ret were terrible, I 100% agree. But while seal twisting may have originated as a bug exploited out of necessity, what it became when polished into an intended and consistent feature in TBC Classic was far greater.
There is no rotation I’ve ever seen in any spec in any version of WoW that can match how fun TBC Classic twisting was. Here are some of the things that add up to make it the most rich and interesting offensive gameplay in the history of WoW:
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Timing-based inputs. Instead of just mashing keys on the GCD, with the only skill involved being choosing which particular button to mash, playing around the swing timer creates much more fun and skill-based gameplay. It feels somewhat like the combat of a Fromsoft game rather than a boring button masher. Also, while you’re not mashing GCD to GCD all the time because of the timings, you’re still pushing buttons most of the time (perhaps every 1.5-2s instead of flat 1.5s every time); it’s nothing like Vanilla where you just autoattack and AFK.
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Great rewards for nailing a perfect timing. There is nothing more satisfying than watching that swing timer tick down as you set up, then nailing that twist and seeing a sudden explosion of crits across the screen as your auto procs a windfury and a seal of command and 3 seal of the martyr hits. And because you aren’t flooded with numbers leading up to it, and it relies on you nailing that twist window, it creates an extremely visceral and satisfying feeling.
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Smooth and dynamic rotation. The twisting rotation flows very nicely. Usually with no haste buffs active you do something like a 1/2 rotation - 1 twist followed by 2 other abilities (usually CS+filler). As you get haste buffs, you start being able to fit more twists in - for example, when DST procs, you might run something more like 3/2. But it’s not a jarring swap from one rotation to another; rather, it’s more a smooth “feel” for whether you have time for a twist this auto or should wait to CS or hit a filler button instead. It flows very well, and you’ll naturally shift things around dynamically with procs, making things more interesting than just using a set rotation.
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Easy to learn, hard to master. It’s surprisingly easy to get started twisting - you don’t need a whole spreadsheet telling you a precise order for pressing 15 buttons like a lot of Retail rotations. You have “only” 6 primary damaging abilities. But the rotation is very elegant in its simplicity, and there is a huge skill ceiling for not only mastering the timing itself, but feeling out all the nuances of when to go for a twist, a CS, or a judge/filler, and how that changes based on haste procs, where you are in your swing timer, etc.
Those are just a few of the reasons I’ve identified for why I believe TBC Classic seal twisting ret is the most fun rotation in tbe history of WoW. Of course due to the nature of “fun” it can be hard to perfectly explain or understand every reason for it at times. But I hope those reasons can help you understand why many people like it so much. I really wish TBC Classic was still around so you could try it yourself, but as it’s gone now you’ll unfortunately only have our word to go off of.
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Seal twisting should be patched out.
Its not a playstyle, its old tech exploitation, you need an addon or two to do it reliably.
It should be fixed across the board. No seal should twist into another seal. A truely implemented version of this allows you to just use 2 seals at the same time, because what youre effectively doing is just using 2 seals.
Why not want for an actual playstyle?
Why not want for something that isnt ovbiously exploiting old and broken tech?
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Youve played exactly 2 versions of wow and it shows
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Its not a playstyle, its old tech exploitation, you need an addon or two to do it reliably.
What the hell does this even mean? Of course it’s a playstyle. It’s a unique way of playing the game. How is watching cooldowns and pressing a button when something is off CD a playstyle, but somehow watching swing timer and pressing a button when it’s about to go off is not?
And you don’t need any addons to play it. A swing timer lets you optimize it more, but the same is true for every physical class in the game. In vanilla you can reliably seal twist with 2 macros and no addons.
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Because the playstle is already ‘buff my auto attack’, and twisting makes it ‘buff my auto attack twice’.
Its not particularly engaging, especially if youre just throwing both seals on a macro, cause then youre just pressing heroic strike but you have to “time” it. Nor is it ‘fun’ to spend all of my mana on seals for mediocre performance on meters.
You arent going to do it reliably without a swing timer or a weakaura because there is no visual tell for autos, so yeah, you do need wst or weakaura or youre just performing poorly.
The best youre going to get is deadly brew but for paladins. Because thats what seal twisting is, its not a play style change, its just adding more damage to the same playstyle you already have.
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You couldn’t be more wrong. Just letting you have two seals on isnt a playstyle, you’d simply autoattack. The twisting playstyle requires you to play around swing timers, simply putting 2 seals on yourself doesnt. You’re proposing replacing something that definitely IS a playstyle with something that definitely is not.
It’s very engaging, and in TBC it was very rewarding. A skilled ret paladin twisting well was one of the higher ST dps classes in the game.
You don’t need a weakaura or swing timer in vanilla, where there aren’t many haste effects to change your swing speed. Simply a /stopattack macro on Seal of Command, and a /startattack macro on seal of blood. Get into a rhythm pressing them and you’ll be twisting fine. Will you be losing some swings compared to properly twisting with a swing timer? Of course. But warriors/rogues lose swings to WF procs from improperly timed instants without a swing timer, hunters lose autoshots to improperly timed aimed shots/melee weaves without a shot timer, and druid’s lose energy to improperly timed powershifts without an energy timer. Needing addons to play physical dps optimally is just a fact of life in vanilla.
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yep
sod ret feels like tbc and wrath ret had a baby, but it inherited none of the good genes from either
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Played multiple Retail xpacs, played all 3 Classic xpacs extensively, played many different specs across all of those. Now I’ve got a question for you - did you raid as Ret in TBC and give seal twisting a fair shot? Because it sounds from your statements like you have absolutely no clue how it even worked, much less any experience with which to give a rational critique.
Id rather them just buff martyrdom honestly.