I don’t think the playstyle of people just having essentially 1 button that uses everything and then just smashing eachothers faces with everything mindlessly is fun.
At most at that point its just a cointoss on who gets the most procs on their enchants/passives or who gets the most random crits.
1v1 duels where you actually have to think about cooldown usage is fun, baiting your opponent, making them waste resources, smartly using your CDs to outmaneuver your enemy is fun.
Just pressing one button and facerolling your keyboard hoping they die is not fun for anyone, or at least i dont hope anyone finds that ‘‘gameplay’’ fun.
If you’re claiming this never existed before BfA then you are sorely mistaken. This has always been the case for me in arenas. Timing your abilities in accordance to the opponent. “Push trinket”, “Push Divine Shield”, these phrases are very common in arenas, and these were strategies I was really bad at.
I remember my friend teaching me how to play disc back in cata, where he chose the glyph that allows him to use Shadow Word: Death regardless of the target’s health, with the condition that Shadow Word: Death will now deal the same damage it does to the opponent to you if used on a target above 35% health. He told me that the reason he chose that glyph (which no longer exists btw), was because he would time it when a mage casts polymorph and cast it as soon as the mage’s cast goes off so that the reflected damage frees him from the polymorph. As amazing as that sounds, it is really hard to pull off. This is how class design used to be, this is how you use your CDs to outmaneuver your opponent’s CDs. Not the pruned options BfA provides you with.
That part of class game play has always existed in all previous WoW expansions, and BfA did not change that aspect for the better, on the contrary, it may have changed it for the worse depending on how you look at it.
Breaking 1 button macros was the right call but they overshot by 1000km. Reactive abilities like Frenzied Regeneration and Hand of the Protector have no place being on the GCD.
No one likes to be killed by cookie cutter specs. No one in arena liked to be killed in two gcds during tbc or wrath. We have an achievement called “resillience will fix it”. You can’t have an arena where you basicly play gun duels of old western movies.
But they overkilled it. Blizzard said: during pve you should have something to press on every gcd while you dps.
Well, i dont think it’s fun. It may be MY point of view that its not fun. But it shows in pvp as a bad feeling. Every “buffer” ability or “utility” ability makes you feel like you are fallin behind. Its much worse for some specs than others.
No one likes 1 shot macros and no one likes their 1st buff to end by the time their last buff begins… It’s where you stand on the spectrum and blizzard likes to stay on safe side a little too much.
Yep. The GCD changes still suck. What I hate most is the inconsistency. Some damage increasing abilites are on GCD, others are not. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Gameplay feels incredibly clunky and unresponsive, especially when switching between characters or specs regularly. It was a bad move by Blizzard.
No. Its not.
The largest issue of BfA is that its poorly done, its poorly written, it has sharding implemented on it that is also in lfg so its now a solo game instead of an mmo.
Claiming that GCD is BfA’s largest issue is like looking at a cancer patient that had 2 of its limbs already rotted away by the disease, and claim that the worst problem they have is an ingrown toe nail.
Your analogy makes absolutely no sense, are you saying ingrown toe nails are always present in cancer patients? Do limbs rot from cancer?
Is sharding really a bigger problem than rotations and gameplay feeling slow and annoying? Sharding was also there in legion and legion was vastly superior to bfa. Why? Because classes felt nice and unique to play and rotations were smooth.
Im saying that you pointed out one problem in a patient that is literally terminal and everything in it is failing.
We can argue all day long what is a larger issue, but the reality of the question is that wow is bleeding out of a hundred wounds because its design has been reduced to a disease.