Swords were the superior spec back then, which means that positioning didn’t matter as much. But even for dagger rogues in vanilla, they only kinda spammed backstab and kept S&D up. In the original trilogy, all melees had to position themselves behind the boss regardless, to avoid parries.
Backstab rogue in vanilla has an extra crit modifier on backstab, and it was around 50-60% of your damage, the rest being auto attacks. Ironically, this spec felt amazing to play cause your backstab hit like a truck and the dopamine hits you got from the crits were unmatched (and nowhere to be found in current wow)
thank you. precisly how i feel. its like youve read my mind.
imo theyve taken the war out of warcraft (AND BTW theve taken the world out of world of warcraft as well imo). its a pity its been filtered out.
for me this is the biggest issue currently. the feeling is just gone.
AND you cant follow whats happening by looking at the screen either. its just looking at bars and cooldown tracking addons. you should be able to see for example the warrior using mortal strike by looking at the animation.
in my personal opinion combat in wow is not good anymore because of the big nerfs and limited spells.
like damage reduced beyond 5 or target.
you just dont feel the power anymore.
killing someone alone is not easy or fun anymore.
every thing needs a damn group .
i really missed the legion
I know part of it is nostalgia, but I just can’t find myself being excited about Jailer, Fyrakk or Xalatath the way I was about Illidan or Arthas. The mystique of the open world is also gone for me.
I am grateful for the existence of classic, but I replayed it in 2019-2024 alongside retail and I’m just ready for something new. I just wish retail fulfilled the playerbase needs.
The developers took a massive step in dragonflight with the introduction of the new talent trees. However, what they simply did was take the current playstyles and repaint them in a more elaborate and complicated frame. They just took already existing passives and choices from the old trees and made them elaborate.
What needs to be done is a thorough top-down pruning of all specs, that will result in a much needed breath, which will ultimately benefit the game greatly.
But I do have a problem with the core design of the spec. Like I said, it being an AoE-oriented while also having a grip and slow baked into aoe, making setups trivial.
I can’t recall cycling obliterate/frost strike ever feeling all that great either, certainly didn’t in Legion when the whole spec felt like it was just 3 buttons.
In fact, thinking about it, I feel like virtually all specs being so cleave/aoe oriented is a bigger issue than reliance on 30sec/1min cd windows.
I do think there is a cleave/AOE issue too since the game is mostly designed around m+ nowadays as it’s the game-mode of choice of the vast majority of the playerbase.
I don’t think there exists a healthy balance though. In cataclysm, people complained about the lack of consistent AOE. In retail every spec is flooded with AOE tools. Maybe there is a middle ground
It’s also surely not very helpful to the lag when you not only have all these procs, but they’re popping off on like 5-10 targets at a time.
I’m pretty certain there’s pruning that can be done there. Idol of N’zoth talent for SP for example.
Doesn’t alter/contribute to rotation in any meaningful way, it’s just an occasional proc baked into it. Pointless and stupid.
Yes, and the amount of calculations going out for every instance of damage is too high, which ultimately causes the lag in larger fights, in both PVE & PVP.
This is the result of every expansion adding things to class design while barely removing anything. 10 expansions later, we find ourselves here. Back in the day you pressed A and you got A. Now you press A and you get A B C D F G Y Z.
Quoting out of context, but I think one reason why Blizzard would like all the many procs, is because it lowers the delta between skilled and unskilled players.
When you have less control and a lot of actions happen by themselves, then there is less opportunity for a player to make a huge mistake. The game basically does most of the upkeep for you.
The same holds true for rotations. When there are many buttons to press, then it does actually become faceroll, because each individual button doesn’t do a whole lot on its own. Individual errors in a modern rotation don’t punish as hard as individual errors in a Vanilla rotation.
In Vanilla WoW where you have fewer buttons and simpler rotations, forgetting to press Mortal Strike on cooldown is a huge mistake. Forgetting to press Mortal Strike in today’s WoW is also a mistake, but not quite as detrimental to your ability to play the game.
That is potentially true in certain situations, but I do think that it has been a lot more damaging to the game than it has been good. If I was game director I would start pruning passive procs and cooldowns immediately.
Oh for sure, but I would imagine that Blizzard developers still wake up at night, drenched in sweat, having nightmares about all the criticism they got during the ability pruning in Warlords or Draenor.
Players seem to recognize that the current design isn’t ideal, and that less would be more, but the reality of what that means is rarely very appetizing when it’s presented. Unfortunately.
Agree on that one. It can sound bad to a player that hasn’t given it much thought or realized the situation.
I am optimistic in the sense that MOP was considered class design peak for a lot of players. Hence, the backlash for the WOD pruning. I think very few people actually would think the same about current class design.
As far as abilities go, If developers don’t change the actual abilities too much, but rather the passive interactions behind them, I don’t think there would be as much backlash, and it would quickly result in more appealing gameplay.
I don’t agree with this. MoP had a lot of buttons but the rotations felt good and meaningful to pull off. Legion had only a few buttons but they felt bad and faceroll.
Because Legion was inundated with procs that flatten the disparity.
Will also add passive cleave on every ability .
It is simply not fun to constantly aoe . Back in Vanilla / TBC , aoe Skills felt amazing to press because suddenly you get all those numbers up and you did a cool animation with them .
Now all your skills do some splash damage you don’t even notice among the 100 procs .
In addition to that you cant focus a target and use cc . So no one uses cc that brakes on damage anymore . Hell we get stuff like traps on hunter that get you imuned , EXACTLY because it is impossible NOT to brake them . It is a pain in low levels when you just want to damage 1 target at a time to 50% , for some quest .
Aa for Cooldowns . I honestly hate how many of them there are . In PvP if you play without addons , you have no idea when to run , when to fight and when to pop defensive . The cooldowns are invisible but do a ton of damage and there are so many , that you can’t mentally track them . Most of the time instead of predictive gameplay , now I am forced to play reactive .
Back in Pandaria and before reactive vs predictive gameplay was what separated the skill of a player and no addon could help you with that . Now … Now you know that 80% of the chance at the start of a fight someone will zug zug you with full cds . If you outlast that … well it is anyone guess what will happen .
I used to laugh at these mongoloid type of plays , but there is just no other way right now . If you don’t press your cooldowns 24/7 you go behind and can’t recover . No need to think when you use them . Just press em . It is very boring and annoying .
And of course don’t cluster , because you get cleaved by the passive cleaves . Playing healer in a mele lobby feels like you are healing bots . They just cluster on one target and start cleaving .
I don’t know. I think the Retail crowd that don’t like Classic because the gameplay feels old, they’re kind of the ones Blizzard are fooling with this modern combat design we have. Because it really is just a lot of smoke and mirrors with all the procs and silly amount of buttons and stupidly long rotations. It’s all a charade to hide the fact that under the hood, at its essence, the combat is still the same as in 2004. Tab-targeting, one button at a time, sequential, and…old.
The combat design in modern World of Warcraft already looks very old compared to any recently-released video game with any kind of combat in it. If you start stripping a lot of the noise away from the combat design in WoW – which is really just a lot of busywork – then you’re left with something that immediately reveals itself as the old and archaic thing it is.
And I think Blizzard really wants to avoid that. If there’s one thing Blizzard don’t want, it is for Retail WoW to appear like an old game.
I don’t like the modern “Combat” of other games . RPG’s at least . They all seem designed for console players , with 5-6 active buttons ,(Usually just 4 active skills) that do Supper Flashy animation . You constantly have to pull combo moves , because innately having 6 skills is boring .
You don’t care what damage you do , because the damage is irrelevant . You just watch the health bar of the enemy and the flashy animations . Frankly it feels very Bot like , made not for people that enjoy gaming , but for people that just want to do some Pew Pew flashy animation , while drunk / grass and than switch off .
Leveling in these games feels completely useless , because you get 30 skills , but you never use them , because you only have 4 to 6 binds .
I personally feel that reacting to all the procs takes more skill than having a set rotation that you just rattle off without variance.
All the procs also make a class’ workings more difficult to figure out, with the average rotation having many moving parts, it can be tricky to figure out what goes wrong, at least when you forget to press MS in Vanilla, you know what you’re doing wrong. (And as a side note, pressing MS actually resulted in a satisfying big hit back then)
They’re not talking about proc abilities, just proc / random damage effects that are tacked on to other things. Tentacles of cthun would be a quick example.
The most egregious it ever got was BFA though. 30%- or so of my damage was just random procs from trinkets and azerite effects that had absolutely zero bearing on my gameplay. And then there was corruption…
Right now though? At least on shadow it feels great.
Sadly, the vocal minority of players on WoW social media, including these forums, are terrified of being called bad, so they have defended the constant massive bloat since Shadowlands and now we are in this mess.
At least the borrowed power passives in BFA served to bridge the skill gap between players. Whereas now, all the passive and actives have created the biggest skill gap in the history of this game. Also at least Twillight devastation could be felt whenever it procced, due to it doing massive damage whenever it procced.
If I were to be selfish, and ignore trying to empathise with terrible WoW players, I would actually agree that the way combat simply feels terrible on pretty much every spec is a massive issue for me. There are no feel good moments in combat anymore.
It´s like playing a terrible melody on the piano composed by a 6 year old. No bueno.
A lot of the passives of Warthin don´t though. They actually increase the skill gap. Which is the exact opposite situation of BFA, where many of them bridged the gap.
Anecdotally I have never seen a bigger gap in DPS performances in the history of this game.
Every single decision Blizzard makes is down to this. They are terrified of being screamed at by a vocal minority of players on Twitter.
It´s like a parent who knows they should be serving vegetables every night for their child, but living in terror of their spoiled offspring they serve fish fingers and fries, even though they know it is worse in the long run.
I would love too play speccs without big cooldowns but eaven if you can set Talents in your tree too avoid it, that one point into your big Cd is just always a hugh dps increase
And if you play at a descent level regardless of raid, M+ or PvP you have too play near optimum talents
Also remove of extra yard range for meeles makes them feel worse
On WW i would like too play without Tiger and have my old reverse harm as active ability, but nope -20% dps