I can’t be the only one that is incredibly nervous regarding class design after the deflated answer Holinka gave us. In my personal experience of playing WoW for 15 years, BFA was the worst reaction I’ve seen regarding class design - if they believe that unpruning abilities will make the current state of class design better, they are incredibly mistaken - speaking as an Enhance shaman, which is painful to play it in its current state due to sheer lack of bordem compared to the glory days.
I’m just hoping that Holinka just misspoke and we will have a much clearer answer soon. The rest of the Shadowlands content looks really interesting and promising, but Class play/design is what matters most.
still too soon to judge what they do to classes, from what i saw all we know is that they are making some talents baseline and giving back some abilities, but they haven’t revealed what the talents will be replaced with as far as i know, also with the leveling changes they have to change talents a bit, let’s wait and see what they throw at us, all we can do is hope.
I’m pretty sure the community, of which you can include yourself if you want, will find a way to be negative about this and complain like they always do. It is the guaranteed outcome.
Well, I enjoy healing in PvP. So before you get everything you wish for on your Death Knight, there is this little matter of balance to take into concern. And I dare suspect that a lot of the things you constitute as well-designed and fun are things that ultimately make you more powerful. And that’s cool. But you becoming more powerful can be rather detrimental to my enjoyment in Battlegrounds, because you can ultimately end up being overpowered. So well-designed and fun has to be squared with balanced and fair.
Unpruning abilities isn’t going to change the fundamental play style of certain classes, I should have been clearer. Take for example Enhancement Shaman, giving us Frost Shock and Totems but keeping the BFA play style isn’t going to make it better, it’s more of a band aid rather than a fix. Placing totems isn’t going to change the almost one button rotation we have.
Unpruning is still a step forward in the right direction, but it isn’t going to overhaul a class/spec.
And what does that entail specifically? More cooldowns, crowd control, and damage-dealing abilities?
Like I said, well-designed and fun has to be squared with balanced and fair. Otherwise you just end up being overpowered, which is definitely fun, but hardly well-designed, balanced or fair.
I’m sure the mandatory health check that various specs go through in the Beta test will also apply to Shadowlands.
I mean, alongside Shadow Priests, then Elemental Shamans were late for their design changes going into BfA. Who knows, Elemental Shaman might be a spec that’s going to see more changes than certain other specs in Shadowlands, just like some specs saw more changes going into BfA than other specs.
What Blizzard are saying in regards to uprunning is that it’s a general design goal across the board. This is something all classes and specs should expect.
On top of that, as always, some specs are likely to receive intensive surgery because they just haven’t played out as well as other specs in BfA.
Fingers crossed, I’m still optimistic, but nervous at the same time. Alpha/Beta should give everyone a better scope on how things are going to play out; I just feel how it was worded could have been a lot better.
