Lately i ve seen quite many videos from popular content creators talking about reducing the number of abilities and generally kill the complexity of the game, remove the thinking part of it. (some dumbass even said to reduce it to 10 abilities for every class… lol wtf, go play call of duty)
This is the worst thing that could happen to wow. I started playing in Dragonflight, because at last, i found a game with many abilities to use and a talent tree like system where i can experiment with builds. The magic in this game comes ftom its complexity and its hard to get bored of it because of that, also there is always room for improvement even for skilled players which is a super good thing.
why ppl want dumb games, why every game is simple and dumb in the modern era of gaming? why ppl dont want to use their brain while playing? why ppl dont want challenges in games? why ppl want everything to be as simple as possible? i dont understand whats the fun in these. I can only hope wow dont go in that direction.
im so happy i found a proper complex game to play at last, i even bought the new dlc, but i fear they ll make this game dumb again because of the no brain content creators saying the game is too complex… wow is meant to be complex and it needs its competitive gameplay(with kinda big skill gaps between players) next to the chill. there are like 9342791378912371498162176 simple\dumb\easy\2button\straightforward games out there. why dont you go and play those? why do you want to kill the complexity in the very few complex games that is left for the non zombie gamers?
just keep the combat complexity, especially pvp wise the way it is in dragonflight which is just simply superb. removing addons and make and only allow necessary built in ones is a pretty good idea tho.
Seriously its so sad to see dumb content creators followed by a ton of players influencing the world of gaming to be dumber…
Another reason is that WoW’s combat system and UI was never designed to handle 20+ cooldowns on every player.
Another reason is that it’s so visually noisy that people don’t like playing it. PvP is on its deathbed - has been for a long time really but this is definitely not helping.
Why is it always people with almost no PvP or PvE experience who come here to defend the game being so insanely complicated? Just you wait till you see what awaits you my friend. You’ll change your mind soon enough, but I’ll see if I can’t get it done now.
You’re using a bog-standard frost mage PvP build and you’re not even playing. And since honour levels is shared across your characters, I can quite easily surmise you’re not playing that, either.
I do not believe you would be capable of exploring the full skill requirements of this game even if it did have 10 abilities per spec, though of course I do agree 10 would be absurdly low.
All I will say is I didn’t feel like the game was dumbed down or hilariously easy when all mage CD’s could fit on a single action bar.
The issue here is that the game isn’t clearly communicating the state of the game, and there’s a lot of clutter. Fewer abilities will help here, but there are other good ways of doing it, too, such as more restrictive resource management or less cooldowns and more situational abilities, which would also have the side-effect of making rotations less complex but more varied as you’d more often switch “rotation” depending on the situation - and perhaps even the concept of rotation starts to die in the extreme case.
That’s true, but it was always like this at all points in the game’s history. The great players were still at the top, the bad players were still at the bottom. I know you feel that it has to be taken to this extreme in order for the game to require any skill at all, but you’re wrong. Just plain wrong, and we have a 19 year history to prove it. You’re speaking for the heart without engaging the mind on this one, which is ironic.
The “modern era of gaming” is dumbed down? My dude, games used to play on an NES with 8 buttons on it.
Are you seriously trying to argue that WotLK takes no skill? That WoD takes no skill? That Legion takes no skill? Are you really? Seems like you are.
Tell me, how did the game improve from removing stance-based abilities and adding another 5 cooldowns and 5 additional buttons? How did the complexity rise? I’ll tell you how it did: It didn’t. We got more buttons and less complexity.
How does that happen? It happens when you make all the abilities recover independently by just slapping cooldowns on every single one of them and ignoring mechanics that force you to choose in your design, or even worse making them self-interact in such a way that there is only one correct choice for what to cast first and second.
There are also 2958725925825 games only fit for the biggest brainiacs on the planet out there. What’s your point?
It’s nearly dead. How can you say it’s “simply superb”? It is in its worst state EVER by far.
How are you gonna deal with the fact that 12 buffs show up on you whenever you’re under attack by a rogue, and just 1-2 of them will kill you if you don’t spot them, while the remaining 10 are hardly dangerou at all? How are you going to deal with the fact that Firemind has no proc effect? How are you going to deal with having 20+ buffs and having to find Icicles in there before your Glacial spike? How are you gonna deal with tracking Cryopathy stacks?
I’ll tell you how you’re gonna do that: You’re not.
Do you feel the game has been improved by the fact that you have to track 24 separate cooldowns? Do you feel it has improved by the fact that the enemies have as many, and that ideally you should track 8-10 of them on every enemy at the same time?
Yeah, default UI isn’t gonna let you track that, either.
How are you going to land that Polymorph exactly right given the DR expiration (which really is a hidden CD on your non-CD polymorph ability)? You’re not, because the default UI still, after 19 years of having DR, can’t track DR.
If we’re gonna take away the addons, and fair enough I suppose, the game MUST be able to communicate the state of the game and make the rotation doable without them, and it isn’t doing that.
If they delete addons like WeakAuras from the game as it is currently they will kill it instantaneously. Our classes will literally become unplayable. But you know what? I’m all for killing addons like that, but before you can get to that point they, and you, have to understand how to create a combat system which can be read and understood as it is being played.
They’ve failed at that, and that’s why this is happening.
While I agree the bigger problem is that Blizzard was combatting addons with added complexity which then helped cultivate the culture of players feeling the need to have lists of addons that they must have and this became a cycle for too many years. They could have easily shut this down by denying certain types of addons and designing encounters better and even more clearly.
The way that some players clutch onto their addons reminds me of this one guy I knew as a kid that couldn’t play anything on his Gameboy without having one of those cheat cartridges to give him advantages.
I don’t mind pruning but they need to make classes have interesting interactions between spells.
I don’t like Cooldowns especially when you have like 4 of them
Game is too fast for that kind of complexity
There is of course middle ground somewhere and it’s on blizzard to find that
but i just want to point out that once they already had that during CATA/MoP era of wow
So maybe they need to look at that and take inspiration from those 2
They should. I play Guardian Druid and it’s amazing having hardly any buttons.
I play shred guitar IRL so my left hand dexterity is near S Tier. It’s embarrassing as hell when I watch people playing WoW and I can see/hear them absolutely smashing the next button in their rotation.
Lmao try doing that on piano or in Street Fighter.
You are confusing complexity with button bloat. That is your mistake.
You can have complex rotations with few buttons. And you can have easy rotations with many buttons (because only 2 actually do something)… And many classes are in this situation.
Ishayo already did an excellent example with mages and “20 buffs/modifiers where 18 are irrelevant and only 2 are important”.
And pruning IS required. Talent trees are good. But in hind-sight I wonder if Blizzard over-did them with 60 total talent points. Maybe smaller trees with only 30 points would have been more appropriate IMO.
I don’t think they should reduce the number of points. I would actually argue they had it right straight out of the gates with most talents requiring 2-3 points, but they received a lot of feedback from tryhards that these should all cost 1-2 points, and so here we are.
They should’ve stuck to their guns that time. But hey, it’s fixable! They know what to do, obviously, they’ve already done it once!
I can mostly comment on RShaman and Arms Warrior talents. Which are the ones I know most about.
And they did do massive mistakes in both trees. TLDR of the issue is that by design you could not have a workable spec if you did those 2-3 talent points as you suggest.
In fact, RShaman still has this issue with Primordial Wave. Where the “base talent” is useless. And to make it useful you need to spend 3 more talents (4 in total) to upgrade it.
Problem is that you loose SO MUCH in return that the only logical conclusion is to remove those 3 talents and make it cost only 1 baseline.
Arms warrior started in S1 like that. And you ended up with a binary spec. Either ST ONLY. Or MT ONLY. Cant do both. And I dont mean full damage both. I mean a little of both.
In fact, Sweeping Strikes used to be a talent !!! How else do you do AoE with out it? Its weird.
I think 60 is fine. While leveling, it’s nice to get 1 point per level.
The problem is that Blizzard already seems to have forgotten their new design principles. When they presented Dragonflight, AFAIK they said they want to stop adding bloat and borrowed power each expansion, but they are doing exactly that in the next expansion by adding 10 more levels and those hero talents. They have to stop adding more and more stuff and instead focus on making the existing stuff perfect. They could’ve easily removed the boring talents from the existing talent trees and replaced them with some interesting hero talents.
Fine with me. But then you need to add a bunch of talents like “5% more leech” or “5% more crit” and borind things like that.
You cant expect to have 30 talent points that give you 30 “relevant” things. Cause you end up with 30 modifiers to your base skills. As Ishayo pointed out.
And to be honest, if the idea is to give me 10 “cool” talents and 20 “meh who cares” talents, then might as well just have 10.
Also:
Who cares about this? You spend at most 1 month leveling a toon. And then 23 months playing it in end-game.
New player experience (or leveling experience for alts) is attrocious on this game. And “cool” talent points wont change that fact. It has other, bigger, problems to address.
Sure, I’ll grant that. It was a first iteration, mistakes were made. Things needed some refining and reshuffling. But I don’t think the solution to that problem was to give everybody 40-50% more talents to pick at a time. I don’t mind that there exist this many talents by the way, it’s the number you can pick simultaneously that bothers me, and the fact that many of them really lack gameplay refinement where the talent adds something that really doesn’t work very well.
Oh that’s normal, and not an issue in my book. I think it’s perfectly fine to ask you to invest more than one point to make an ability really powerful.
I think it’s a far bigger problem when you have a useless talent that doesn’t have anything to make it stronger.
Yes that’s bad. Reshuffling was in order here - for example fire mages have Flamestrike near the top, which is absolutely fine. Yes, without it your AoE kindda tanks, but you do. Unless it’s worthless like it was at the start of the expansion of course; but that was a tuning issue, not a talent layout issue.
We can assume the player picked some talents. That’s okay. The only thing that’s important is to remember that best the top is not that optional, and near the bottom it is.
People who ask for a simple game don’t play the game because they are old and slow, they want everything to be easy; they’re just bitter old boomers.
but easy things no interest, watched the warfront, watched thorgast, watched the gameplay of bfa, I remember it very well, it was horrible and boring
the gameplay concerns currently:
Too many liabilities (since sl s3 they added lots of liabilities, and it was even worse in df)
Some very poorly thought out gameplay, (the unholy dk has too many gcdson it’s sort of burst, or it should reset the gcd to 1sec like cata/mop/wod)
The gameplay resembles a lot of food mixed in a shaker, there are some cool things but most of them are very bad
For the bitter old boomer:
The annoying thing is that they can be played on other versions, played in simple difficulty modes (I saw as an argument, we don’t do lfr because the loot is of no interest, but you are aware that the loot is related to the difficulty? why have mythical loot for clean hard lfr or stack in an aoe doesn’t matter?)
I think its more a discussion of where the complexity should be… in playing your class or the boss mechanics…
And thats without touching on does having 10 buttons vs 20 equal complexity difference? Not necessarily… depends on how much interaction there is…
I think we can all agree that having 10 abilities doing 50k dmg with different cooldowns doesnt make those 10 buttons complex.
But having 5 buttons with cool interactions that buff each other to do differnt things for different sitiuations? That can be way more complex and interesting.
I personally see hero talents as a solution to a problem we’d have in 3-4 expansions time… if going forward they just add new thematic hero talent tress, and we’re still only locked to having 1 active? That allows them to add new cool things every expansion without running into button bloat, and everyone having everything…
One could argue it should have already been added in DF, and let us have fewer “regular” talents… but that is different for each person when they think its enough.
You’re missing the point of what they are saying, button bloat does not mean complexity.
Having 32 spells but only ever using maybe 18-20 of them is not complex its overwhelming.
I’m sorry and I don’t mean to be that guy, but you simply don’t know a better form of wow, dragonflight is great in many respects when it comes to how the classes play, one reason being the talent trees you mentioned. But there have been times where the classes have felt better, imo it was mop where every class felt like they had enough and unique spells that they actually used.
It’s not, this is one of the hottest takes as e-sports is in its prime rn because of so many complex games out there but alright. Here’s a list with games more complex then wow(not including wow pvp):
-League of Legends
-Fortnite Ranked
-Helldivers 2
-DOTA 2
Why I would consider wow easier is because it’s heavily pve focused which (outside of tank and healer) is just use your rotation optimally, dont stand in bad stuff and that’s kinda it, obviously there are mechanics but those have often dumbed down to: interupt this or move here.
No offense but you’re basically looking at people who have played for ages and been a core part of the community and going:“No, I as a new player know whats best for the game I just strted playing and you guys don’t know what you’re doing.”(Obviously sarcasrticly over the top but you get the point).
Again, more buttons doesnt mean complex, it means more annyoing to deal with.
No it’s not, e-sports should never be the focus in an mmo, especially wow, this is lack of info my guy.
Because wow can be complex in certain things, but rotation and button bloat isn’t complex it’s unnecesary and your repeated lack of understanding this does not make me feel you know what you’re talking about.
Bro you have no idea what you’re talking about do you? Wow is already incredibly simple at it’s core, the “complexity” is that you have waaayyy to many buttons to have to look at and some you never even press so you would technically have more.
The complexity of combat is when do I use what, so if I go “okay now I should use my cooldowns” it should be one ro maybe two max 3 buttons before I continue my rotation, but for button bloat it becomes more buttons for the same result, it simply makes things more tedious, like it’s not hard it’s just more buttons for no reason. That’s not complex it’s annoying.
My guy you play a frost mage, you don’t know proper button bloat, maybe it’s tolerable for your class/spec which is great, there are definetely some classes that I think are fine in that regards, hell bm hunters have almost too few actual abilities that they actually use. But go play every spec and then come back and talk about what makes who not a “zombie gamer”, im ngl this seems like a bit of an ego thing.
When we talk about button bloat we aren’t talking about the game mechanics, we simply want less buttons for the same outcome, making things more refined, we ddon’t need 7 buttons but only 2 of them are actually important and the others are so irrelevant most dont even have them on their bars.
You have no idea man, pvp is in a terrible state right now, I’m happy for you if you think this is a good state, but please understand that having a million things happening on screen and then suddenly dying and having to guess which effect was the actual problem is not fun for the most/ old vets.
You threw the words complex and dumb around alot in this post, which is fine and if you think you have a good suggestion then by all means, but you really shouldnt be assuming that the game is so black and white, obviously there would be negatives as well as positives to reducing button bloat, but I think it’s the balance that’s important, and not just call everryone who doesnt want to have to deal with buttons for no reason a “zombie gamer”
I play wow arena for the first time in dragonflight and generally only played wow 1-1 months in the past and left because the game was dumb and boring. im representing the new player, you know the one content creators say the game is too complex for.
While clearly im not an experienced player in wow, in my first wow pvp seson i went 1600+ on 2 of my characters which is low by the standards of players playing the game for years but im totally new to arena and only played wow 1-1 months before ages ago.
You can be sure i could explore the full skill requirements of this game if it had 10 abilities and would leave the game after a month. you dont even know who you re talking to, i mean why would you say anything like that, if you dont know my expereinces in the genre.
indie games and dead games, 90% of the not dead online games are braindead, while very few complex active games out there with proper playerbase.
im having most fun in wow in this expansion, because there are a lot of ways to play, and combo to do. jut take a look at 1 example, solo shuffle playing frost mage.
2 enemies, a ranged and a healer, stand away from the fight while the enemy melee trying to kill the other dps guy. i can stand behind the 2 enemies away from the fight, send a spatial rift, then cast an ice wall to separate them, then teleport behind the ice wall, then cast a frost ring next to the ice wall, so if they try to get past the wall they ll be frozen, or cast a poly, or blink there and freeze them, get them totally out of the game while we re killng the melee dps. of course it can be outplayed, but thats the point, the many abilities easch class have, give many possibilities and counters, which make the game fun. none of these could happen if we have 10 abilities cuz we wont have ice wall and frost ring, etc… im simply in love with the number of abilities in the game and the magic things you can do with them.
I dont know… in the past could you do something liek that when you had like 15 abilities? i dont think so…
i said MAKE built in addons, aka new ui, or built in addons, official addons by blizzard which have the same use as weak aura or DR tracker for example… so you dont have to install addons and everyone has the same stuff.
No, you couldn’t, but the statement she made wasn’t for you, it was a general statement, which is true, if you could understand a class in every matchup how to play into every comp, you would be a god and not at 1600 but more of the top gladiators.
Because the game has so many complex mechanics that even the pro players are still learning with their full rotation and reactions mastered, even they don’t win everything. I don’t know if it was your intention but it sounds like arrogance, probably not the case but just thought I’d let you know.
This is for multiple reasons:
Games are for fun and to relax, and very few people want to put in time just to be able to understand the game, believe me, I played a game called for honor a while back and reached top 500 EU but the game simply is dwindiling because the bar of entry is so high because it’s a complex game that it shut out all beginners and it killed the game.
The ones that died probably had too high a bar of entry and died because new players couldnt keep up, cause complex games with a low bar of entry are doing well, see league of legends, easy as a base but can be incredibly complicated.
Yess, combos exist, do you really think combos havent been a thing with previous expansion and seasons? And again this is combat complexity, not button bloat, go play arcane mage and you’ll see what i mean every time you want to use your CDs, there are like 6 of them you have to press before you go back to your super simple rotation, a perfect example of button bloat, tons of buttons for one purpose but the class in itself is easy as heck.
It’s one thing that in PvP you could have a million reactive abilities, and if you replace all keybinds with combat abilities, you could probably handle it.
Rotation is a funny animal.
Of course, when all you do is press one button, it’s awkward.
When you press a few buttons in a sequence, you’re playing house groove.
When you react on random procs, you play whack-a-mole with your skills.
I don’t know enough about ADHD but it sounds perfect for them, while the rest tends to focus either on the fight or rotation, not both.
Supposedly there is a sweet spot. Easiest for healers where you choose your spell based on the situation. I don’t mean spam pump, I mean the old druid. Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Lifebloom, Healing Touch, maybe Nourish, Wild Growth, Tranquility all have their uses.
Back in the day auto attack was significant and abilities were more like augmenting it. Pally? Judge so that your AA restores health or mana. Warrior? Spend rage to AA stronger.
Cooldowns are even funnier.
It makes a lot of sense as a tank to have a couple abilities to react to things: flat damage reduction when the boss enrages a bit (typically when low health), a taunt and shield to protect team when things go awry. It’s nice to choose what kind of passive damage I want (trash vs boss) or what kind of support (armor, thorns, resistance), again based on the fight. This can look like many buttons but more like groups. Used to be the same with hunter aspects.
However, if you have 15 cooldowns, how are they different? What is their effect? Do you have to drop a brick on your keyboard and press all of them anyway? Do you macro them and just smash that 9 for two seconds? Is it so that outside cooldowns, you are worse than a lane minion in Heroes, unable to 1v1 a random mob 5 levels below you, but with the cooldowns, you can solo the endgame raid boss? Or, is it 5% damage here, 2% attack speed there, basically… irrelevant? Bestial Wrath, Avenging Wrath, they are just strong cooldowns and enough.
Last time I played the game wasn’t horrible, although some specs were quirky (ret pally in particular felt like pressing random buttons, whatever is off CD) and I usually went passive talents.
I found (and others said) that people often withhold the use of active abilities too much, making them overall inferior choices. For world content at least.
Complexity for the sake of complexity is not good.
