Blizzard has had a long tradition of adding buttons to push every expansion. By the time they realize what had been done it was too late… someone was bound to be upset by button removal. Whether they remove the right things or not is yet to be seen but something had to be done.
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So does complex equal fun? I’m just not so sure it’s always the case.
Certainly I think if it’s easier to play your class, people would have fun with it because they don’t have to think too hard on how to play but on the flipside if it is complex, but people do figure it out then it’s fun right?
I think two different things can be true at the same time but at the end of the day what makes the most money for blizzard?
It’s literally just the life cycle of MMOs.
Things are added. Things become bloated. Pruning happens. Things are added and the cycle repeats.
Not sure why people aren’t conditioned to all of this between prior pruning, stat, and level squishes lol.
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Too be fair, that is their own fault. I didn’t tell them to add slice and dice back, I don’t even have it on my bars, it’s pointless to even exist lol.
Its definitely possible to land on fun classes with simple gameplay, but they have a long road ahead to make that work as a lot of classes relies on procs/buffs. Are they going too far? In my opinion sure but the overall feedback from users seems to be that they want that, it is what it is, I think its lame. Dude is crying about frostbolt damage, not even in Warcraft and older RPGs that thing did damage xd
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The pruning also goes deeper than just making the classes “easier”
It’s a fundamental gameplay shift, for example the defensive pruning allows healers to actually heal instead of having binary health defensive or die gameplay which people have been complaining about for years
A lot of this goes way deeper than “less buttons baby game”
All healing is right now is reaction time based spot healing with “healcheck” bosses just to allow them to use their kit, it’s not in a healthy place at all
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It doesn’t have to be but Ion and their crew have no other motive but to do this because it’s what they’ve done for their entire working careers. It works, I guess, but man.
It just keeps happening. For better or for worse, of course.
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You are not wrong. I am just saying I agree some buttons need removing and I doubt many on these forums are qualified to say what should or shouldn’t. I am looking forward to seeing how the classes land and I am sure I will be less than happy with some of the results.
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I can see how my class plays on live. It’s fun.
I can replicate how my class plays in midnight on live by untalenting and removing buttons from my bars. It’s not fun.
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I should say progress, not experience. So 2 to 3 hours a week is a perfect example of a normal person. I would say perhaps double that is more consistent with normal gaming for an ageing audience. I think it would be great if the game was designed with that level of commitment in mind
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This is an argument that you cannot possibly win, because Blizzard themselves have come out and said that the existence of addons has necessitate increasingly complex encounter and spec design in order to keep up with the capabilities of addons.
That’s why they’re reducing the power of combat addons in tandem with reducing the complexity of specs. It’s a pair of cyclical issues which compound on top of one another. Addons make combat easier, so spec design becomes more complex to compensate, which addons then improve to handle more efficiently, which means the spec gets even more complex.
Since Dragonflight, and especially in TWW, they have been scaling back the necessary complexity of most specs, and it has been beautiful. Just ask most Affliction Warlock players how they feel about Malefic Rapture being removed.
Most of them are very, very happy about this.
Back to the subject of addons…remember Archimonde in WoD, with the extremely specific placement of beams which could only reasonably be overcome by using an addon that tracked each player in the raid’s specific location and told them exactly where to stand to avoid killing each other?
That’s a pretty blatant example of addon capabilities creating more complex raid mechanics in order to keep up. If addons didn’t exist to trivialize such mechanics, it would not have existed in that form. Addons have been influencing encounter design for over a decade at least. The escalation never stopped, but maybe it hasn’t been quite as blatant since the Archimonde example.
The same is true for spec design. Everybody at the top level uses weakauras to manage their procs, cooldowns, modifiers, etc. because there are so many layers of modifiers, procs, and cooldowns that it’s unreasonable for a player to manage them appropriately without addons helping them process all of the information that’s being simultaneously thrown at them.
Top-level players use addons because they can’t perform perfectly without them. If the best players in the world need multiple weakauras and combat addons in order to perform at an acceptable level, then the game design is taking those addons into account and it’s far, far too complex for an average player to play at full strength without extensive guides, addons, and practice.
I just want to deal damage with my cool spells. It doesn’t need to be DDR/Whack-A-Mole to deal baseline damage. That’s not really fun for me.
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It is, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it lol.
Sure it is, watch:
The addon developers don’t design the classes.
See, look how easy that was lol.
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They aren’t doing it for any of those reasons. They are doing it to prepare for a console release.
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If it was, then you would be 8/8 mythic and at kwastike 3k score
No mage tower in Legion Remix.
Dumbing down talent trees and play styles.
No transmogs from upgrading tier gear.
Blizz is trying so hard to get me to quit the game.
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Wut? How do you figure that? I barely play the game and do maybe 4 Mythic+ runs in a week lol. “That level of commitment.”
To be fair other midnight specs will still be more complex than TWW ret
But do you or don’t you have the ability to see how different your relationship is with this game than basically almost every single other person playing it. There are something like 800 or 900 players that get title every season. If you throw cutting edge into that, it dropw significantly. Idk if you’re Hof, but then we are going down to maybe a few hubdred
I really wish they would stop. Blizz tried this kind of mass simplification once before, players were outraged, and then Blizz spent the following two expansions un-pruning everything to make players happy again. So my prediction is that one of Last Titan’s key features will be undoing a lot of Midnight’s spec simplification.
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