Thats fair. I just kept yapping because I saw you equating less with stupefied. It does not have to be that.
It is also perfectly fine to like how things are and wanting nothing to change.
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I understand what you mean. I think in the past in WoD and Pandaria, even cataclysm, we had a better mix of complexity when it came to our specs than we do today. The only issue with that I saw was an imbalance in how well we could perform vs that complexity and how it often didn’t feel worth it. Feral Druid being an example of that.
Personally I would enjoy more viable options available to us through our talents. Every spec having a simplified design and a more complex one but without the 1m dps difference or not having synergy anymore. Taking what we may want affects these things to a high degree that I just never agreed with.
Some difference is great. It should feel rewarding! BUT it’s a tad stupid right now. Not just the difference in taking different talents currently but also even just not playing the recommended talent builds correctly.
It’s quite punishing to play however somebody may want to, if what they enjoy is activities like raiding or mythic dungeon. Don’t take that as if I’m saying there shouldn’t be a rotation still to execute or something. But if there were a way I could manage my spec without so many cooldown and buff trackers, without holding back a group for it so much, I would take it.
But that doesn’t exist right now. Lol
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What I would like, and this might work for all sides…is say the spec has 7 abilities that you should be firing off…if they could talent maybe half of them so now its only 3 or 4.
Say how murder of crows use to have to be keybound, but now it just happens on its own if you take the talent.
maybe a SLIGHT DPS output decrease, maybe not, i dont care either way…but if thats what it would take to get it done.
That way those who like the key banging can have it, and those who want simplicity can be happy too.
HEY ION…could you get to work on that, pronto?
Lol
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lol I wouldn’t complain. Back in dragonflight and I think I made a few posts about it, but I was playing a ret paladin in season 1. Coming out of shadowlands at that point I never really was serious about dungeons or raid content. I dabbled as holy paladin for a little and got to like mythic 5s. Lol But I wanted to try it more. The one thing I didn’t want to do was take a copy paste build, so I didn’t! And I did choose more passives over spells I have to push.
I did alright imo, and my rotation felt fluid af. But then I went into a raid and somebody told me that I’m doing something very very wrong. I was bottom dps by a lot. They said to fix my talents. SIGH okay, I went to wowhead and got the build.
2 new spells for me to push.
That’s it.
And I went from bottom to top without any change in my rotation but adding in two buttons. 
Since then I never even considered trying to make my own spec. It was a waste of time if you want to play not even competitively… but just to do mid level difficulty stuff without being a carry.
My opinion and take on this I know isn’t popular. But it’s how I came into doing harder content as mythic became more and more popular and noticed the difference in my power over the smallest things. And I feel like it’s only gotten worse.
Take arcane mage, it’s what I enjoy right now. I started playing it end of last season. Blizz said they are happy with arcane and don’t want to change its playstyle. Then they change one of our procs to must be cast within 3 seconds, because they felt it would simplify the spec. That it was too complicated.
It’s actually the opposite tho. Before you could hold onto that proc and line it up to fit right into your usual rotation and it would do more damage tbh. Now you have to smash the button randomly whenever it lights up and then see what new passive buff you may have acquired from pushing that button to determine your next move.
I like arcane mage, I practice it to get better. But literally just watching passives when I play. There are currently 7 buffs I need to track to determine my rotation as it’s almost all random, some I can proc myself. Not only 7 passive buffs I’m looking at but they almost all come in different stacks too. Our tier perk, 4 stack of charges, 18 stacks of arcane harmony or 12 if I have high voltage buff up, 2 nether precision, or conditions change if I have different combinations of buffs active when enemies are below 35%. That’s just to determine if I’m hitting arcane barrage or not pretty much.
If you look at my details it’s like only two of spells are doing any damage. All the power comes from juggling those passives.
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Im sure id get the same. I talent for MY enjoyment, not for top DPS…another reason I wont M+ or do any content that matters…Im positive theyd come after me to retalent and thats not happening. lol.
I have some talents I enjoy that I know drag my DPS down and its gonna stay that way.
some specs feel really good like that…others you can just feel / hear keys clacking, thats about the only rhythm to it, lol.
I seriously enjoy…love…how demonology plays now. Great pace. Can nearly keep moving while casting, almost. its a work of art right now as far as how it plays…not that I would know if its ok in higher content, though
I never realy did get a feel for arcane. I dont know if iits too simplistic or of it feels clunky, but whatever it is just never felt the love for it. Great for clearing old raids with though for mobs…but thats about all Ive used it for since moving to demonology.
it would be nice if we could talent as much or as little keybanging into each spec as we’d like.
All sides could be happy,…well…SHOULD be, lol.
But any spec I play I notice that a couple abilities are nearly always top of Details.
I usually try to squeeze as much as I can out of all of them, but combat is over too quick a lot of time at the level I play for it to matter much
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Exactly!!
This is the response I get most of the time when I talk about spec complexity here most often. “You can take whatever you want and do fine unless you’re doing high end content”. But in the same breath from those same people mythic +10s are not high end content and there can be a noticeably huge damage or healing different if you just pick talents because you like them.
Then you get yelled at for playing badly in that 10 too.
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I’ve always said the problem is more so on the side of utility. Every spec now has multiple personal heals, defensives, CCs, movements, etc, so Blizzard now has to design fights to make you use all of that junk. They need to vastly cut down on non-DPS utility spells to dial things back a bit.
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Same hopes here as well. Let them have the DPS increase for clacking more keys and having more going on, that’s fine. But like so many, I’d really enjoy the game more if I could focus more on the game and less on what keys I’m supposed to be hitting every 1 to 2 seconds.
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See now this is where things really start to get tedious. It seems they would like all players to have more personal responsibility when it comes to handling threats in dungeons. Which is great and fine but then they also nerf healing so it’s really required for everybody to use all these things. So we are watching our procs, our passives, the enemies actions and reacting to it all as quickly as possible to live.
All together… it can be pretty fun. But it’s also a lot. It’s not just moments of this occurring, it’s the entire instance. Is it fun to watch players do these things in super coordinated groups on super high levels? It is for some. I don’t find it interesting to watch too much.
I like to play! But it can make me feel tired too cuz it’s work. lol
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I don’t really have a dog in this fight anymore since I stopped playing retail a while back.
The main thing I remember, was that I didn’t like the way game has shifted from resource based gameplay to a whack-a-mole priority based system. It’s fun at first, but it starts to get old. The, “Go, go, go” meta isn’t really all that it’s cracked up to be. People just become interchangeable widgets and you don’t appreciate the different specs all that much.
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It’s a little different rn. A lot of the specs seem to be designed to perform better in different situations. But we are like… locked in on that design too. Arcane has strong single target priory damage with good cleave. While something like balance druid will do 2x what an arcane mage can do in places with large pulls.
Different specs are definitely appreciated in different dungeons today! Even class buff combos, and utility they bring.
Yes, as was discussed before too, the classes and combat is how it is because the game has been designed in a way that necessitates it.
Which kind of brings us back to the addons I feel like. In order for some difficulty to be present, and without breaking the addons, there is no other way but to have the game as it is.
So really it is the addons that have designed the game for some time now 
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That is a great point.
Lol it’s funny but I made a post in the mage forum just the other day about how to use defensive better at higher level mythics and it’s mostly addons that will help the most. I didn’t even know that an addon could tell me that I was targeted by an enemy and stuff like that.
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I think the only ‘bloat’ that I wouldnt miss is goofy stuff like eye of Kilrog. lol.
though you do kind of need it for getting the green fire, but other than that it seems to serve no purpose whatsoever.
Hunter has that same thing where you look thru the eyes of your pet, unless its been removed, I never bother with it so I dont know for sure.
But like all the defensive type abilities on hunter…I never want to take those out.
Ive got more abilities than I even keybind on hunter, but its more options and I like options. All my hunters are set up a little differently even though theyre all Beastmaster.
I like having the option of disengaging instead of feigning death instead of just having one thing…and being able to interrupt with a traps and other abilities.
It gives the spec personality.
This becomes natural and thoughtless with practice. I stopped playing alts of a different class for my professions, made a bunch of Druids and hunters to replace them, my favorite two. This helped my rotations more than any add, because I set them all up exactly the same and am no longer having to remember everything all classes do, it works.
Also, unless you are pushing cutting edge content, your rotation can absorb a few miss clicks here and there.
I’m far from perfect, but I stay in the top DPS in pretty much everything I run. And on raid trash, feral puts out stupidly high DPS, I make those other classes work to catch me, it’s so much fun.
That’s my main concern, feral is in a pretty good spot right now, it’s fast, fun, and does competitive numbers. Any changes by blizzard to “make the game easier” will undoubtedly destroy feral yet again. Let me have my time in the sun before I’m “forced” back on my hunter.
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I hope not, feral has suffered enough. Lol
I’m just going to point out this is the easiest MMO of all former MMO’s and if you truly think it is hard here, this might not be the genre for you.
I’m looking for to some real RvR in Camelot Unchained, and that MMO is going to be way more complex than this one.
I mean, no it isnt? GW2, WildStar, BDO, LOTRO, SWTOR, CoH, etc. all had significantly less buttons. The OP isnt talking about easy or hard, its the amount of abilities and complexity of rotations. The game can be hard without having a 15 button rotation.
I came from an MMO that didn’t have rotations at all. 
I like all of the comments about consolification when in a certain context that’s almost exactly what I think the problem is.
Admittedly, this is my own perception and bias, but console gaming is very twitchy.
Which comes down to the types of games I played on console were the ones that had that feel.
Which is to say, I tend to associate fighting games with consoles (not exclusively, obviously. I’m trying to use as an example). This very much has the same sort of “Set X, go into Y, inorder to execute Z, unless conditions A and B are present/missing” situational complications that I think is one of the big issues with WoW.
Now, perhaps fittingly for a Monk, one of the previous people in the thread pointed out the conditions on a monks rotation, and it also just reminds me of that sort of gameplay.
Setting up combos in order to set up conditions in order to execute a proper damage throughout as a basic tenant of the combat, which absolutely exists in WoW, is one of the things that feels very “consoley” to me, personally.
I’m not so sure removing abilities is the correct answer. At the same time, there’s certainly some truth that creating abilities that set up ideal conditions is healthy for a variety gameplay.
If every ability was just flat damage, it’s just the same think packaged differently.
A good example of the type of tedious silliness though is the example of frost shock used in the thread. Giving a debuff an 8 second CD on a mob that encourages an X,X,Y pattern to maintain a short CD on an enemy is just cumbersome.
It’s like they looked at a tanks active mitigation spells and decided “Yeah, let’s add that same idea of a spell that makes you do everything you already do but better every few seconds” should be a foundational design feature, but forgot that a tanks “core gameplay” is vastly simpler than a DPS as a tradeoff to afford a much higher contribution to situational awareness and quick shot reactions.
Except then they also made so many external mechanics that DPS just needs a billion add-ons to make up for so much brain power to track everything.