If we are going to have a discussion about how world buffs trivialized content well into the extreme, I think another place to look is the amount of power that heroic strike queuing brought warriors. Let alone the sheer amount of damage it granted fury warriors, one should also think about the additional amount of threat it granted DW fury-prot tanks which allowed for the entirety of the raid to crank damage which was a large reason for the trivialization of content. If Blizzard is looking to make SoM difficult, a great place to look would be at removing this.
And before you scream “ITS CONFIRMED NOT A BUG” or “IT WAS IN VANILLA”, it is still a feature akin to world buffs in that was not utilized by about 99% of the player base in original vanilla.
Indeed it is! However, it would likely have an impact on the difficulty of the content, lower the amount of mage boosters, and of course it would prevent Heroic Strike queueing.
There are plenty of private servers where heroic strike queueing was not a thing in addition to armor values and boss hp being overly inflated and many of guilds still cleared Naxx. It’s not an unreasonable thing to ask for I’d say. People are just unable to adjust to allowing for a significant amount of time for the tank to establish threat before toeing the line between optimal DPS and not over aggroing the tank. They would rather prefer something to how it is in retail where threat is not a thing.
Would I want thoughtful and engaging mechanics that are player-controlled which require skill to execute? Yes, I would.
A big thing that people didn’t understand with Classic which they would have if they played during vanilla is that threat itself was a substantial mechanic beyond just “be below the tank”. Bosses had simple mechanics yes but combined with having to carefully manage your threat made fights much more difficult in execution.
Take Onyxia: the mechanics she does are not too hard to counter but back in the day it was threat that made the fight and gave it the legacy it had due to the aggro drops ala wing buffet.
I’ve been playing a warrior forever and have reached 95+ parses pretty consistently. But I never really bothered with HS queue.
You need a slow MH weapon and fast OH to make it viable which isn’t always practical depending on what loot you get.
If you mess up the timing, it will actually decrease your DPS.
Even if you do it perfectly, the increase in DPS is actually pretty small.
Focusing on your swing timer constantly while trying to optimize this mechanic is exhausting and pretty un-fun.
I’d rather my focus be spent on other things that have an even greater likelihood to increase my DPS… like positioning, buff management, engineering, deathwish timing, wing buffet threat drop, basic rotation and other cooldowns. Basically, good fundamentals.
Plus, I suspect it’ll be a non-issue in SoM anyway. Threat ceilings will (hopefully) exist again so HS won’t be used nearly as much… plus HS is really rage inefficient and we won’t have infinite rage from WBs anymore.
In short, it won’t be a thing for the most part. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Tanks will though so they will still have inflated rage which also greatly increases their threat generation meaning DPS can go harder which leads to many encounters significantly easier.
