One of the reasons many people liked MoP class design is because classes were complete, and talents just added situational utility on top. Very few of them were active damaging spells, but instead, most rows were kind of doing a similar thing in slightly different ways.
After Legion they gutted classes and shoved their previous baseline spells and artifact abilities as choices in the talent tree, meaning that whatever you pick, you will always feel gimped and useless in other areas of the game. That and reliance on external sources of power like Azerite and now Covenant abilities, means classes have to go through this gutting process every expansion, which feels terrible every time.
There was also no M+ back then, so there was no need to have radically different builds as M+ and raiding are often completely different in terms of encounters. Shadow priest is absolutely useless at AoE without Searing Nightmare for example, so you can either take it, or be awful in every M+ trash pack.
So there is very little choice even now, we have only sacrificed complete classes with toolkits for every situation and are forced to choose where we want to be less useless.
Also, tomes of clear mind were practically free from a vendor, so you could buy a 1000 and keep changing non-stop if you wanted, despite the fact that you had to change them much less often than we do now.
Legion truly butched classes, for sure. I have expected that unpruning would simply move every single active talent spell as a baseline spell within the specs toolkit, which… Didn’t happened.
I would also say that legion/bfa/SL class design is nothing alike Mop and Wod.
It did but it was the first expansion with huge reliance on borrowed power, and I didn’t mind it as much honestly. It only started to suck royally afterward, when they started taking away everything that made classes work in Legion.
So did I, but it was a PR stunt with 0 thought put into it and nothing more.
Am saying this every day. Fire Ion with his team,sue them or jail them or even worse.Hire people who love WoW and have some idea and talent to make this game atleast TBC -WoD (up to date he decide butcher entire expansion to altar of legion …).
Pretty much everything, the talent system was very disliked, this arbitrary notion that “classes were complete”, suddenly now having talent rows that do similar things in different ways is a good thing and so on.
I’m not saying it’s better than the talent system from before, but that it’s better than the system now. Classes being more complete in MoP than now isn’t even arguable, look at literally any talent tree for any spec in SL and you can find many talents that should be a baseline part of their toolkit, because the spec feels awful without them.
To be fair, most class/specs I played/tried during Legion was fine to pretty fun. However, I must agree. It’s clear that they had these revisions with the artifact weapons in mind and sadly they forgot to add these abilities to baseline after the expansion.
Covenants adds little to nothing to the specs. If a spec is fundamentally broken, then no covenant choice can help about it. The unpruning was nothing but a PR stunt. The “unpruned” abilities have 0 synergies with the other abilities. For example, Assassination Rogues. Their talent tree “offers” 3 different playstyles. A poison build, a bleed build and a short window Envenom buff build. Neither of these profits from Slice and Dice!!! What where they thinking?!
Just go back, finish these ideas you clearly have with the talent trees, add the missing abilities to make it feel complete. It’s not that hard if someone plays the gam… oh wait… Yeah, they don’t really play their own game anymore…
They can’t be “more complete”, they’re either complete or not, but this whole concept is arbitrary. How do you decide if a class is complete? Most of the things that were pruned/moved to talents were CC abilities or cooldowns (most got merged into others).
Again how do you decide what should and shouldn’t be baseline? The point is that you will always feel the need for another gap closer and the ranged for one more teleport, this is an arms race which happened up to MoP.
edit: this idea of a “complete” class is being parroted over and over and i don’t think anyone took a second to think about what it actually means
I was only playing Balance, Shadow, and Arms, and of all their Covenant spells only Convoke felt essential to Balance. I’ve no idea how non-NF balance druids work as it sounds horribly boring cause setting up a good convoke is the only interesting thing about it.
I heard mages and hunters have some interesting Covenant spells but most I’ve seen so far are disposable, and they were designed that way so they can more easily remove them after SL. It’s backwards game design that basically revolves around, never giving us anything great so that we don’t miss it later when it’s removed.
few people mention this but mop’s talent were the same across the whole class, all specs had the same talents further proof that classes felt more complete and that you’re playing a class, not a spec.
That doesn’t prove anything, the mobility/utility talents are the same now even though the “trees” are spec specific. Also when they wanted to have different talents for each spec, mostly for hybrids, they were specified in the description.
Not to mention that certain talents were clearly better for one spec, leaving you with no choice on that row, how is this twisted into a good thing, i don’t know, but keep rewriting history i guess.
There’s nothing philosophical or complex about it lol. Shadow priest is awful in AoE without Searing Nightmare, that’s a fact, multi dotting is far more seamless with the Misery talent.
A “complete” class doesn’t feel terrible to play if you don’t chose a specific talent, it has all the essentials baked in, and talents are situation stuff like move speed, a heal, slight alterations of spells you already have for added utility etc.
Removing Artifacts is a prime example as Legion classes were designed around having those abilities, and when they were removed, you had to CHOOSE to pick that ability back from your talents to have that cohesion back, meaning that you are sacrificing the other 2 talents from that row.
Wtf are you talking about? As if that’s not still happening right now lol.
What makes you think Ion doesn’t love wow? He’s been playing it since vanilla. Some might have heard of elitist jerks etc… Not saying Ion does good things for the game or anything like that but I honestly believe he loves it nevertheless.
As much as i dislike Ion, im sure he likes the game nonetheless, at this point Warcraft as a franchise is focused on making money, one way or another they saw people are addicted to the game so whatever they do, they will squeeze us as much as they can, why would they put effort when they can put a 30th anniversary mount for 40€ it doesn’t matter if its ion or anyone Blizzard isnt a independent company to make such decisions.
If you turn your brain off then yes, it’s pretty straight forward.
Oh so it’s based on how you feel, right? cause i always feel like i need more healing, speed and teleports, regardless of how many i have.
Classes change significantly from expansion to expansion, what you rely on in one expansion may not be so important in the next. This already derailed into borrowed power discussion cause you keep moving the goal post but the point is that you always that perceive gap filled by something, so saying that the class feels incomplete without X is kinda dumb, since you always have an X.
Oh so if it happens now it’s bad, but when it happened in MoP it was good. Brilliant.