I’m a veteran WoW and other MMO player. I’m good with most of the things I’m going to talk about here, but I’ve invited so many friends to play WoW with me and almost no one stayed because of one or more of these “old” game mechanics.
1 - Starting with the radius of your skills’ range X the “practical” effect of this radius. An example of this is the monk’s spinning kick on small classes like vulpera or goblin. The animation of the kick is small and inconsistent with the range. The skill description says it’s X meters, but that’s the animation we’re seeing in combat.
2 - And following this line of visual effect of the radius, I think the best update for new players would be a more prominent visual effect on ALL frontals and area skills, debuffs, important mechanics and essential interrupts. M+ is already a mess with pulls, thousands of HP plates of mobs on the screen, things to interrupt. This would reduce the number of addons you need to have to start playing. I think the less pressure you put on new players to install certain addons, the greater the chances they’ll stay. And gameplay needs to be attractive (something Blizzard is already doing by reworking classes) and it needs to be as transparent as possible. Highlighting the cast bar that would also be on you or important kick spells would be interesting for better use of CDs and CCs. This already exists in addons, but I think it would be important in the base game. These changes would help with the learning curve of new players, and in my opinion, it would increase the number of players reaching the higher keys.
3 - Another thing that needs to change is the “target ring” (I don’t know what it’s called) of BOSSes and enemies. Until now, in many BOSSes, it’s a parameter of the range at which you can attack them, but in other cases it’s a total mess. Queen Ansurek’s target ring is small compared to the stage she’s in, and the range at which we can attack is not compatible with her “ring”. This makes melee gameplay too inconsistent.
4 - List all talent effects in the skill description.
I don’t know why this isn’t already in the game. In Diablo 4, when you look at the skill description, you already have a full idea of all the modifiers (talents) you have equipped for that skill. I think this would be essential for new players to understand their rotation more quickly.
5 - Something I’ve always found interesting is to remove defensive CDs from the global CD. The gameplay would be more intuitive, instead of punishing you because your character is doing an attack animation and this animation needs to wait for the global CD so you can defend yourself. This would reduce the pressure on healers, because each player would be a little more responsible (more than they already are) for their survival.
EDIT:
6 - Doing something about toxicity would also be good. Punishing the player more quickly by banning the chat would avoid a lot of headaches. The game already has a PING to facilitate communication. A PING for kicking would also be interesting. A punishment for those who leave the DG group frequently would also be a good idea.
I could mention more things, but I think the issue of transparency is one of the most important, and one that the game is lacking at the moment. It seems like it’s a mechanic in WoW Classic to hide certain information to make the game more difficult. And this is reflected in the addons that the community creates to reveal this information that the company hides. I think this is an old philosophy, and it drives many players away from an MMO that is changing with each exp, but still wants to keep certain things hidden.