Keep in mind that my idea of good class design does not mean “balanced”. I don’t think balance equates to anything good, more often than not.
Legion had Discipline Priests and Survival Hunters. Both took a bold new direction with their gameplay and it really payed off.
Come BfA and everything that made Survival interesting, was stripped down to something very basic <— this right here is nothing new.
We saw this with Holy priests in MoP and many classes suffered this treatment as of Legion’s release. It’s not a new concept. Sometimes it’s been deemed necessary. If you erase everything about a class, only for it to come out on the other side with almost the exact same issues, can’t we agree that it’s a failure?
An example could be the Retribution spec.
In WoD you had the option to pick talents that would practically make you a caster for the duration of Avenging Wrath (damage boosting ability). In my humble opinion, this was easily the most fun iteration we’ve ever had for Retribution. Then came Legion and removed this playstyle entirely in exchange for something… Well, something that actually wasn’t even much different when looking at the numbers.
All in the name of, convenience? What exactly is the point of this, guys?
Demonology had a really strong identity from Cata through WoD, but because Demon Hunters became a thing, they had to be rewritten. Why again, exactly? Do you really have so little faith in your playerbase that you think they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a demo warlock and a demon hunter?
Here’s the real sad part: Just like retribution the numbers remained largely unchanged. Once again, you managed to change how a class plays fundamentally, without actually changing their position on the performance meters.
So for all the good intentions you may have, all you really accomplish is to disenfranchise entire communities with the yield resulting in numbers remaining the same, because the playstyle is shallow like a puddle.
I’m asking you to please consider, when you go forward with class design in the future: Please stop destroying what makes specializations unique. If you don’t understand what you’ve made, get some passionate community members to assist you in development. For the fans, by the fans is always a powerful mantra you know?
And here’s why: Gameplay outside the numbers, is far more important than said numbers. When you cater to people who have no respect for your game, you lose credibility on all sides, including your target audience. Ability pruning is not a bad concept in and on itself, but if it comes at the cost of the soul of a class/spec, then it isn’t worth it.
I feel confident when I say that people care far more about how their class plays, than the numbers it might put out. Of course there are exceptions and ideally every specialization should be able to function competitively at a high level, but you need to fix the gameplay before you look at numbers. The type of person that only ever looks at numbers rather than how they feel about playing a certain class, is not the type of consumer that’s going to keep you afloat, let alone profitable.
Right now, every specialization feels like it’s been built around numbers.
It’s incredibly mundane and I can hardly tell the difference between classes anymore. Hunters in WoD suffered from having all three specs feeling like slight variations of one another.
Now it feels this way, across classes, let alone specs.
Even with all this ability pruning and watering down of complexities, you still managed to mess up shadow priests and elemental shamans in early BfA to a point where you conceded to the fact that they were unfinished.
So I ask you again - What is the point of this approach? For all the stripping down of classes, issues with numbers are still prevalent. You can’t even manage to keep numbers clean, even within this design philosophy.
If you have no passion for developing the classes in this game any longer, hire some new blood. Get things rolling again instead of forcing restrictions on creativity in the name of convenience. Convenience is your biggest downfall. You can practically trace every single problem in this game down to that one term: convenience.