HUH.
I was doing far less DPS with hekili last time I tried it than without it.
You also can’t focus on the dungeon or raid when you have to constantly check what hekili is telling you to press. I got hit by a lot more avoidable damage when I tried it than when I don’t use it.
BM, FDK and ret pally dont have button bloat, not spammy like other specs, simplest rotations and fun gameplay 
Depends on the specs. As I mentioned, its priority rules for some specs aren’t up-to-date. I feel that it does a solid job for a lot of specs. I guess it’ll be kinda bad in the next few weeks for a lot of specs due to so many changes.
As for focus, that’s just a thing you need to get used to as you adjust your UI. If you’re used to focusing on your resource bar, your action buttons, some custom WAs, or whatever, you’ll need some time to instead focus on Hekili. If Hekili works well for your spec, you’ll be able to focus only on it, rather than all the other stuff you focused on in the past, so theoretically you should have to focus on less stuff than before.
I personally position the Hekili icon near the center on my screen, slightly off-set to the right so that it doesn’t block anything, but I always see it without needing to switch my attention away from enemy nameplates.
Also, if your spec has icons that look too much alike (e.g. fire mage), you can override the the way Hekili shows particular ability icons.
Yeah, I played Ret for most of Dragonflight and can confirm that its rotation is intuitive and easy to execute. Very fun spec to play, and I hear it’s getting even better in TWW!
time to take a pause from WoW, play some shooters, MOBA, Eldeng Ring, etc.
It sounds like you are putting too much effort in based off what only mythic raiders need to do. Don’t focus on things like timing and perfect rotation, that doesn’t seem like it’s fun for you.
Here’s my suggestion: Do not copy the talent tree from a webpage or from another player. Instead build your own talent tree by focusing on as many passives and as few actives as possible. This will reduce your button-bloat. Yes, your performance will take a hit. But the important thing is to have fun, not to top the meters.
As I grew older I too have started to have a problem with some classes. Not so much the buttonbloat as the complexity of synergy effects that some classes have. If you click the wrong button at the wrong time you are sometimes completely borked. THis makes for a very stressful play wich I dont have the nerves for anymore. I do, however, have two classes that is playable for me and that is Ret Paladin and BM Hunter. They are not that stressful to play. Mind, that they to have synergy effects that you might miss from time to time but its not so unforgiving as it is for many other classes.(looking at you arcane mage.)
100% agree. this is why i play it. no stress at all.
Try ret paladin? It does have some buttons but alot of them are for utility so depending on content you do, you might not need to bind them.
Yeah, the game is stupid fast. For frost it didn’t really change, but in general you’ll be pressing an ability 2-3 times as often as in vanilla, and more spells are fire-and-forget, too, so there’s tons of abilities just flying through the air even as you’re mashing others. This includes both AoE spells as well as CD’s. Also lots of stuff off the GCD.
Then there’s the duplications. Right now mages legit have two spells whose only function is to do a little damage and then knock all mobs in a small radius into the air. Why do we need two spells for this? Who knows!
I get you, OP. I get you. I asked Blizzard to chill out a bit with this button mashing, but clearly I was unsuccessful.
If you do decide to quit over it, I don’t blame you. 
Time to try something else I think until TWW comes out, a while ago I had the same issue, every class seemed boring to me, so I started playing GW2 I really recommend that game to anyone that wants a break from WoW
You have 8 buttons and no more… You switch depending on your weapon, so you are free to be melee or ranged, also water combat is completely different to your normal weapons and that felt refreshing.
On Remix I played Survival hunter and had a blast, simply love it, its simple and straight to the point, however Im aware that it will have some changed that I haven’t checked so not sure how it will work on TWW.
But sincerely, if you no longer enjoy a game, then you should stop playing it.
how’s the population in gw2 actually? i played it a looooong time ago and still cant remember
I don’t, I played to level 50 as guardian before I decided to switch to elementalist and to 60 as elementalist when I tried it again recently. The game just plain sucks.
I made it to lvl 20 something when the game originally launched as guardian before I stopped playing it. I liked GW1 but GW2 is a huge miss.
I played until late End of Dragons, like 2/3 years ago maybe? World Bosses and events were always full, I had no issue with group content
AD problems.
I don’t know what’s the state recently, I played until end of dragons and I had a lot of fun playing as Mesmer.
I enjoyed doing a lot of open world content, specially on path of fire with the mounts stuff.
Storytelling is also really good specially the Ice Brood saga.
I find the Elementalist is one (if not) the most hard class to play imo… I could not pass lvl 50 xD
I don’t know what kind of setup you have for your keybinds, but do you feel like it’s a “too many spells to keybind” issue, or simply a GCD issue?
I noticed that most classes have about 8 or 9 offensive spells/CDs in total, and I haven’t really had an issue with button bloat in terms of “there are too many spells” specifically.
What I HAVE noticed though, is bloat when it comes to getting an opener out, where you need to get through 3-5 spells just to ramp up your damage.
Or that a sustained damage rotation have too many spells to alternate between…
So I don’t mind “options”, like Hunter traps and utility. But I do hate if the opener or sustained damage takes away from what is going on in front of you, because you need to work your way through too many spells.
I haven’t managed to read all the thread yet (I’m a couple of days behind) but have you tried Shadow Priest? It has a mostly uncomplicated rotation with not too many essential buttons to deal with and quite a lot of oomph at the moment. It’s still lacking a decent aoe as spreading dots around isn’t as exciting as dropping a big bomb in the middle of a group of mobs but it’s still fun and pretty good at defending itself.
i think the class with a slow rotation and not a lot of buttons in the rotation is probably devastation evoker.
but i mean arms also has like a 3 button rotation and the cds can be even macroed together if you want to.
arms is just super boring and cluttered that it just isnt obvious when you want to press ww cleave or mortal strike because of cleaving strikes etc.
its more of when you press what at which target count, which is kind of special for arms.
but bloated? i mean st is basically 2 buttons with sometimes a cd sprinkled in. cannot get easier than that lol