All these abilities’ coming back while novel seems to be a cluster mess. Adding a classic ability to most class are welcomed but is that really necessary? A druid with 30+ hotbar keys? I’ve played my druids and even after rearranging the whole UI, paging tab etc it still feels like a mess.
Mages got like Frostbolt / fire blast as standard, while it has its niche in old content farming and probably pvp it doesn’t feel necessary in terms of general expac gameplay. A fire mage would hardly use frostbolt and vice versa. It’s already a convulated mess to learn rotation as it is, especially when you have an army of alts (again I know alts is at your own risk, but come on everyone plays alts)
Totally uncessary. A Fury warrior with Board / Sword? Novelty that’s a waste of time. In raid / M+ when you die, you die. No proper player would sacrifice a dps to 1/4 tank. And if they can successfully 1/4 tank raid boss (for example in a one boss tank swap) then it’ll add a “we don’t need a proper tank” scenario all over again.
Curse of Tounge would become mandatory in raid for specific encounter as it’s too game breaking, or if the boss is immune then it’ll be another useless skill.
tl;dr some skills are too usefull to have, some skills are too useless to have.
15 Likes
Please don’t start this. Really. If you hate having choices just go on to one of the various 5 button MMORPGs available currently.
24 Likes
Remove them from your hotbar if it’s useless
40 Likes
Choices are fine.
Personally, I hate having more spells than I have keybinds for.
7 Likes
While I understand that they gave some classes some useful things, there are quite a lot of useless ones, as well.
Honestly, this reminds me of the Warlock debacle of Mists and flying. They got upset and pulled something petty: pulling everything from Warlocks for being upset with a former employee; putting flying back in but with Pathfinder; giving buttons back but making quite a few useless to prove a childish point.
Now, I honestly don’t care. These useless abilities don’t affect me. (Because, well… ya know… they’re useless and not on my bars. lol) I do wonder why they even spent time on them, but… no biggie.
5 Likes
only warlock ever to complain about getting tounge’s back
6 Likes
Hmm i’m pretty happy with Spirit Shell and Mind Sear. /shrug
Yes, but as holy/disc it really clutters up the rotation.
and some mix/maxer would make it a necessity in rotation … /sigh
1 Like
Nah, no min/maxer is going to put random things into rotation.
4 Likes
Some of the unpruned abilities are rather pointless, I agree. With luck, Blizzard will target the useless ones first if we get anything trimmed in 10.0.
Some of them are great though, like mages getting Mirror Image and Alter Time back. AE baseline is nice for both fire and frost aoe. frostbolt is situationally useful for kiting on fire (Arcane has the superior Slow).
I agree that putting shield abilities on the DPS plate specs doesn’t make a lot of sense.
In any event, nothing is forcing us to put everything they gave us back on our bars.
3 Likes
Frostbolt may be niche as a fire mage, but I’m glad to have it for those situations where it’s useful. Arcane Explosion will be getting used semi-regularly, definitely glad to get that back.
Also,
^^^ This. Not everything needs to be keybound. If it’s not of value let it sit on a secondary clicked action bar or even in your spellbook unused.
4 Likes
Not everything has to be useful in raids. Plenty of returned skills have use in PvP even if they aren’t useful in most PvE. In those cases you can just not use them.
I dunno how anyone would even complain about not having enough keybinds either. I had 80+ in Cata (as did basically everyone else that did arena higher than rival rating). I think people should be able to manage it now with much fewer skills than we had then.
4 Likes
Personally, it wouldn’t surprise me if part of the reason they did this was to demonstrate why it was stupid to whine about pruning in the first place.
7 Likes
Having the hotbar is one thing, having the necessary skills to implement 5 more hotbar is another thing.
There are things like :
Frostbolt for fire mage : will be extremely useful for kiting in pvp
Fireblast : I’ve yet to see how much dps it does but if it’s significant at instant cast it’ll be be a DPS gain and by default it’ll hamper people who doesn’t have the skill to employ it.
CoT : This one doesn’t require much skill, dot and forget but the implication is that you’ll always be looking for a warlock, by default gamers wants to cookie cut and blizzard is further making it more complex.
Paladin aura : pretty standard press and forgot
Paladin Conceration / Holy shock : this would be rotation changer, it’s instant and depending on the numbers won’t simply be “not useful”
Druid : Oh don’t get me started on druid, an expert druid would make all things usefull especially cyclone, kitty, claw, rake, and it’s very hard to remain at an acceptable PVP druid if you don’t master all the extra skills. It’s another level of proficiency needed to play a good druid.
Now imagine if you’re used to a sets of hotkeys that employs 5-6 skills in a highly competent raid setup, now add 3 more and see how that undoes years and years of muscle memories.
Cooldown / trinket is one thing, adding a main skill is another.
2 Likes
I guess we are just going to have to disagree that adding depth is bad? I don’t see having to learn new skills as a bad thing. That’s how the game used to work with every expansion when they’d add new skills or new sections to talent trees.
I know a lot of people are used to pruned down Legion and BFA but it honestly is good for the game for classes to have more depth. Especially in PvP.
10 Likes
I found Disc was actually easier to adjust to, but then again I use Heal/Harm macros for most of my abilities.
Shaman got an ability back called primal strike that is pretty much useful for only the first 10 levels before you get s spec. Also flametongue weapon baseline is quite trash if unless you play enhancement spec. I also argue that returning weapon imbues are boring and also not a choice. WF mainhand and FT offhand is literally the only choice allowed presently and it was the correct choice in the other expansions when they existed. Weapon imbues are just a couple buttons you now press once every hour on the hour. In BFA they were a mix of a passive and a couple active abilities.
The above are examples of unpruned abilities done wrong. As an ele spec, there was nothing exciting about the unprune. Maybe they could have brought back the fire totem and had a row of talents that enhance that totem. Bit of a bummer that the best unrpune for ele shaman was just a healing totem.
Yeah, but Sprit grace, healing stream, healing chain aren’t exactly useless for an Elemental shaman.
It’ll probably be an afterthought in a raid environment, but in 5 men dungeon it could complicate things.
1 Like
Honestly I had a bunch of empty space on my hotbar going into BFA. The essence ability only took up one. I’ll probably be looking into a gaming mouse for Vuhdo / Healbot purposes so I can make use of all the new toys while click-healing but I think that will be more of a nice to have.
But the abilities you listed are just great to have back. Example:
Fireblast is really nice for Arcane as it gives you an instant cast that doesn’t mess with your arcane charges. Great for high movement or finishing off a weak enemy while conserving your charges for the next (healthy) mob.
Pally aura isn’t press and forget at all, in fact you’ll want to be able to “stance dance” into ret aura for the free wings pretty quickly before a clutch death before dropping back into Devotion on progression fights.
Druids getting Cyclone back, as well as more affinity abilities is fantastic. Balance getting a snare and resto getting a knockback as examples are quite nice.
3 Likes
seconding this, I use all the action bars, including the ones on the right. (yes i’m a scrub who sticks with default UI come at me bro) anything that is just an occasional utility ability/spell gets thrown over onto the right. some things I use so rarely that i’ll just cast em from my spellbook cuz outside of some VERY niche cases, they aren’t worth using a slot for.
more often than not I will even end up with empty slots just cuz I had nothing worth even putting in them. you don’t actually NEED macros and keybinds for absolutely every spell you have. its okay to just manually click some of em on the odd occasion you need em.