Class design observations from a pvt server player

Community General Discussion
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None of the classes seem to have a decent rotation anymore either. You’re usually spamming 1 button waiting for a cooldown on a weird timer that doesn’t fit with your rotation to come up. A lot of the damage on the classes in this game doesn’t feel like it makes sense and doesn’t feel good to do. Very Spammy.

After Cata things moved more and more away from sustained and more towards only doing any damage in cooldowns or at high dementia. Remember getting big crits (on any spell) and then having deep wounds tick away. That gave you the feeling of doing a good amount of damage. Now you can get builds where you’re spamming one button over and over and then another, instead of a 1, 2, 3, 4 rotation, which felt better. You still had to maintain certain buffs/debuffs and procs from Talents/Gear set bonuses.

On live for the free 3 days rn wondering why I would pay for a sub, when half of the identity and fun gameplay of classes has been taken away.

Look at Disc too. That was one of the most fun specs in the game at one point. Now it just feels really clunky. Why would they ever remove the: PW: Shield > PoM > Renew combo? It was one of the most satisfying feelings as a healer to see your teammates hp pop up.

For defence on Warrior you lost Resil with Sword and board, Reflect, Intervene, Enraged Regen, Retaliate(offensive) to force things off you, Shield Block, passive healing from Talents on being the victim of a Stun/Crit.

It honestly feels like for some lines of the Talent tree they just dumped a random spell in and didn’t have any over arching plan to point the rotations in a certain direction. Passive/Instant spell choices are the proof of that. You’re either spamming the buttons you already have more, or adding one extra spell to your rotation.

I mainly play WoTLK on a private server because of this. I’ve been leveling as Blood DK on live, and it just feels so aimless in terms of any sort of rotation, and so much less satisfying than: DnD> Icy Touch > Plague Strike > Pestilence. At least had that had some organisation to it and wasn’t just: DnD >Blood Boil > Blood Boil. :^]

The smaller damage numbers visually makes your damage and healing ambiguous too, so it’s hard to tell what’s worth doing without the help of a DPS metre. This makes the lack of sustained healing/damage outside of cooldowns feel even worse. The classes have just lost that feeling of impact, and gained a load of vague looking spam numbers outside of big cooldowns.

Another thing about the stacked abilities is how lazy it seems, and how boring it is to use.

In conclusion, when playing most of the classes I play on older content, the older versions feel more satisfying to play.

It’s strange to me how the visuals and effects all progressed massively, but the gameplay of certain classes just seemed to fall apart. Blizz have acknowledged they may have pruned too much, but a lot of the problems I’ve raised have nothing to do with that. You could have made more satisfying builds with less abilities for sure. The artifact traits also feel out of place, as some of them don’t even aesthetically fit with the class/spec you’re playing. It all just feels a little aimless sometimes. They have so much potential to make interesting rotations with ramp up, procs and more.

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I’m a long time disc player (since TBC to be specific), and I wholeheartedly agree with you. What they did to my spec after WoD is just… no words. I hate this legion-bfa version of disc, it’s so dull and clunky and unsatisfying to play compared to the older version.

TBH, if class design is a major issue for you, playing retail WoW now is setting yourself for disappointment. I don’t know anyone for whom the classes are the top source of fun (as opposed to just doing the raids or the dungeons or whatnot with whatever the classes may or may not be) that actually likes the game atm.

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Basically every spec is at a worse state, than what they were back in MoP :disappointed_relieved:

Ps.
Red … :heart_eyes:

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Oh, but no love for a Tauren? :cow2: I see how it is. :cow:

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I don’t know about DPS, but I didn’t enjoy playing resto druid in Cataclysm.

Our old mastery was just terrible, forcing a specific direct heal cast every 10 seconds.

Nowadays, I miss having a lot of things. I miss healing touch, I miss nourish, I miss direct heals refreshing my lifebloom.

But I don’t miss my old mastery for sure.

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Is there anyone who actually thinks one of their specs feels better in this expansion compared to previous ones?

They’re all starting to feel half-baked to me.

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I’ve only played warrior and paladin in wotlk.

The only thing I see better or maybe just as good now is Prot Warrior.

Prot in wotlk was mindless but fun.

Prot now requires some pretty cool handling but Is abiiiit clunky.

Current arms would be 10x times more fun than it is now and just as great if not greater than arms in wotlk if blizzard didn’t shift it’s damage to it’s mastery and strip it of all sort of powers it had, making it a dot class that heavily depend on their team mates.

I recall everyone praising arms as the superbly awesome designed spec that’s going to come to BFA but then out of nowhere damage shift and people realized we got 0 utility once we lost our artifacts.

In general legion design was as good as Wotlk, MoP design was 10 times better than wotlk, but BFA is basically Legion but pruned, gutted and stripped down to the bone.

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Warrior was kind of the reason I started to write all of this. Arms is my main, and I found the spam too much. Two Overpowers and spamming Slam. Slam giving bleed, but not having passive deep wounds off Crits, kinda makes it not feel like Warrior too.

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Been a warrior since vanilla :stuck_out_tongue: and been trying my best to give suggestions and ideas in the warrior forums, hopefully I’ll be heard one day.

P.S I think you meant mortal strike for bleed, slam doesn’t give any kind of bleed.

The only bleed you have now is deep wounds and for the M+9 Motherlode run I just finished.

It did 25% of my overall dps of 36.4k

and on Bosses it ranged from 24.6% to 27.5% of my over all damage.

On the third boss, doing 34k dps Deep wounds did 26.3%, melee did 11.9% and slam did 13% of my total damage

If you consider slam to be passive damage since it comes passively from whirlwind

My passive damage is 51.2%, as in 51.2% of my damage I cannot control.

If you don’t consider slam to be passive damage because you have to click whirlwind

Then my passive damage becomes 38.2% as in 38.2% of my damage I have no control of.

This in my opinion destroys the warrior class appeal, were supposed to be the class with the most active damage, instead we are with the most passive damage atm.

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This thread confuses me. As far as I’m aware Classic WoW doesn’t have real rotations at all, really, and if the game calls for you to press the same ability many times because that is the best strategy, which it unfortunately did in raids rather often, then you simply press that one button repeatedly.

Instead your keyboard was full of small utilities and variations on damage dealing that was useful in certain circumstances only, but those circumstances came up rather often, especially in PvP.

This is of course very different to today, where we all do have rotations, where pressing 1 determines you must press 2 next rather than 1, regardless of what the enemy is doing.

There is another argument being made in here that live damage never feels chunky or satisfying, such as the comment made on Deep Wounds for a class that’s fundamentally supposed to hit you with a giant war axe (or whatever he has on hand! :smiley: ) and cleave your arm off in a single strike, and this is also true.

In fact, World of Warcraft now generates an obscene amount of combat log events, and these events are mostly damage. Obviously, if there are 10 times more attacks and the DPS should remain relatively the same, that means each attack hits for 1/10th, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen. Attacks, in general, hit for all of nothing, and they generally feel extremely unsatisfying to use, and yet you still take massive damage, and it’s impossible to tell in many cases what actually killed you in PvP, even with the extra tools added over the years.

I don’t like modern class design either. All I can really hope for is that they get the message real soon, but honestly I said that 4 years ago and they haven’t, so the continued decline is almost inevitable, unfortunately.

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Part of the reason I like my MM hunter so much is that they crit for 100k+ all the time, which is super satisfying, also rapid fire after a multi shoot feels great.

On contrast where my mortal strikes reach a maximum of 57k if I had 6k+ str from ToM and Warbreaker which happens only when I have bloodlust, use the lucid essence and smash buttons fast enough to get another warbreaker in before ToM buff disappears… which is only 1 time in an entire fight, where I actually feel like a warrior for a total of 3 seconds.

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I like Prot 10 times more than back in Legion. In Legion, basically all I did was spam IP… I had so boring rotation, I even started to hate my spec (the only one I mostly played like ever).
This version is much more fun, harder and feels deeper to me. But I also liked older ones in WoD or TBC versions.

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Your post feels very “cherrypicky”.
First of all i don’t know what classes you play where you just spam one ability while waiting for something to come off cd. The specs i play have 4-5 abilities in their rotation with some low cd abilities that aren’t necessarily the brainless “used this once it comes of cd” type.

Also this idea that “it doesn’t fit with your rotation” is a weird criticism. This type of cd is more characteristic of the old game, where it felt like the devs just dropped some legos on us and said “see how you can make these fit”. (which i enjoyed)
Now everything is more structured and the rotations are carefully crafted and dictated from on high by the devs and our challenge is to execute as accurately as possible. In this age cooldowns fit by design, which is the exact opposite of your claim.

Lastly you mention tanking. This role changed quite a lot through the expansions and yes back in LK you had a lot more abilities on your DK, but to what end? what did you actually accomplish with it? Tank dps didn’t matter much back then, threat wasn’t much of an issue and survival was mostly based on your gear. I think that makes the perfect example for pointless complexity, showing that the amount of buttons you have to press doesn’t correlate to how good a class is to play.

Yes many tanking elements have been simplified or outright removed but also other elements were added, like active mitigation, which you conveniently don’t acknowledge.

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Your post feels very “cherrypicky” too, the only 2 specs I can think of that stray away from the mold are aff and demo because they’re dot specs (one literally and the other summons demons that basically work like dots).

Do you genuinely feel that warlock is even half as satisfying to play as it used to be? Even in PvE destro especially feels clunky, I know what I’ve lost and particularly when it comes to finishing off a mob with 1-10% hp left it feels bad having to cast incinerate. 3 expansions ago we had 2 mob finishing moves and now we have to overkill a mob by casting a 1-2 second spell? How is that better? How is it the same? To me that’s one example of objectively worse gameplay. How are you not worse off losing both instant shadowfury, your demonic circle and your self healing without gaining any mobility to compensate for it?

Warlock has gotten nothing since Mop and lost 1 or 2 abilities on every single front, how is that not objectively worse to play? Warlock is not an example of pointless complexity, every spell we lost had it’s place.

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Holy pally main here ever since I started playing in Wotlk release. I can still have fun with my class, but only because I mained it for so long. Current holy paladin is an abomination - in the wrong sense.

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What mold are you talking about? i disagreed with the OP claim that rotations now consist of “spamming one button while waiting for a cooldown”, yet you insinuate i’m wrong by making a claim that’s not contradictory to my statement. That’s not how arguments work.

Now while there are some areas i think my spec is lacking and i could make a whole page speaking of affliction issues, i’m not sure any of my solutions would be “go back to X” or maybe a bit in the aoe department.
And yes adding a cast time to shadowfury seems dumb however the number of abilities don’t make for an objective measurement of how good the spec is to play. I don’t care that i lost 1-2 buttons, i enjoyed affliction in legion much more than in MoP, even though it had like the worst active artifact power in the game.

Also is there anything in this game that someone at some time did NOT call clunky?

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The spamming one button while waiting for a cooldown mold, all the specs I’m playing are more or less that, affliction and demo are the 2 exceptions I can think of so I was less concerned about proving you wrong and more interested in what other specs you feel stray from that mold.

Also how was affliction artifact power the worst? I mean it was boring compared to a lot of others, but it was really strong. I agree that the number of spells doesn’t objectively indicate how good a spec feels to play, but in a lot of cases it does like my destro example. More abilities tend to mean more options for more scenarios which often results in a better experience for a broader amount of content. I can adapt if I have a bit of everything, if I only have a tightly tuned rotation that rotation is gonna be really good for one thing and not as good for other things. Destro again, fairly good (really good for those 30 seconds of juicy infernal damage) for single target, quite possibly the worst spec in the entire game for AoE. All the AoE abilities are on the talent tree, they’re all fairly mediocre on their own so if we had access to a few of them as baseline, say fire and brimstone suddenly our AoE rotation would’ve been an entirely different story. Casting cataclysm and then doing a single target rotation is not only not optimal, but it also feels bad.

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You know how you could describe anything in a boring manner? Like the Shawshank redemption is just a story of a guy who escapes from prison through a sewer. This is the vibe i’m getting from you.
Now i’m thinking of my alts and for example fury warrior could technically fit that mold of yours, but does a 3 sec cd count? when among the other abilites, because it fits rather gracefully and it never gets in the way. Raging blow has charges and always feels enough to get you to rampage before you have to wait for cooldown.
So from this point of view in now way i would describe the fury rotation as “spamming one button while waiting for a cooldown”.

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What? I’m coming from Wrath where every spec other than Enh has a clear rotation, usually with procs, buffs, and debuffs to maintain and deal more damage, and even more viable builds because of the multitued of talent choices, stats and glyphs.

I’m pretty happy playing Affli on WoTLK where I don’t just spam UA 400x, and don’t have to swap out actual abilities in my rotation for passives. Even Arms feels better on Wrath and it doesn’t even have the bigger ramp up rotation it had in Cata.

Then you’ve misunderstood my entire thread. I really don’t understand where the fun of pressing one AoE and then spamming the same button twice for an AoE pull can be fun for anyone. The idea of the build up is that you actually have something to do which makes it enjoyable. It doesn’t even look or feel interesting or satisfying at all. Death and Decay > Blood Boil x2 :sleeping:

They basically pruned all of the depth out of the game and then did a really lazy job at designing rotations for everything, leaving the whole game to feel like an ornate shape sorting toy.

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There is no clear cut-off point, the thing is that now rotation is very planned and structured and the further back in time you go, the less planned and structure it becomes.

Yeah in wrath UA was just a second corruption but with a cast time and you spammed shadowbolt 400x.

I don’t think you understand what “depth” means because the DK example is the exact opposite of that. What you described there is a clear LACK of depth, you had 5 buttons that did the exact same thing you now do with 2.
The idea is that you lost buttons from your DPS rotation, but now you have to deal with your survival “rotation” aswell, something that was almost passive in wrath. You still have something to do, but in another direction, is it that hard to see the full picture? and not focus on a specific out of context aspect?

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