EDITED TO ADD BALANCE AND FERAL TO THE LIST
Lock main here. Obviously, pretty incensed about how Demo is being gutted, but after talking to my mates about TWW in Alpha and rereading all the talent tree changes and noticed a common statement about the philosophy of TWW. Let me introduce you to the unannounced box feature for every class in TWW:
Resource Flooding reduction
After all the Hero Talents were announced and Ion said on stage “we’re not changing your builds”, devs have without warning been systematically making every class clunkier. Initially, I thought this was a Lock problem with Demonic Core, but I noticed every rework focused on weakening core gameplay for every class. You’ll notice terms like “tactical” or “health of the class” pop up constantly. These both translate to “more auto attacks/filler spells”. Let me present you with the Warrior, DK, and Druid changes over the past few weeks:
WARRIOR
-“In Dragonflight, Rage generation for warriors of all specs was higher than what we are happy with. We feel that warriors play best when Rage is a resource they must manage tactically, so we have reduced or removed the Rage generated by several talents and abilities”
-“Our goals for Arms in The War Within are to restore Arms Warriors’ tactical relationship with Rage generation and spending and provide more choices in your talent builds.”
DK
-“For Unholy our goal was to address some of the flood of resources”
-“Empower Rune Weapon has been removed.
Developer’s note:This will still be available for Frost in their spec tree but both Blood and Unholy were often flooded with resources and a big unnecessary contributor to this was Empower Rune Weapon”
BALANCE:
-“Our top goals for Balance Druid in The War Within are to ease some of the constraints on their rotation, open up a greater variety of builds and play styles, and tune their balance and resource generation.”
-“Balance’s Astral Power generation increased a lot in Dragonflight. We’re pulling back some of those increases to slow the pace of play just a little, make pooling gameplay more interesting”
FERAL
-“Our top goals for Feral Druid in The War Within are to slow down its rotation a little to make Energy usage more tactical and to bring more clarity to playing the spec.”
-“Feral gained a lot of strong Energy generation talents in Dragonflight. As a result, it lost some of its feel as a spec where sometimes the best thing to do was pause to let a DoT tick down or for your Energy to recover.”
To put into blatant terms, the goal of the dev team going into War Within is to slow everybody down. Some of you may like the concept, but the way they’re doing it (lowering resources) isn’t going to make it feel like Vanilla, it’s just doing to make everything feel less fluid and rotations less interconnected. It’s not pruning down moves or talents either, they are legitimately angling moves like Demon Bolt or Mortal Strike to be a "payoff " instead of part of your rotation while most of your rotation is taken up by filler moves (which are being buffed in fairness)
Chances are, this will affect your classes. I’m putting this out there so everyone is aware: You are going to feel a lot less fluid and powerful in WW. Because of the breadth of these changes, I’m positive this was a stated goal for the Dev team and not something up for debate.
I believe this is going to lead into a huge pruning in Midnight when all of the no longer used moves can be cut, but in TWW we’re going to really be feeling the pain of meaningless choices and extremely filler-heavy gameplay.
For the record, I think it was incredibly dishonest and disrespectful to not have announced this, but what’s done is done. Make sure to keep up with the alpha.
