OneButton is better than 99% of players

[Ishayo-tarren-mill]

@Dreamkore-silvermoon

This is what i don’t get either, besides it eroding the skill expression and the rewarding learning curve of a game, people who advocate for dumbing the game down to the lowest common denominator, do they even like playing the game? Like one of the fun things about wow is picking up a class, and having to stretch your mental muscles learning how to play it.

Once again I think you’re approaching me on this issue but are seeing it from the precisely the perspective I worry about.

I think you’re right that one of the fun things about WoW is figuring out how to play your class, but this really means two different things:

1. Figuring out how your class self-interacts and what you must do to make optimal use of its capabilities to perform something outwardly simple. This is what we commonly call “rotations”; for example the simple act of dealing maximum AoE damage can have 10 or more abilities involved.
2. Figuring out how your class can help you in various situations brought about by enemies. This includes things such as cloaking a powerful enemy spell, casting a Glacial Spike because you know you don’t have to move and it does large amounts of damage, decursing yourself, interrupts, taunting an enemy as a bear to drag it away from a nearly defeated tank, using cyclone to take an enemy out for a few seconds because the casts are too hard to handle right now, etc.

The second one? Tons of fun. That’s where all the variety comes from, that’s where most of the thinking comes from. Further, you can make the different encounters harder and easier much more easily by taking enemy mechanics away.

That first one is a problem. It has gotten out of control and we’re spending too much of our time with it. The one button rotation fixes this, but in such an extreme way that many things that would have been rotationally interesting, like that Glacial Spike I mentioned earlier, get gobbled up by it. As a result, it damages the 2nd one of the two.

By taking out all the interactions and replacing them with dozens of buttons that perform simple things Blizzard are saying “99% of the time, you’re doing the same thing”. This is not fun, and it is analogous to what I meant by saying it’s always the same build in LoL.

There’s still plenty of room for skill here, but it turns out you no longer have to pick the best heroes to deal with your enemy’s hero choices, or change your build. You ALWAYS use the same build against everything. That would be considered broken. So are rotations; we just don’t switch heroes, we switch what abilities we press. We have more than they do because we need that option. But right now we don’t, because everything is tied up in procs and buffs and self-interactions so we can’t use them for when their apparent effect is useful, but instead we use them when our own class’ internal proc machine tells us to.

This is the inevitable result of the path Blizzard have tread. I warned them 4 years ago, or more, that they were treading down a dark path with this class design.

This isn’t my earliest, but it’s the earliest I could quickly find:

Readability - an ongoing problem

Before I go on: What is readability? Readability is a measure of how easy it is to understand the situation by looking at the game world or other obvious HUD elements. Readability measures how easy it is to see and follow the flow of the game. Note that readability does not mean making it easy to make the right decision, it simply makes it easy to see and understand what’s going on. Shadowlands has major readability issues. Most effects, including very dangerous ones, simply have no visual dis…

Here I lament that the confusing self-interactions of the classes are causing a readability problem, making the 2nd part of the game too hard to figure out and play, and that this isn’t fun.

Where we are now is the end-game. It can’t get worse than this. I hope that Blizzard will LISTEN TO ME FOR ONCE IN THEIR BLOODY LIVES, but I’m not holding my breath. After all, they completely ignored my feedback about this problem in the first place.

/rant

@Antivax-doomhammer

What I do not like is the gcd added. It feels really bad playing with less than 30 haste. Please remove it.

And it has begun. Actually, it begun several weeks ago.

This ends one way and one way only: Dealing with an enemy that does nothing to you will be trivial. It must be. So enemies must fight you directly to prevent you from frostbolt-spamming them to death like we did in vanilla. Enemy encounter design must be made more confrontational against players and force their hand to do something, and class design must be dramatically simplified, especially rotations.

The age of complicated rotations to simply hit a target dummy is over, or WoW itself is over if its developers refuse to understand this.