Yeah. And guess why. Because people complained Holy Pala “iS tOo GoOd In HiGhEr KeYs” and that other healers “have no chance” to shine… If people wouldn’t have played so much and exploited every little stat and boost with the class in combination, average players like me could still enjoy the game in their prefered playstyle.
Also blame is partially on Blizzard because they said “we are not looking to change preferred playstyles” and yet they did so exactly.
I even did the math for them in their patch post.
I told them it will be a summarized 20% nerf for Avenging Crusader healing in total. It did happen. Oh guess what? Players like me have trouble now healing a bit tougher fights our way. So much so for “we are not looking to change preferred playstyles”…
I have to use different talents now. People tell me I use the “wrong stuff” and try to lecture me on “doing better”. I could play perfectly fine before the changes, now I sometimes can’t and am negatively affecting other players with it, because Blizzard could not take smaller steps with their changes and see first how they turn out…
But that is a totally different topic. This is about the dungeon and its stressful boss fights and ads.
I really doubt that I would ever be able to manage that. I play lots of different games, all with defaulted WASD controls and if I would change it to something similar to yours, I could also just stop playing games altogether, because I would have to learn keybinds every time I take a longer break before I would even be able to have some fun. It is cool it works out for you here with the numpad. But I won’t try that again. I did in the past and know it doesn’t work for me.
I use keys 1-6 for base abilities, everything else I do click. It works much better for me that way compared to when I started the game. I won’t deviate from that because it is the most similar control pattern I use across several games.
It’s actually a lack of good game design, putting visual cues into the UI to show players with minimum effort when they can use what.
That aside, I KNOW my rotation on every class. But unlike other games, WoW does not give you any reliable feedback visually and/or audible if you can use a skill or not.
You click a skill you can’t use? Your character says “I can’t use that right now” with a 5s cooldown on average. Also it shows up in words as a super tiny text line at the top of your screen, where you aren’t looking at.
In other games, whenever I hit a key for an ability I can’t use, the voice line gets reset and starts from anew without a cooldown or I get a specific sound that states I can’t use that ability, like a buzzer sound or similar.
Even Skyrim has better audible and visual feedback on resources and skills by having flashing resource bars and even an “out of breath” sound file when you can’t sprint at the moment due to no stamina.
But WoW? Oh yeah, your player relevant information is on a Cooldown so it doesn’t get spammed on accident. It is not like sometimes people NEED to hear things over and over again in a very short time to realize in their tunnel vision something doesn’t work.
Also, it is really bad in my opinion that Blizzard doesn’t use Camera border effects anymore for AoE and Debuff display. They did that back in SL on a few occasions like the Dungeon “De otha Side” and it did help to identify if you had a debuff or not. If they would use that in general for debuffs (even before they trigger), it would surely help players to realize “something is not quite right” and check if they have a debuff or are standing in a bad spot or forgetting a mechanic to solve.
In case you need a visual example, that’s a raw image I created quickly of such a screen effect in Blender in the last 10 minutes.
https://imgur.com/a/aruo0H5 (Everything black is transparent)
That’s something I will do from now on in that range of keys. But honestly, imo that shouldn’t be necessary. Having specific classes be bad choices in endgame content is also not good design either. Each class should have their own unique way to deal with the same problem, but all of them SHOULD be able to solve the problem faster or slower in their way.
There are reasons why people complain about “my class isn’t get picked on queues” that are valid and such “certain classes are bad choices for this” encounters are one of the reasons.