I haven’t been fully paying attention to all the wowhead news for the last few month as I’ve been doing my annual WoW cleanse, where I play OTHER games while in the big patch lull.
When I last left ret pallys were falling hard in singe target. Has that been fixed? Is it looking to be better in next patch? or are we doomed to scale terribly all of next patch too?
By the time you made this post, you could have found the information you need in the paladin forum post.
They still have a braindead easy rotation, wings still go brrrrt, damage isn’t the worst. Seems fine to me.
ret is still average boss damage in raids.
Ret is “ok” single target last I checked. Little below mid, right? Easy and comfy to play though, so that makes up for a lot of it, plus lots of bonus utility. I think they’re pretty much done with ret for a while, though. They’re putting a lot of work into other classes at the moment, ret’s time probably isn’t coming back around until next expansion.
So which specs rotation isnt “braindead wings brt”?
That.
There isn’t any real skill involved in WoW.
No free aiming, no real mouse precision required to play.
You can’t “miss” your abilities.
You learn your sequence and that’s it.
Some sequences are more complicated but that’s not an indicator of skill.
It just shows commitment to learn.
Skills would require some kind of dexterity which is virtually absent from the game.
What it comes down to after that is situational awareness and decision making.
WoW doesn’t have mechanics that requires split second reflexes to evade or block such as games like Dark Souls, it doesn’t have aiming mechanics like FPS games that requires high level of eye-hand coordination.
There’s no environmental element to really play with aside from LoS and even then it doesn’t always feel consistent.
You can’t feint much either like you can in a game like Dead by Daylight.
I guess you can bait cast? That’s slim to call WoW a “skillful” game…
And there’s some light resource management for healers, that sums it up.
I didnt mean it as “wow has no skill” but I wanted mr monk to tell me what specs take a lot more to play than “braindead” ret.
He probably thinks snapshotting or pandemic ing dots is a lot harder than reacting to resource income and procs.
ret is brain dead tho, its literally the beast mastery of melee specs
I didn’t bother responding because it was pretty obvious you were just winding up for either a: “ret takes just as much skill as x” or “lol nothing in this game is difficult” meme response.
Sorry, but the only spec with bigger training wheels than ret is BM. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Ret is fun to play, but I’m not going to pretend there’s any real depth to it’s rotation in order to protect my ego.
Fwiw, effective use of ret’s utility instead of just zug zugging does require some brain cells. It’s just very rare to actually see in the wild.
Because it is false. Ret and avenging wrath arent the biggest offenders in specs and how much they take to pick up. Into the ignore bin you go
If the game required no skill everyone would have cutting edge, but they don’t.
Learning is a skill itself, which not many people excel at.
This is a bit misleading imo. CE requires networking and dedication of time, as do many titles in the game. I don’t disagree with your last point though.
As a long time ret player, I find these conversations a bit tiresome (not what you said Indo, but more what came before with the comments that pretty much say, “ret deserves to be mid because it’s easy.”
I’d actually really like it if most specs had much more challenging builds one could take if inclined, but unfortunately that’s just not what we got with the rework. Ultimately, perhaps it’s time I move on from the spec or the game, I never signed up to play something “braindead easy” I just really liked the spec and really invest myself in what I choose to play, even if it is somewhat suboptimal.
But here we are, in a game where people still think they deserve to top meters by virtue of the spec they choose. Unfortunate really. There’s a lot of things which make a player skillful that cannot be seen on the dps summary.
As I said, it just shows a commitment to learn, not any dexterous skill. (Which is what I was referring to by mentioning aim and the general inability to miss)
What’s the first thing that is asked before an encounter in a raid?
“Does everyone KNOW the fight?”
People who get CE are those who commit to learning fights on the tip of their finger, then it become a question of time until they get some gear to alleviate sub-optimal comp/use of CD’s.
They may get more familiar with the fight but they don’t get any better with their character not in any significant way anyway.
I think you are over simplifying a lot of things. It takes a lot more than just learning the fight. There is still skill involved, some fights require dodging mechanics at the right time, moving your character to the right place at the right time etc.
You mentioned souls games like the concept was any different, fights also have patterns and scripts there which players can learn, master and press their buttons at the right time to succeed.
Does it require some timing like Dark Souls roll to make use of the invulnerable frame or make a timely block? Or is it more akin to positioning yourself accordingly for something you have a timer on somewhere on your screen?
I know the answer…
There’s no dexterity or reflex check in WoW, the closest it gets to it are interrupts and even those are telegraphed and made to be easy to interrupt by anyone paying attention.
WoW is not a skill game, it’s not a dig to anyone.
But calling X and Y “braindead” rotation because Z has marginally more buttons to its rotation is dumb.
None of the spec are that hard to play and executing a rotation well is not impressive or worthy of praise.
It’s cringe that some feel the need to elevate themselves over something as inconsequential as the rotation.
If it isn’t the pot calling the kettle black…
This is objectively false. WoW and Dark Souls are different games that don’t necessarily require the same skill set.
Coordinating 20 people to take down a boss is a skill in and of itself. Otherwise majority of the player base would do it.
Time and it’s correlation to “commitment to learn” as you say is also irrelevant because your argument can be flipped back at you and used for any scenario: Dark souls doesn’t require any skill and with time you memorize the patterns of most enemies. But of course, that isn’t true.
The core of any skill is time and commitment to learn and that applies to WoW as well.
Timing rolls or invulnerable frames in Dark Souls is akin to performing your rotation optimally while performing mechanics at any given time in WoW. Does that mean WoW is objectively harder than Dark Souls? Not necessarily, but the basis is the same.
I don’t expect a random person to go into a Dark Souls game and perform it masterfully unless they’ve experienced the game already and know the fights. I also don’t expect a random person to go into a mythic raid and perform well without knowing the fights or experiencing it first hand.
Each will require time, learning, research, a varying degree of reflexes, etc. You get better with repetition and practice, which is how people learn a skill set.
Learning a rotation is easy, sure. Just like learning how to dodge in Dark Souls is easy, lol. Performing your rotation well takes time and practice. Performing your rotation well while doing mechanics correctly, interrupting and stunning enemies, etc. takes time, practice and skill (timing your interrupts, reacting accordingly if a mistake happens, how do you recover, etc).
Which mechanic in WoW consistently checks your reflex?
And which ones requires dexterity and hand/eye coordination?
Most mechanics? Dodging a circle on the ground is a reflex, so it correctly interrupting.
Reacting to things happening on your screen is a reflex, regardless of difficulty.
Dodging in WoW and Dark Souls is the same at it’s core. You’re moving out of the way to avoid damage.
Dexterity and reflex generally isn’t the main issue with complexity. It’s how large the cognitive load someone can take at once.
The average person can accurately remember 7 + / - 2 numbers. This is taught in any cognitive psych class. This translates to keeping track of dbm timers, watching your buffs, watching positioning, rotation, etc. Each of those things a heavier load than a single number.
And the average person doesn’t think about differences in peoples ability to do this very often. Most people just assume if they can think about X amount of things easily, then so can others.