There are people in here asking for 4 button rotations that include single target and AOE abilities…They are never going to meet the needs of people asking for simpler rotations.
Since very few active abilities are baseline now, players have a lot of flexibility in determining how complex their rotation is. The problem is that they want it to be simple and competitive,
The problem is what used to compete directly with them was a strong passive or group of passives, now those effects were broken up and scattered all across the tree to pad out the numbers. Most active abilities on current talent trees are worth 2-3 points of passive talents in some places. Also because trees are less direct in their comparison it’s not just 3 options on a row that compete with eachother, it’s the nearly the whole tree.
If you skip active abilities on current talent trees you mostly just end up playing a spec with holes in it, instead of a slightly weaker but still fleshed out build because you aren’t getting good passives instead of actives (The good builds get those too), you’re getting the bargain bin passives nobody was taking.
Clearly what I wrote is sarcasm. What I’m saying is:
Both groups have people who blame the devs for not listening to “the community” when in fact “the community” does not have a concensus for the devs to follow.
Oh, my bad. Didn’t catch the implied /s while reading. Carry on 
Personally, I cap out at around 18 abilities/buttons that I can reliably keep track of in game while still maneuvering my character through the “Floor is Lava” that raids are these days.
Well obviously they’ll never make everyone happy, but I think they could hit a wider population than currently.
Yeah, that’s the real problem. Nobody wants to have a tradeoff for the simplicity.
Eh, we’ve had trade offs for simplicity before and people were mostly fine with it because it all felt intentional. Right now it doesn’t feel intentional for the reasons I mentioned above. The thing you “gain” by not taking the active is a weak passive that likely doesn’t really do anything.
The current trees would definitely need to be adjusted, but I’d rather start from this version than the 3 per level talents version.
I think the point is you’d need to incorporate elements of both at least in terms of design goals. You want to create choices between cool / strong ish passive options and active spells, as well as importantly make sure those passives are unique and not available alongside the active ability.
If for example every active ability was a choice node alongside a passive of similar but not equal strength that’d be an option, though it removes the ability to have two actives on the same choice node.
Yeah but I feel the OPs pain. As Unholy we have 9 CDs to hit, plus racial and trinket for our opener.
It goes as follows. Build 4 wounds, Apoc,Unholy blight, trinket, racial, Gargoyle, Unholy assult, ERW, DnD, slappy hands, DT and then you can finally burst
It’s definitely something that needs to be looked at on a spec by spec basis. However I’d say bloated specs are the exception not the rule currently.
People also forget the PvP side, and how that often adds more buttons, or makes some buttons have greater significance, such that the keybinds for them need to be more convenient (taking up more of the “convenient keybind” space).
Sometimes it’s a racial ability (like will of the forsaken - not very high importance for me in PvE, can be extremely significant in PvP). Sometimes it’s a general class ability (Psychic Scream as a priest - rarely useful for me in PvE, extremely important in PvP).
Then you’ve got Priest PvP talents like ascendance (flying up in the air to heal) or Holy Ward (30 buff that eats up one CC against the allied target) mean having to press an additional button. Spirit of Redeemer turns our Spirit of Redemption into an active, button-pressing talent instead of something passive.
I’m sure every spec in the game has stuff like this. Whatever the “button bloat” is for a spec in its PvE state, in its PvP state it tends to be that, plus some extra. “Button bloat” is really mostly a complaint when players feel like convenient-feeling keybind space is running too short. (And this all leaves out how PvP, separate from class or race abilities, also tends to need additional keybind space for targeting macros).
I wonder sometimes in button bloat conversations if there’s a disconnect between players who only engage in PvE and players who do both PvP and PvE in terms of their perception of the issue. I never feel like I’m too low on good keybind space when I’m doing PvE, but PvP often makes me feel like I’m trying to squeeze a bit too much in.
I agree just showing that there are certain specs that can’t just pop 1 CD and roll their face across the keyboard
There should be 12 or less core buttons.
3-5 “main” rotational abilities, 1-3 mini-cooldown rotational buttons, 2 mobility buttons, 2 offensive cooldowns, 2 defensive cooldowns. A few others give or take for miscellaneous things like heals, cleanses, utility, etc.
No reason for there to be more than this.
No. FF14 has this kind of homogeneity and it’s super boring. At that point the only difference between the specs and classes is the color of your attack.
I think more is better I don’t want to go back to the pruning days the more options we have the better.
But how else can I express my superiority over others by making sure I have more keybinds than anyone else and reminding them of that fact constantly when dps rankings are brought up?
Spec complexity is definitely a spec-by-spec issue but I’d say the vast majority of specs are fine. You’re not mythic raiding, if you don’t want all those buttons then pick other talents, your LFR / normal group won’t care.
?
Last time I played that game every class had like 50 buttons
And I’m worried that this “button bloat” trend will lead to another prune and a lot of good abilities will be lost.