I always find it fascinating when people claim classes were more fun in classic, and then I look at how my class was in classic and it’s literally a one button spam fest.
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After getting used to GW2 combat all other mmorpg feel like you keyboard turn with delay of 15s.
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I wouldn’t say not fun, but less fun than they used to be in f. ex. MOP yes, I would say so.
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I’m the opposite I find the gameplay of Classic so slow and boring. Others love it.
Every time I dabble with Classic I come back to Retail appreciating how much the game.
Back in the day I had no idea what class I should play, in TBC I settled on Warlock and I was and still am the world’s worst warlock. Sometime in Wrath I decided to try a Paladin and she has been my main every since. I do not gel with any other class like I do with her.
Some people will chop and change main every tier, some will change every expansion. People play in whatever way they find the most fun. Some will only ever play the strong/broken classes, others play what they enjoy the most. There is no right or wrong.
If you’re not enjoying either game (Classics or Retail) it may be time to take a break and come back when there is something new on the table.
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Ironically I am a person that hates all Anime stuff by default, but have not a single problem with FF14s Art Style and Animations/Story…
Same. I tried recently to play TBC again (tried it a few months back) and fought 2 of those moths in the Draenei Starting Area. Never Alt-F4d a game so quickly.
Classic WoW plays so slow that I would die of age before having fun with it.
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Then, super-ironically, I love anime (not all of them), but I really can’t stand it when my character is depicted as a mindless girly girl running like a doll.
I mean… yeah you right when it comes to riding, but in PvP or through leveling or world content its other story (of course you can also spam just wand shooting if playing caster, but in retail WoW you also can killing only spamming frost bolt for example ;D)
I find all the classes in WoW to be boring these days.
After 17 years the design is really starting to show its age.
And although some people appreciate and enjoy it for what it is, I’m not one of them.
And it’s not really the class design per se. Some people seem to get very animated about new talents or abilities or such. I find that entirely irrelevant.
It’s the fundamental combat design that’s problematic.
It’s slow, it’s rudimentary, it’s robotic, and it’s tedious.
The point-and-click design with tab-targeting is just so old. In modern games you just aim your sword or fireball at the enemy and then start attacking them. In WoW you need to click on the enemy first. And besides needing to face the enemy, then you don’t aim at all.
The design is so…dated.
Most games today lean into the design notion that people like to press buttons and they like to get instant feedback. You press a button, something cool happens, and you see an immediate and satisfying result.
In WoW everything has cooldowns. Everything has cast-times. Delays. Stuns. And so on.
Do a World Quest where you have to kill 20 enemies…It’s so uninspiring. It takes several seconds to kill a monster which just stands there and auto-attacks you in a completely uninspiring fashion). It dies in a totally uninspiring manner. And then you realize that you just have to repeat that process x number of times.
It’s just not enjoyable.
WoW’s combat design only has a leg to stand on in boss battles. And that’s less because of the combat on the player’s part (which again is a just static and robotic and uninspiring process of pressing buttons), and more on the part of the bosses which Blizzard can make challenging through ways of coordination, memorization, and execution. It’s like learning to dance the waltz with your partners to perfection. Every time.
What other games manage to do in 5 seconds worth of combat WoW spends 20 seconds on. But WoW’s combat doesn’t give you 4x the enjoyment. It just takes more time. And that’s boring.
I hate the cast times on abilities. Every time I play the Wizard or Sorceress in Diablo (or any other caster in any other game for that matter), then it dawns on me how absolutely crap the design of WoW is.
In all other games you press a button and your character shoots forth a fireball or frostbolt. It’s instant. You get to aim it. It does something when it hits. It looks cool.
Then I play WoW and I press the same button and I wait. Because there’s a cast time. And I don’t really aim it at all, the game does that automatically. It doesn’t really do anything when it hits. If it’s a weak monster it just falls over and dies in an uninspiring manner. And if it’s a stronger monster my task is simply to press the button again and again until the same thing happens. No explosions. No splattering of blood. No frozen or burning limbs. Nothing. And the fireball or frostbolt looks completely boring by itself. 15 years ago it was excellent visuals. But now it’s not. It looks old and lacking.
So yeah, the actual gameplay in WoW, the process of playing your character, is simply not fun anymore to me. The core combat design is just outdated. There’s perhaps a niche audience for it like there is for point-and-click adventure games. But it’s not for me anymore. It’s just a tedious and monotonous slug.
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90% of my former WoW guild plays FFXIV for some years now. I think the majority quit after MoP, started GW2 and now are lost forever to me because they like FFXIV.
I tried two times to like the game, but I seriously can’t. I really hate all the characters and the graphics of the game in general.
If they had at least one race I’d like, I’d try again to play it.
So I’m stuck now with GW2, which I played to death, and WoW while I hate SL so far.
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Sacrilege! How can you not like the Viera 
Try Elder Scrolls Online too.
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¯_(ツ)_/¯
It is how it is.
I agree, rotations are too complex for some classes like arcane/fire/shadowpriest to allow fun/relaxing gameplay in non-competitive environments. For specs like this, you will just do almost no damage (below tank), if you don’t focus and don’t know how to lign up cooldowns properly and have them synced cooldown-wise periodically. (Especially referring to fire/arcane).
I know how to do it for example, but it’s just very tiring, because after work/study, I have to “work” again to just make my spec functional. I’d prefer it, if it had a lower skill floor, but a higher skill ceiling. (I prefer, if you do more damage with less effort, but you can still do very high damage, if you go above and beyond)
I agree with all you said except this. Casting is somethin that is “magic” since the foundation of RPG. Without casting mages wouldnt be mages IMHO.
Same for hunters.
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Playing paladin with the 4-set effect right now feels a bit like keyboard whack-a-mole. I find it fun, but it is a bit weird.
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Classes used to have more depth between cata and Wod but Blizzard streamlined (Pruned) and made classes faster in Legion, thus shifting skill ceiling into instance bosses rather than the classes themselves. It was an okayish trade-off since legion classes were really fast paced for the most parts.
That being said, they’ve slowed classes down in BFA and re-added a lot of old flavoured spells in SL (but not that much compared to what was removed in Legion, both in quantity and quality) so we’ve ended up with legion classes being slower with slightly more useful spells alongside a heck ton of rp garbage. For some specs, that’s working just fine like fury warrior, but for others, it’s still awful like arms warrior.
The end result is actually pretty meh but it still superior to the old trilogy, ie vanilla to wrath, because gameplay is at least fast paced. Many people are memeing aboot 3 buttons rotations while craping on Mop classes while praising tbc or wrath classes which… For the most part were 3 buttons rotations…
Overall, there is probably 1 spec you might enjoy playing 
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I think that the basic mechanics of all classes have always been very similar. Take for example a DPS spec, they all have to have their fillers/builders and then their special attacks that have longer cooldowns etc. They’re just dressed up differently by having their own animations.
The key thing that separates classes is peoples imagination.
I don’t know. I suppose I wasn’t there during the foundation of the RPG.
The only example that really comes to my mind is Goku in Dragonball:
And I think that franchise really builds it into its lore – it makes sense in its universe. And in the few Dragonball games I’ve played in the past it’s been a strength of the game that you had to charge a certain attack, because you vibe with the notion that you need to channel and concentrate the energy before unleashing it. It becomes a cool aspect of the gameplay in those games, because it feels just like the show. It’s a moment you build up to, and when it finally happens, then it’s super gratifying and you feel incredibly powerful. For example:
In Harry Potter they use magic words and waving the wand:
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/PotableMiserlyGhostshrimp-size_restricted.gif
And it works and it’s super cool and the potterheads know all the spells and totally dig this kind of magical universe, and the Harry Potter games always keep a strong focus on the fantasy of using a wand because that’s what cool and what you want to experience as a player.
Upcoming Hogwarts Legacy:
Or the old Chamber of Secrets:
But what’s spellcasting in Warcraft?
This is how Medivh does it in the movie:
And Anduin:
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MintyWellwornAplomadofalcon-size_restricted.gif
Very flashy.
And here’s how I do it in-game:
https://i.gyazo.com/0db66a0628aa1b8036a7b14b1a5c0010.gif
But it doesn’t work, because whenever Warcraft uses spellcasting in the story and lore, then it’s always during special moments. It’s the money-shot. Like the kamehameha in Dragonball. But that doesn’t translate very well to actual gameplay where it ends up being a lot more mundane because your character has to cast all the time. Instead of being cool like Medivh or Anduin, you end up more like the Lightning Bolt guy:
World of Warcraft is crap at making the magic fantasy come alive when playing as a caster. Having actual spellcasting is fine if it’s an RPG tradition the game wants to lean into, but then it should do so by making it a gameplay strength like Dragonball does with kamehameha or Harry Potter does with wands. World of Warcraft doesn’t do anything. It just makes spellcasting a liability and an annoyance. It’s boring. You don’t feel like a powerful Mage that’s harnessing great arcane magic. You’re just pew pewing.
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They’re better compared to stuff from like classic-wotlk era, but from what I’ve heard and seen about MoP classes they were absolutely amazing and it’d be sick if those returned.
The combat is sooooo slow in that game. I don’t know if it improves with more levels.
From what people who switched are telling me, it does speed up since you get lots of off-gcd stuff as you go along. No idea how true that is, though.