Warcraft Combat is too busy

Community General Discussion
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This is a bit of an odd thread, because I don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing, or entirely a good thing.

In general, as the thread title suggests, I think that the combat in WoW is entirely too busy. Too many short form procs without a clear indicator, too many short length buffs to juggle, too many “Use X attack and Y spell does 300% more damage in the next 8 seconds” debuffs.

It’s not exactly that they are hard to keep up or apply, as much as it’s tedious. And tedium coupled with what’s going on in the game ends up making things more fuzzy than fun.

Fuzzy, as in it;s just too much to keep track of. Dodge spells, interrupt, avoid cleaves, hit rotation/priority, watch buffs to maximize damage.

This used to be something I thought was pretty trivial to do, honestly. But as I’ve gotten older, especially post COVID lockdowns, a near constant state of brain fog kind of really just makes things… blurry.

Easy to let something slip, and to maintain concentration on the amount of things going on actively tends to reduce enjoyment itself from the game. It makes WoW feel like a game at an arcade, not a world.

Sometimes this is good, sometimes this isn’t. M+ is extremely fun with a group of friends. The game is tuned loosely enough that any class can do any level of content realistically, despite player perception. At the same time, it’s difficult enough that it discourages people to join and participate in higher content.

It also often kind of kills the social vibe of the game. I’ll be real, I like the people I group with, but sometimes they’ll start talking in the middle of a key or a fight, and the extra attention given to them, even for a few seconds, can be enough to slip. And it kind of defeats the purpose to not talk crap in a group game with friends.

I know the one-button rotation is being introduced, but honestly I think that’s just going to make the issue worse. Blizzard is going to start tuning damage requirements around the output of that, while saying “If people are underperforming, they can just use the one button rotation”. Which will drive people away from group content even more, because they actively like trying to play the class, and even if they aren’t great at it, it’s fine. With enough people that can be overcome and it’s just a group of friends being a group of friends.

That works when you’ve got a relatively wide/low timelimit to take out encounters, as a few higher geared/performing players can get people through.

I ultimately guess I’m rambling a bit here.

But I feel like, ultimately, while I appreciate and encourage the one button rotation for accessibility reasons and absolutely think it’s going to be a great feature…

I fear the introduction of it will also further along an already bursting attention bloat as Blizzard leans into the option for tighter tuning purposes, then compensates with more external stuff. “More mechanics, more dots, more interupts” with the idea of “If it gets too much to process, just use the one button”

And I can’t help but feel that trimming back on these short-term buffs, these small damage windows, these “every pack has some nasty AoE or annoyance” would ultimately do a better job at improving the game vs the high APM current method.

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Can we please stop lobbying to dumb this PC game down to a console hello kitty island adventure?
Thank You

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Watch the video of Hazzikostas talking with Max and Dratnos.
Hazzikostas talks about the issue of the overwhelming mechanics in the game requiring addons just to play properly and and they want to move away from that. So your entire idea of “because people can play their class in a simplified way with 1 button means they will make everything harder” is completely the opposite of the vision Hazzikostas described for where the game is going in the future.

Now, that’s what he said, and not everything he says actually becomes reality, sure, but that’s all we have to go off of. Also 1 button rotation is meant to underperform compared to playing your spec correctly, so it shouldn’t be popular and mostly be there to help with accessibility. Nothing actually hints at this becoming the meta way to play this game.

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He also talked about not getting into an arms race with players via difficulty tuning in Shadowlands, and then introduced two expansions filled with AoE one shot mechanics. Though this season is way better than last.

Which isn’t to say you are wrong.

You do have a point in that “It’s supposed to be inferior to the way you play if playing correctly”.

But what’s playing correctly? Using raid as an example, there’s a massive enough difference between someone getting a grey purse and a blue parse.

While I know this is sort of going off of “This is the average if your class from players”, a blue parse would begin at “This is an Average to a above average player”

A green parse can get hundreds of thousands of less DPS, and won’t be playing the class properly, but it’s vastly higher than a grey parse, which is still 20% of people who log.

I do appreciate moving away from add-ons

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You parse 30s lol

As for the thread i’ve been saying this since Dragonflight, the spinning plates for the most part just turn gameplay into annoying side minigames and can actually be quite mentally taxing depending on the spec, not to mention all the modifiers make baseline spells feel really weak and intuitive

I would rather the difficulty come from the content rather than keeping up 10 second debuff windows to do 2% more dmg

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My guess is most people who actually want to use the 1 button rotation also don’t have the motivation to position properly or use their skills in smart ways, they just want to send everything off cooldown, and I strongly believe that even with 1 button rotation they will still parse very badly because the basic rotation is not the main thing that makes the difference between low and high parses.

Like the button will see eyebeam go off cooldown and use it instead of realizing adds spawn in 4 seconds and you gain a lot more dps by holding for 4 seconds to blast everything instead of just 1 target. The button won’t place rain of fire in the direction the tank is moving the pack in Priory to kite out of consecrations. The button will most likely not do anything correctly on most tanks specially the more complexe ones with extra actions like death gripping the right target or using freedom on an ally or boping them to clear a bleed and stuff like that.

I think very quickly people will realize this button is not good.

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The part that’s too busy are all the swirlies you have to avoid every single time you try to cast something

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It may not be good but the average WoW player is very bad for lack of a better word

The main cause of dps in logs is not using your good abilities often enough, It’s always better to slam off CD then dial back rather than saving things for the perfect moment

20 trash demonic tyrants is better than 12 good ones

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Yeah but that’s more an issue of casting being outdated since long before the game was even in beginning of conception. There is no logical reason for legs to become paralyzed while casting, or mouth unable to speak while legs are moving.

Casting and moving should work together, at least for all basic rotational spells, maybe some special super nuke summon thing could justify standing still, but never moving or being interrupted by all swirlies feel atrocious. I was a caster main who completely quit this play style because of the subpar quality of gameplay being unfun.

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The concept of saving things is because you already know what’s coming next. If you’re blindly saving your cooldowns because you don’t know what’s next, it’s because you lack experience in that specific content which means that no matter what you do, you will have bad parses.

Yes but a big chunk of that has nothing to do with the rotation. The 1 button will help them not think about the rotation and focus on mechanics, which is good, and when they do mechanics right they will want to do their rotation more efficiently so they will abandon the 1 button, and now they will focus on their bars because they have no idea where their skills are and zero muscle memory, so they will parse bad again until they know how to do their rotation correctly without looking at their bars. And then a new season roll over and they have to start everything again because they change main.

The primary reason why people are bad is because they don’t practice enough, keep rerolling fotm they can’t play, and giving them a button that further prevents them from learning is not gonna help that much.

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It’s because fantasy wise, most spells have a verbal and hand movement cost.

No joke, try running, while doing a complex hand signs, while saying a specific difficult tongue twister.

It’s too much for the brain to process smoothly.

Silly for a game mechanic, but it’s the idea behind it

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I considered reading this post, have you considered git gud?

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Yes. Because “war” is literally in the name of this game.

With war are battles. With battles there’s combat.

Let’s stop trying to make this game something it isn’t.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

EndRant

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Side ways look with a shoulder shrug to start this off.

‘Member when in the new days of the game the talk across gamers was wow is a casual mmorpg? If you don’t . Yes many were saying that. other popular MMOs of that time were far harsher. I still think wow isn’t the hardest mmo . Not that I’d care if it was either it’s just a matter of point.

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What relevance does this have exactly? This thread is about the micromanagement of passives within class design

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That happened to me in Mists. We were progessing on the hydra boss, i was healing on my paladin. Constanly dodging meant I couldnt cast a heal tank died. I switched to resto druid almost all instant cast.

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Sometimes less is more. It is about the intricate interplay between abilities and every spell really having some oomph that creates engaging gameplay, instead of gazillion buttons, many of which should really be combined tbh.

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Pick up an axe, and try to swing it accurately while running.

Yeah, it’s like 10-12 times harder to do weapon based combat with heavy weapons than it is to cast a spell. Even the best boxers have greatly reduced power when striking on the move they need specific positions and timing that allow the correct foot to be grounded to allow proper power transfer to the correct hand otherwise it would be as bad a what a glancing blow is(was) in WoW. And that’s with bare hands, it gets exponentially worse when swinging a 20lbs axe, and in game it’s more like 150lbs mega lamp-post polearms.

The reality is realistic combat is not fun, and both melee or casting dps is more fun while moving. You can even move during Demolish if you jump first, like the entire thing makes no sense. Some spells becoming instant cast because of a proc, why? Power is not even correlated to moving or not, frostbolt does like no dmg but you have to sit still to cast it but frozen orb and icelance doing like 10 times more dmg are all instant cast, none of it makes sense. It’s not related to power or balance or logic or realism. Everything is arbitrary and that’s just not good.

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Nah, this thread is more about dumbing down the game

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I don’t want 5 min cooldowns. I like my 1 min or 45 second cooldowns.

And what are you doing that you’re running out of time to hit one out of like 5 spells for your procs?

You’re claiming procs are too short and cooldowns are too short… yet they’re tedious.

:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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