Class Design in Shadowlands

I meant more as in balance them so that none of them is broken OP.

Ok, but… isn’t that the case already?

Yeah, but then we end up back where we started, with the reason for unpruning in the first place.

You see, like I said, then I enjoy healing in battlegrounds. That means that I primarily want to spend my time casting healing spells.

If everyone gets everything on their wish-list, then my time is primarily going to be spent using defensive cooldowns, escape abilities, crowd control, and movement-enhancing effects because everyone is throwing a huge arsenal of those exact kind of abilities around.

The gameplay then becomes about preparing and setting up cooldowns, unloading everything at once, and hoping your opponent dies because he failed to respond appropriately with his plethora of cooldowns. And if he doesn’t die, then you sit back and wait 2-3 minutes until your cooldowns are ready again and you have another try, because there’s no point in if you don’t have your hundreds of cooldowns ready.

That was the gameplay we ended up with when everyone had a plethora of stuff to throw around. And it wasn’t well-designed, fun, balanced, or fair. That’s why we went away from it.

The power and impact of all your cooldowns and crowd control has to be balanced relative to your power and impact when those abilities aren’t ready to use.
It shouldn’t feel like you’re useless and can’t do anything when all your Super Saiyan abilities are on cooldown. Your basic bread-and-butter rotational abilities are supposed to matter, so you can’t overshadow them too much with crazy new cooldowns and crowd control.

We’ve been there before, and the forums weren’t exactly a happy place then either.

Yes, but DK feels shallow to me now.

So make classes shallow and bland due to…PvP? Maybe they can disable abilities in PvP then.

Then maybe try a class that you DO enjoy? Maybe it’s not the class. Maybe it’s you.

I have mained DK for years. I am not going to change mains after everything I did with him.

But BfA PvP is the same? You CC, blow CDs and if you fail, you play defensively until your CDs are up. What exactly changed?

No it applies to PvE as well, although the problematic is different. It goes something like this:

“Okay, since all the classes have hundreds of offensive cooldowns and are now able to spike their dps to unfathomable levels, alongside having a ton of defensive cooldowns and life-saving utility, then the only way we can make challenging encounters is by having insane dps checks and binary wipe mechanics.”

And then we end up with Heroic Spine of Deathwing where you don’t get to kill the boss if you don’t have 10 Mages with Dragonwrath who all line up their cooldowns perfectly, and Heroic Ultraxion where everyone dies if they don’t press the button at the right time.

That wasn’t exactly popular either.

I’m sorry, but you are wrong. Unprunning is exactly the way to go to improve class design. The question at hand is if they will unprune enough to return to a state similar to Mists or at the very least Warlords, or if they will do a half job nobody will end up being happy with.

I understand.
Hell, I’ve mained hunter since launch (with a short paladin main mistake at the start of TBC - man that was stupid) and most of that time I’ve been BM.
I love how it played it the past and I love how it plays now. If it were to change into something I don’t like, I think I’d quit. So I do get you, and it’s fine to give them some feedback in advance, but honestly… I’m not sure how much impact it will actually have.

Probably none. But I can try and hope at least.

I do not remember MoP and WoD having these issues though. As for class stacking, people did that in BfA and Legion as well, so again, what exactly changed?

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No, because MoP and WoD had already pruned classes by transitioning from the old talent trees with zero restrictions, to the new talent system with spec-specific abilities and forced specializations.

How far Blizzard wants to dial classes back remains to be seen. But Cataclysm was when classes had the most fat on them, so to speak. MoP was when Blizzard began to reign things back in.

If what you’re looking for is class design akin to WoD or MoP, then you’re likely easier to satisfy than the players looking for class design akin to Cata.

Improve but not fix, please read what I said in response to @jito - it won’t fundamentally change the play style for every class, I gave a scenario with my spec/class - some classes/specs need heavy surgery.

Agreed. They still have infinite room to screw it up. But, as of now, all we know is “unpruning” - and that is better than no unpruning. So the only news we have is good.

Keep a close eye on it!

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MoP had a good class design in my opinion. Hope they bring that back.

Anywhere in Wrath-Cata-Mists will do for me.

Personally, I think that the switch-on, switch-off grid we have is an error of historic proportions, but the devs like it from their point of view, so I’m afraid we’re stuck with it - but Mists shows that classes can still be fun to play, even with the grid.

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WoD for dk though.
WoD Blood and Unhoyl where best versions we have ever had from the spec

Except for dk. DK’s lowest point was in MoP in many aspects.

WoD frost dk was probably the most fun class I’ve ever played.

I’d be fine with class design like wotlk - wod but it’s not going to happen. Deep Dive panel pretty much confirmed it.