Outside of fire mage, most of the content videos ive seen have the creators really excited for the spec changes. Kalamazi was about as excited as I’ve ever seen him when trying the rebuilt aff
It’s a bit early to draw a conclusion. Generally, many specs feel the same on alpha. There are a few that got a bomb dropped on them that need to be reconsidered.
Aff, balance, ret, devourer look pretty good.
There’s a couple that are real bad though, fire and shadow spring to mind, devastation too.
new players pick hunter, rogue, or paladin.
some classes are meant for players who want more, those classes are not and should not be new player friendly.
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that kind of my hope, that they are wiping the slate and will slowly rebuild from there over time.
I have a back order of torches on Amazon, just in case!
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I mean tbh most classes don’t HAVE that many more damage abilities than that already. If you take away the cds, utility and defensives it’s already like that for plenty of classes. I feel like a lot of content creators will make this seem worse than it is. That’s just my opinion but those types of videos get a lot of views in times like this.
Arcane mage is a harder to learn class with 4 spells, 7 with cds…8 if you really want to count shifting power and a lot more with utility and defensives.
I could slap on 6 spells on my bar right now and complain about it lolz
The complexity and issues that happen isn’t for the amount of spells itself but the buffs or reasons WHY we are hitting the spells. If 5 spells feel more impactful to hit than 7 because 3 of them exist to prime other spells then I’d rather just the 5.
Not having a weakaura to track an arcane mages passive buffs today would be absolutely awful.
And I think you know all of that by reading the op and I do agree with you. But I don’t trust any streamers right now to represent these changes well. I see A LOT of streamers mad at just the idea of changes to make the classes easier to track and play when it did need to happen but happen with some nuance.
Which is my concern. Blizz can be a bit too heavy handed.
A class could easily have 5 spells and still have complexity. Assassination rogue back in WoD was like that and it was really fun. You had to learn how and when to pool energy right, keep a buff up on yourself as long as you could, apply poisons to everything, and plan ahead with combo points. People would say it’s too simple back then but there was a GAP between the ones who understood it and the ones who didn’t.
But the important part was that it was inviting to try.
Not sure why you are strawmanning wow’s entire gameplay loop to “mashing 3 buttons” but sure. i guess getting bait farmed by streamers and youtubers by clickbait and then running to scream on forums is fun.
if you think thats what retail is with class pruning and you prefer overly complex button bloat, no one can change your mind on what is fun, so just dont play midnight.
Some of the pruning won’t make a difference because people didn’t use say healing wave unless they were speced into a certain talent. They only used healing surge the rest of the time. There wasn’t really a reason to have both spells anymore. The time when we had three basic healing spells on almost all classes was very redundant and annoying and mostly just about mana management. They eventually went back to two. Most classes now don’t frequently use even two unless they had a rotational talent like lightweaver.
A lot of the interesting interactions really haven’t changed due to the pruning. Prevoker losing lifebind combos is the only really big playstyle loss that I noticed for healers.
I think the cooldown pruning should come with making some of them more impressive to press. In some cases you can talent into merging cooldowns like flourish into tranq. For things like Ultimate Penitence, they need to remove the cast time. It was already stupid that it had a 1.5 second cast time when it was a channeled cooldown to begin with. Now that it’s one of your only cooldowns if you pick it, it should do something as soon as you press it.
Hopefully they’ll get that kind of feedback in beta.
Also wild growth should be instant cast again because cast times into channels or HoTs is just generally dumb and feels bad. Regrowth is an exception since most of its healing is upfront. That has nothing to do with the pruning but the point about UP reminded me of it and I’ve been trying to get them to change it back for years.
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Its just blizzard making the same mistakes they made in the past because they forgot why they did it and then reverted it.
They do this to some capacity with every expansion because no one there seems to have a memory of the past.
yeah watching the alpha videos for all 3 mage specs looks bleak. i look at other classes and don’t see anything i’m interested in playing so far. the search continues for what i will try out during pre patch.
Fire mage is literally the most extreme example you can find.
I will say it’s hard to judge the end goal class design at expansion launch. They tend to iterate as the expansion progresses and things also change when tier sets come into play.
I also never really like how class changes feel at first, but then get used to them and sometimes it’s good, sometimes not so good. Hard for me to tell so far based on videos and not actually playing.
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The most extreme example I could find was watching firedup and hopeful just case orb > barrage over and over. Ironically just watched a bit of the rogue gameplay and the class that needed the rework the most based on outlaws apm and its lack of representation is getting almost the least. no rhyme or reason
theres definitely some cases where the pruning has likely gone too far. but i remain cautiously optimistic.
i wonder what stuff looks like in the last titan. it could be that these are going to serve as new baselines to iterate off of or it could be a more long term design goal in which case i worry about the long term state of class design.
i wonder if a large part of the reason why they went so basic is so that new class designers can be eased into the role more easily. the rogues and demon hunters who went through much of tww without some very much needed iteration can attest to how bad it is when your class designer appears to be nonexistent.