Yeah, but on Wrath I don’t need to spec into passives and drop spells, I get all of it, including other passives for more Haste and Proc chances. It also feels way more satisfying for me.
I mean depth of rotation, instead of 2 buttons. Maybe you don’t understand what “depth” means.
Blood DK was still one of the most active tanks in terms of maintaining survival, if you didn’t use cooldowns properly, you died. It was a good balance of a satisfying DPS rotation and using survival cooldowns when necessary, as well as making sure you had enough runes for DS.
There are also several Talent builds, armour sets, trinket combinations, which offered way more depth than now.
I’m sure there are like a hundred ways to rationalize it, to spin every difference between now and wrath into a positive that serves your narrative, but i could do the same with everything exclusive to BFA and this can go on until morning.
Or maybe i do and by the looks of it you’re talking about complexity, not depth. The two are correlated a lot of the time but not always.
And yes DK was one of the most active tanks, in 2009, when tanking was mostly about stacking stamina, but in today’s arena it would be the least active by far. (although you could enjoy yourself by using 4 buttons to apply disease).
I don’t know about that. I don’t play on private server and don’t remember much, even though i tanked on my DK back in WotLK. I trust you have a fully geared max level DK tank with most essences unlocked on retail that serves as basis for that comparison, right?
Almost like the gameplay tanked since older expansions. They literally removed half of the gameplay mechanics that existed when they pruned. Removal of depth/variability has just led to it being boring. Along with bad class design on top of that.
Also it wouldn’t matter if I had the highest geared character of ‘x’ class, I tried enough of them, and the gameplay was underwhelming and mediocre at best. I mean when an AoE pull consists of 2 buttons and then AFKing, I dunno what great knowledge I could possibly be missing.
I’m kinda impressed you’ve been playing for so long and manage to have absolutely 0 public opinion on the game. Even statng you have a bucketlist of things to say about affliction but choose the defend Blizzards decisions that you seemingly disagree with. Why?
Do you just enjoy playing devils advocate? I’ll concede that fury warrior is also not entirely a build and dump spec, but that doesn’t really take away from the overarching trend that it’s the playstyle that fits too many specs nowadays and with the pruning has made the specs that do have that build far too similar.
Legion was the high point for classes in my eyes, but thats because I started playing more than half of em on a very regular basis in that expac. Most of them felt really good, ones that didn’t feel good were outlaw rogue, subtlety, feral druid, demo lock, arcane mage and marksmanship hunter. Ofc those are based on preference, but some of those definitely felt clunky. I’m sad that they didn’t keep the specs intact that didn’t have issues and just fixed the ones that had issues. For BM I’m pretty sure Legion was the best version. By removing the artifact ability from some specs they’ve ruined their gameplay and numbers (enhancement shaman comes to mind). That said, I basically started in MoP and I know that back then there were way more buttons, I don’t miss the part where my rotation is like 10 buttons honestly, but I do miss some flavor spells being baseline. We know they’re going back a little on the pruning so that’s going to fix some of our concerns, let’s hope we won’t need to manage 10 buttons again though.
I’m fairly sure i mentioned some of my thoughts on improving my spec in some thread on the warlock forum. There is a lot of criticism regarding classes, some of it rather sensible, in which case i leave a like and move on, however if there’s truth to a claim, if silly and exaggerated arguments are used that kinda invalidates the whole point.
As for the similarity of playstyle, it’s true that out of the 36 specs some play too similar to eachother, however the problem isn’t the pruning. Classes were much more homogeneous in MoP than they are now, i don’t see how giving every spec a buff to keep up, a dot, an execute, etc would make them different.
I too am wondering where these “mash one button whilst waiting for CD specs” are. I personally havent encountered one.
I often see a hark back to Mop. I wasn’t active during Mop, it’s the one point in WoW I was unsubbed. What I’d like to see to help clarify this is picking a couple of classes and comparing their current rotation/s (if they have many via spec) and then the same for them in Mop so I can see this often referred to pinnacle of class design that is referred to. Because everyone refers to it but nobody specifies what it is, beyond referring to a few core abilities they lost after Mop (imho class design =/= to one ability you really liked)
Anyone care to show me this? It’d really help joining the discussion because I think there’s a lot of generalisation coming on about BFA rotations here. They’re not perfect but some complaints here seem a, bit off the mark.
Wasn’t Wrath the expansion where you could pretty much macro your entire rotation and just constantly press the same button over and over?
Personally I agree that the prune went too far but I also remember the days when half the spell book was filled with spells that were so niche that by the time it came to use them you’d forgotten where they were on your action bars. I quite like the if X procs then use Y but if not then use Z mechanic that we have nowadays.
I was making a general claim about specs where you do have to spam one button at parts of the rotation, Survival hunt and Arms for example.
Visually and in terms of engagement, spamming one button isn’t very fun (with the exception of combo point builders, which are given depth by the ramp up to a pay off). Which ties in to:
This only really applied to BM Hunter, and has no relevance to how fun using rotations feels. I’m literally talking about adding more buttons/depth/engagement to your rotation. And in fact, if they hadn’t removed the ability to create these macros, they would be extremly viable for a lot of classes on Live right now, due to the 1 button mashing some classes already do.
As I mentioned before, on WoTLK I can have procs, debuffs to manage, and buffs to manage from gear. Live feels a lot more passive and chance on hit oriented.
I think there’s a lot to be said for having too many abilities in the base rotation, and it’s not always good. I think if a primarily rotation (so not counting things like essence choices or “big cds” of 2 min plus) has over 10 abilities that feature in it regularly it’s probably unnecessarily busy and thus hard to execute.
For me I feel satisfied perfecting a rotation that requires optimising timing windows etc.i don’t derive joy from having ten thousand things to press, particularly if they do little on their own. That’s just turning a rotation into a to do list and you end up having so much to focus on you can’t respond to things like trinket /essence procs without punishing your dps, or your heavily punished by any mechanics that require you to move as it can cause several essential components of your rotation to fall off.
What comes to mind is Legion Survival Hunter. I mean that was a busy rotation. It was quite enjoyable sometimes but it was difficult to execute perfectly and a spec where you have that feeling often is not fun.
It looked something like:
maintain explosive trap on the target as much as possible.
maintain caltrops on the target as much as possible.
keep lacerate on the target.
ensure serpents sting/way of the mok nathal never drops from target/you.
ensure you don’t cap focus by using raptor strike to maintain above or flanking strike if available.
ensure you have focus to cast FS on CD.
when at 3 mongoose bites, cast mongoose bite.
always ensure mongoose bite never has 3 charges so you do not waste mastery procs.
cast mongoose bite repeatedly to stack mongoose Fury
use talonstrike at high mongoose Fury stacks.
Watching these dots whilst managing the mongoose window was a pain which essentially required you to ignore the dot abilities when at high stacks of Fury which is counterintuitive to me. This isn’t even adding the trap dots are not targeted casts so they could be fiddly and messed up.
There is such a thing as giving you too much to do. Now survival has less to do, but it matters more WHEN you do it (wildfire grenade 100 talent for example, and mongoose bite in new form) which I prefer.
Well my point is that from the classes I’ve tried none of them feel close to having too much to do. Especially when you have time where you’re basically an active auto attack (spamming one button).
All classes have “use basic ability repeatedly” at their core and always have. If you have two competing abilities at the core of your rotation then it’s not going to be clear what you do to maximise performance.
Mages have always cast (primary nuke) as filler, rogues SS, druids wrath/SF, etc. This hasn’t changed.
The reason it looks more obvious now is because rotations are about when you use abilities not how many you use. I prefer this model myself. A basic core that has several conditional checks upon it rather than a convoluted basic rotation.
Which actual specs are one button mashers in the game right now? I have just been looking at icyveins and I am yet to see one but I haven’t bothered checking through all 36 specs.
And as far as the one button macro it applied to DK DPS too for a lot of the Wrath expansion.
Then lets agree to disagree. I find downtime, where I spam one button on classes very boring and instantly switches my brain off. Combo point classes only maintain my attention because they’re building to something and require you to keep track of them.
I answered the first question in the post you’re replying to.
And yeah, as I said, the macro is irrelevant to the points I’m making.
Survival Hunter - mongoose bite and wildfire infusion specced. ensure focus does not cap, maintai serpents sting and wildfire on target, track which bomb buff is Inc via infusion talent:
If poison, use as late into serpent sting duration as poss
If pheromones, use when focus is at low point oref (dump focus prior}
If shrapnel, use when focus is high to stack bleed.
Use mongoose bite to avoid focus cap, spam as much as possible when Fury buff is up.
Ensure kill command is never at max charges, try to use on CD to max focus returns.
Also enh shaman is quite busy potentially based upon talent choices with all of the things they have to track on themselves, and the unpredictability of their resource generation.
Which classes have you played and specs if I may ask? It might help me recommend some more and not recommend those you’ve done.
