When a player wants to interact with a neutral or hostile target, action targeting and tab targeting is usually sufficient. The nature of what the game wants you to do in relation to these targets (kill them, 99% of the time) doesn’t require any fine-tuned targeting. And if any specific targeting is needed, tab targeting is usually sufficient. These features could be ported over to console (or controller input) without significant issue.
Compare that to the task of healing (or cleansing, or aiding a specific ally in some way).
The Problem
When a player wants to interact with a friendly target, they have to manually click on it somehow. There isn’t a way to tab-target or action-target your way onto the desired target. Mouse interaction is required.
The only exception is when you’re grouped in a party. Hotkey assignments are available to let you automatically target the desired party or raid member with the press of a complex combinatinon of hotkeys because all of your normal hotkeys are already assigned to something else.
Selecting a friendly target isn’t a well supported task in WoW’s game UI (particularly in comparison to selecting a neutral/hostile target). Never has been. And having an army of keybinds isn’t feasible to recreate on a console controller either.
“Smart” Abilities
In various periods throughout WoW’s history, some abilities are “smart”, meaning that they’d automatically do what the player would desire to have happen without requiring significant input from the player themselves. A few examples:
- Chain heal used to always prioritize the lowest health targets for each successive bounce. The only decision to be made by the player was A) to cast the spell, and B) select the initial target. Now, chain heal just heals random injured allies.
- Disc Priest Atonement healing (at the end of Mists of Pandaria) only healed when dealing damage with Smite, and the heal automatically triggered on the lowest health ally within 40 yards of Smite’s target for an amount of equal to Smite’s damage. The only interaction required on the player’s part was basically to just cast the spell. This was coupled with out-of-control scaling and Priests doing significantly more damage than almost every other spec by just spamming smite (and thus, out-healing most everyone else as well).
- Mistweavers have loads of “smart” abilities, from Renewing Mist jumping to injured targets to Ancient Teachings (and whatever other iterations of “Fistweaving” that have existed).
- Druid’s Wild Growth has had various degrees of “smartness”.
- Most beneficial, limited-target AoE abilities are inherently “smart” to varying degrees simply because it’s impossible for players to target multiple things simultaneously. Not having the “smart” behavior built-in would break how the ability works. Radiance should cast Atonement on allies in the raid that don’t already have it, rather than risking RNG to just hit the same targets with a second cast.
Blizzard’s Stance on “Smart” Abilities
Blizzard has historically taken the stance to “dumb down” beneficial abilities in the interest of optimizing player engagement with how the ability performs. More player input into the skill output. Except in this case, the majority of the “skill” involved is a measure of “how good can you move your mouse to select unit frames on a screen?”. It’s a direction that simply cannot support console controller accessibility.
New WoW players have to deal with the limitations of targeting friendly units. Veteran WoW players often get around this through addons and learning how to write macros (usually @mouseover macros). Players have to pull themselves out of the game and dive into the nuances of the game’s UI in order to make it easier to interact with the game in a skillful way. This bleeds into a much larger conversation about addons and their effect on expression of skill in WoW, but I’ll set that topic aside for now.
What’s the Solution?
Here’s a few ideas:
- Instead of nerfing the “smartest” beneficial abilities because they outperform all the “dumb” abilities, make every ability smart. For example, when a Paladin casts Flash of Light let the game assume (in order): A) The paladin wants to cast it on their target, if a friendly target is selected. B) The paladin wants to cast it on the most injured member of their party or raid group, C) The paladin wants to cast it on themselves. There’s still room for skillful expression while intelligently supporting player intention.
- It’s reasonable to not want players to do nothing more than mindlessly spam “smart” abilities. Rework the play-style of the healing role into more of a pendulum. Some abilities (such as damaging enemies) generate mana while other abilities (such as healing allies) spend it. The healer’s mana bar can transform into a flexible expression of the ebb and flow of combat rather than a gear-check enrage timer indicator.
- (not a great suggestion, but still an idea) Get rid of the healer role altogether and reposition self-healing as a more vital aspect of each class/spec’s gameplay loop. Loosen up the “trinity” and allow players to express themselves through skill rather than the character creation menu.
But who knows, maybe limiting the system through which WoW can be experienced is the winning business play. Maybe that’d earn Microsoft/Activision/Blizzard significantly more money than designing WoW in a way that would allow it to port onto other platforms. Maybe there’s financial value in preserving authentically archaic UI mechanics.
