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! ) 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.