Combat doesn't feel good anymore

Community General Discussion
1

I am making a forum post to address an issue regarding combat feeling. I generally believe that the majority of the specs in the game don’t feel good for several reasons.

I have played every patch of every expansion of this game in both PVE & PVP at a high level, and after comparing and contrasting across all versions, I have concluded the following:

  1. Several specs have bad sound effects, resulting in low dopamine feedback on button presses.

  2. Theres too many passive procs & dots, removing impact from your actual button press.

  3. Too much damage in cooldown window / Too little outside of it.

In order to keep this forum post a relatively fast read, I will give one example to demonstrate each point.

Number 1: Rogue used to be one of the best sounding classes back in the day. Great sound effects such as Backstab/Ambush, mutilate, envenom, hemorrhage really brought together a complete sound kit. Currently rogue (across all 3 specs) sounds as if you are hitting with a broken stick. Unfortunately, most classes suffer from this as the legion revamp of spell VFX and SFX didn’t do the latter justice.

Number 2: This is a perpetrator that taints MOST specs in the game, and doesn’t get spoken about often enough. I am going to use Havoc Demon Hunter to elaborate on this. Demon Hunter has 5 rotation abilities, and 4 cooldowns; nevertheless, if you open details, there are 20 instances of damage. passive procs and dots make over 50% of your damage. This circumstance takes away all the dopamine of the buttons you ACTUALLY press. In the case of demon hunter, that is Blade Dance and Chaos Strike. Chaos strike makes around half of your globals, yet it does around 25% of your damage = it doesnt feel good to press.

Part of the reason alot of the older iterations of specs in earlier expansions felt better is the simplicity of the specs. 1 button mage in classic is an overkill, but warrior in classic is a masterpiece and an amazing spec that is difficult to match in dopamine hits.

Number 3: This point is similar in nature to the one above, but has to do mostly with cooldowns. Back in the day, most specs had 1-2 cooldowns. Currently specs have 3-4 cooldowns each, usually a 30 sec/45sec/1min/2min. This means that there is no spec in the game which feels good to do damage on when you don’t have cooldowns. I know alot of people will disagree with me, and that is completely fine, but i think bloodlust and so many cooldowns are bad for the game. Honestly, bursting 2.5m dps on BL+cds and then doing 600k outside cds doesn’t sit right with me. People are currently doing triple and quadruple the damage with all cds up vs no cds up. Cooldowns used to be a 25-50% dps increase, how did it end up like this?

Solution: If i was game director at wow I would request new sound effects, good & satisfying sounds that actually make button presses release the dopamine.

I would also prune alot of the passive & dot damage found in most specs & return value back into the actual core rotational abilities.

Last, I would prune the amount of cooldowns available to each spec, making the gameplay more reliant on your rotational abilities & less reliant on your long cooldowns.

I know alot of people like the current feeling and gameplay of wow, and I would love to hear other opinions too in the comments to discuss with. I personally feel like the majority would agree that the gameplay isnt as rewarding as it used to be and it can do better.

13 Likes
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+honorable mention to class inbalance because it’s just the cherry on the top. Oh you want to play this? Too bad, you are way worse than X -Y spec. Looking at you Brewmaster just to name one.

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I agree this is an issue too, but this cannot be resolved and has been an issue since 2004. Unfortunately, there will always be something that’s better than something else. If you completely homogenized classes you would be able to balance them, but then there would be 0 diversity. I would even argue that homogenization is already extreme in retail. Every spec I can think of is a “builder spender”. At least back in the day you had the seal twisting ret, or the dotting warlock (with no malefic rapture).

I think blizz just lost the ball on class & combat design and they are too deep now to do anything about it + it would look bad if they suddenly started removing everything.

Last, I think m+ (which I also assume is what you are talking about) is where the issue is most prevalent. There’s only 5 people you take at a dungeon and there are 38 different specializations. If it isnt the top 5 specs you are taking, at best it will be the top 10 that are “meta”. In raiding (mythic) where u can take 20 people, mostly anything goes & balancing isn’t as much of an issue, but I would argue that raiding is too hard for the average player and only a small fraction of the population does it on retail currently.

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I have always disliked the sound of divine storm. It feels like a placeholder sound, that just ended up permanent.

2 Likes
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I agree, Final Verdict sounds great, but can’t say the same for divine storm. I personally preferred the old iteration of it that was introduced in wotlk.

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Op got a point but i’m not against having multiple skills right now with our characters.^^
In PVE it feels nice to that you can use multiple skills in your rotation but

IN PVP IT’S A MESS.

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PVP has grown smaller and smaller with every expansion. TBC and Wotlk Classic were a breath of fresh air for it, but with the removal of rewards from 2s and 5s in Cata Classic, it also seems to have died out.

As far as the post I made goes, it was done mostly with PvE in mind (but I do agree that its an even bigger issue for PVP, as it has become a cooldown trading simulator).

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Just in case you were not aware, hit affects are partially determined by the weapon you transmog. That said, Outlaw feels fine in terms of audio. I don’t know about the other specs because I don’t play them.

I agree, there’s way too much indirect damage. I rather have them remove some of the indirect the dots and add it to up-front damage of the ability I press. My personal pet peeve are abilities that “collect” damage. Breath of Eons and Execution Sentence for example.

My only big issue with combat is that especially early in the patch it feels bad because of low haste. There are also way too many abilities that temporarily give you more haste, sometimes over time it decays or increases, sometimes by stacks… This up and down makes combat feel inconsistent and I don’t like it.

1 Like
9

Generally I like the way rotations feel, at least in pvp.
Would there be a way to keep rotations as interesting as they are now, while reducing the amount of procs, cooldowns and damage effects?

Can’t speak of the sound effects because my gamesound is way low always.

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I agree and it reminds me of this classic video of Pat from Vanilla WoW:

Such a video could not be made today, because pressing buttons and seeing big numbers is not a “cool moment” in WoW gameplay today.

And that feels like a huge loss to the game.

2 Likes
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Agree completely, from animations & sound effects, to damage font and auto attacks, everything blended together and really hit nicely. Can’t say the same today. Sure i love hitting chaos bolt on destro, but that’s the only button really, and rarely found across all specs in the game.

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I am aware, but I don’t find any weapon aesthetically pleasing as far as auto attacks go, they are just horrible for all classes (except for ret crusading strikes, which have a semi decent SFX and generate holy power). As far as outlaw goes, I guess it’s subjective, but I preferred the feel of original combat rogue over it. Sinister Strike and dispatch feel like they hit for nothing, part because they proc so many other things and part because they sound bad (IMO)

I think the main perpetrator as I said is the fact that you open details and there are 20+ instances of damage, when you only press 4-6 buttons. The fact that so many hits go out means they had to “dampen” the sounds too, which just makes combat overall bad.

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Yep, there used to be something there that was just peak gameplay.

Warlocks had Shadowbolt in Vanilla that once in a blue moon could hit for 2k damage, which was insane. It barely ever happened, but when it did…it felt so good.

Same with Warrior. The gameplay basically consisted of waiting a handful seconds until Mortal Strike came off cooldown, so you could cross your fingers and pray that your 5% crit chance would pull through and you’d see a huge number on your screen and cream your pants.
It was so satisfying.

Priest had a cool dopamine hit with double trinkets and Power Infusion into Holy Fire followed by Inner Focus into another Holy Fire.
Only worked every 3 minutes, but damn it felt awesome.

And the game has none of that anymore. Even when you are fully buffed and you get Bloodlust and Power Infusion and there’s an Augmentation Evoker who’s your best friend, you’re still just going through the motions with your rotation. Yeah, you’re doing more damage, but it’s delivered in this slightly bigger and slightly faster manner. You don’t get those big jackpot moments anymore. There’s no climax to the combat anymore, it’s just a forever looping rotation.

2 Likes
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Totally agree with you on this one. The developers should acknowledge that less is more in these situations.

My personal favorite was warrior with windfury in classic wow. You can’t beat the feeling of getting a windfury proc while spamming heroic strike or cleave and suddenly being swamped with rage ready to press your BT and WW. All the while being accompaned by an SFX kit made of 3-4 sounds that are simply amazing.

1 Like
15

I am not sure, I generally find the less amount of procs and cooldowns existing, the better the gameplay.

for example. Let’s assume for simplicity purposes that a boss has 10X health and there are 10 DPS in the raid. In an ideal world, DPS with different playstyles would all have to do X dps so that 10 of them kill the boss.

Assuming that X represents the damage budget developers are tuning around, when all your passive procs do 50% of your damage and you also deal 50% of your total damage during your cooldown window that lasts 10-15% of the fight, it really means that for the vast majority of time, your button presses don’t feel like they do anything meaningful.

Same goes for PVP. You have a frost DK that can kill during pillar of frost, but there is no chance in the world you are killing anyone outside of your pillar window. Your abilities literally hit for nothing while cooldowns arent up.

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I think there is a lot of merit in this argument. I think this is also why lag is so terrible in areas where combat is being done by groups of players (World Bosses etc.).

One reason I like Shaman currently is just how simple it is. Flame Shock - Lava Burst, fill with Lightning Bolt and Spend with Earth Shock. This covers most situations.

I have this memory of olden days (not sure how accurate it is) that Warrior was quite simple and Rogue was quite complicated. A well played rogue would out perform a well played Warrior but a poorly played Rogue would be out performed by a damp cloth.
The game has made all classes and specs so close to each other now that such differences no longer exist. Having simpler and more complex classes is a good thing. Gives players choice. Although the problem then becomes Meta thinking and the simpler classes get ignored.

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That is true. Elemental shaman is one of the specs that still has frontloaded damage on its buttons. I’m not a big fan of the new lava burst animation, but it’s one of the better things someone can play on retail atm.

About rogue & warrior, I belive rogue was simpler in PVE in the original trilogy. In pvp rogue was clearly more difficult

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At least with Frost, I think the bigger problem with their design is less with revolving around pillar, and more about half of their core rotation revolving around AoE, and their ST being more or less just 2 buttons.

Coupled with their ability to pull dudes in, setting up a blender go is a little too easy without something like Pillar curbing them just doing that nonstop.

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Simpler than a Warrior? When positioning / stealth for back stab and ambush etc came into it?

I didn’t play rogue back in the day and my rogue alt is Outlaw which is simple enough (if you ignore procs etc, which I do).

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I don’t necessarily have something against the way it plays, but rather the fact that alot of the damage is now offloaded into the passive procs & hero talents, making your frost strike and obliterate hit for less than they are meant too, as the damage budget is allocated somewhere else.

I don’t mind it having 2 buttons. A ton of specs had only a few buttons in earlier versions of the game but felt amazing to play.