Im not rushing to grab my pitch fork just yet. I genuinely agreed with the overall philosophy of bloat. There is way too many CDs and abilities for classes in the game, and as a healer, I can attest a good example is Pres Evoker. Like let’s be serious how is a new player supposed to pick up pres and know what on gods earth what to do.
That being said, after watching Xaryu’s video, watching his mage get stripped down to 3-4 abilities only, seems a bit overkill. I hope this early alpha is just a starting point of design and not the end result of their pruning philosophy.
I take pride in my gameplay, every season I have gotten slightly better then the last, I am climbing the ranks, and I want SOME complexity. There needs to be an environment thats friendly/inviting for new players, BUT there also needs to be a bridge between the average player and the good/pro players, where skill becomes rewarding and fulfilling and sets you apart from the the player next to you.
I don’t see a rewarding experience for someone like me who genuinely WANTS to be the best I can be, by mashing 3 buttons in a rotation lol.
It isn’t for new players. It literally says it’s an advanced class.
Of course, not anymore. Apparently I’m now considered too dumb to use Spiritbloom and everyone has to be treated like a child who can only use a few buttons.
Well, if blizzard reverted the ability pruning, they would also have to change course and then design a UI that is capable of displaying the necessary information to the player.
So that requires blizzard tossing out their UI and building one from the ground up that is complex enough for all of the abilities.
So I don’t see blizzard reverting any of the class pruning.
There are only a very select handful of specs / changes that were actually necessitated by the removal of add-ons. Most of them are just cutting core abilities for the fun (Or lack thereof) of it.
I wouldnt want them to fuly revert but I think 3-4 abilities per class was WAYYYYY overkill. I think 10-12 keybinds of abilities and cooldowns per class is very reasonable. Under the current system, binding 10 keys and then using shift and control modifiers for those same keys for even more abilities + all the macros is way too much going on. We can all agree on that
On the positive side I guess for the first time in my entire wow career ill finally be able to bind my mount LOL
That’s the issue, like I don’t see how 3 buttons, is going to make interesting combat. I mean mobile games have more complexity then that.
Pruning shoulda been more of an opportunity to remove bloat vs dumbing down the specs to nothing. For example, if I stick with the Pres Evoker example above, instead of having tail swipe + an interrupt, those 2 shoulda been on the tree together forcing you to pick one or the other. THATS pruning. Deleting 80% of all the specs abilities is not. I don’t know where this is going lol
The goal is to remove addons, simplify combat back to 2005 where you used 1-2 buttons the entire fight. People will simply quit because the games boring.
They even managed to make devastation even more boring and worse off and all we do is spam pyre…
I thought we had things like the 1 button rotation so we DID NOT have to simplify the game for everyone else. I welcome (with reservation) the addon change but every time they have pruned abilities, it has basically ruined the game imo. I do not think we need this. If the classes are too complicated for people (they aren’t) then let them do easier content. Rarely do I complain about changes but I HATE this.
I feel like the game should be designed in such a way that by the time you are at level cap you should know how to play your spec. Of course if you level DPS and decide to pick up healer it’s gonna take time to adjust, but there’s always follower dungeons to learn your abilities and test new stuff.
As a survival hunter I have like Raptor Strike and Kill command to hit. Wildfire bomb has charges and a CD and most of my abilities from the talent tree are on a 30 second to 2 minute cooldown. It’s really not engaging.
Beast mastery is fairly similar where you are hitting Kill command and Barbed shot and hoping your RNG Dire Beast procs so your numbers go up. Not really engaging. A turn your brain off while raiding spec.
And it sounds like this is the norm they are aiming for for everyone.
People often ask me why I love wow pve so much. For a long time it was just the right difficulty to keep me in a flow state when I wanted to play.
I’m pretty pessimistic for midnight . I like the idea that some specs are easy while others are harder . I was happy about a world where people could play classic if they wanted to go back to simpler times but now that philosophy is being forced on retail.
They probably think it’s easier to wipe the slate down to what they’re pruning and then building up from that point with the addon restrictions in place. I assume the classes will start to gain more complexity after this initial pass again, but with not having WAs in mind from the start.
If this is the case I don’t know if I quite agree with the approach but I can see the reasoning in it.
Many people also used Weak Auras to compensate for the base UI. Wow devs had 25 years to update the UI, and only just now started? The cooldown manager revealed the ineptitude and just out of touch the devs are from the players. Many features covered by addons/WA are still missing from cooldown manager