What is the point of having different dificulties of dungeons then?
Why should there be Normal, Heroic, Mythic, +2, +3, +4, +5, +6, +7, +8, +9, +10, +11, +12, +13, +14, +15, … if the deciding factor in completing it is the intelligence of a Blizzard’s bot instead of your own?
Why should raids be split into LFR, Normal, Heroic and Mythic besides farming some arbitrary item level?
My stance is that videogames should be played by people not by bots.
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:
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:
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
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.
Tbh I think Blizzard just wants to put world of warcraft in a situation, where someone can just pick it up and play the normal raid for fun without watching a guide and without being a heavyweight for the team due to low damage output. I think that’s their goal with OBR. Leading more of the casual playerbase into multiplayer content. There are also new people, who never played anything that is close to how wow is played, and I think they want to make the game enjoyable for someone like this, which is understandable
But…
but…
we don’t need a 1-button macro for this?!?!
We just need easier and more context-based rotations.
We had this. Why?! Why did they introduce 15 buttons to hit a target dummy and then simplify them all back to 1 instead of keeping 4-5 situational ones?
This is madness… it’s actual madness.
I agree, but maybe we end up getting both. The bright side is that the OBR revealed how problematic the wide range of skill is in the game, where it’s not enough to give it a 20% higher gcd for it to be worse than the average player. That says a lot.
I play better than obr, but not by that much, especially in a M+ in the heat of the moment I do pure single target maybe like 1.6 mio dps, and the obr does maybe 1-1.3 mio
Then perhaps the issue lies in the teaching of the rotation or rotations itself.
When new players start WoW they likely see the combat system and assume that the spells they unlock are for individual use, not for chaining-use.
For example, I on Retribution still don’t play to 100% effectiveness because I regularly forget to cast Final Reckoning because to me its a “better save up for major boss fights” ability while it just has a 50s CD or my Crusade wings with 2 Minutes CD. Why do I have that mentality? Because I play games like Destiny since the past 11 years where abilities that look/are ultimates are being saved up for the right moments.
But that’s not how Retribution plays effectively in method and it’s hard to change muscle memory regularly.
Hence I prefer playing Holy Paladin, because there the Wings actually are treated as an ultimate. And Avenging Crusader simply turns your attack spells into healing abilities, so the entire idea of it is to use it offensively like an ultimate every minute.
People come from various backgrounds with various different muscle memory, expectations and gameplay experiences.
So if the teaching of a class falls short due to it, the issue isn’t the 1-button rotation thing but lack of teaching.
In fact, the 1-button rotation is actually a band-aid fix to that problem.
No, it’s not the teaching at all. Wow is a complex, convoluted high apm game, and that’s why average players don’t even do like 50% of optimal dmg. They need to find a way to keep the skill ceiling high, while reducing the output width, and also reducing the skill floor. They do that for example by removing combat addons and shifting the skill to other places like coordination, communication, spatial awareness, etc. and less focus on quick, spammy, mechanical input.
Many Fighting games for example also went through a similar development, where they had to nerf button mashing to decrease the skill floor
Unlike Broduin, I COMPLETELY agree to an almost comical degree. You have no idea how right you are and how much damage this has caused to the game.
But like Broduin I also believe that this isn’t just a new player problem. The problem continues to haunt even experienced players as they try to put it all together in practice, or as Blizzard changes something they didn’t realise, or didn’t realise the implications of.
I tried it on ww monk and the buff you get from using a different skill every time just stayed up
But i noticed on shadow priest it doesn’t use void bolt even though the button say it does
this was the worst blizz decision in decades…literally automazing and dumbing the game to it’s limit. And they wanted to prune abilities and talents lol. I guess wow is gonna fall down with time just because people will get bored clicking only one button xD
Sorry but that foundation were lost many many years ago in WoW.
You have so many classes which has the same utilities as Lust, CR, etc.
I can see you are 3K, which surprises me with that post.
You should know damn well theres a huge difference between especially 2, 8, 10, 12+.
A bad player fumbling with their rotation trying to avoid stuff, will still have to hold upkeep of long CDs, interrupt, and dont stand in stuff.
We both now, just because OBR comes, a poor +2 will not be able to complete a +12 just bewcause theres a basic OBR rotation.
Okay, so the answer to the homogenization problem of wow classes is to double down and dumb it down so hard that every class is just one button? That’s your optimal solution?
My optimal solution is to not have 8 abilities that does the same, but are either on a longer CD or awaits for procs.
What specs actually play like this, genuinely. I’m doing alts way more than I usually do this patch for raid prep and there’s maybe a couple specs that feel a bit overdone but it’s far FAR from the norm.
It’s starting to feel like people just want to dumb things down til there’s nothing of nuance left. Which would explain the love of OBR.
Most classes usually has a ST and AOE builder and spender. Druid has it, shaman has it.
Besides that, Shaman has ice Fury flame shock proc, and other procs as well. While not technically skilled, it is super boring to check procs and doing kinda the same ability, with the difference of it being ST or AOE.
Personally, I find it easy to get lost in a rotation during higher keys. Hekili helped me reach 3k between resto/balance.
Call me a noob or whatever, but I found it much better to use hekili, which for me personally tells theres some fundamentally wrong with the game when you have to use an addon to be optimal, unless you are a super elitist.
Sounds like you are, and I respect that. It is awesome you are that skilled.
But its like 1 percent of all players.
Bad players are still bad, good players are still good.
And this is a problem?
Its boring.
It is the exact same ability. One just does ST, one does AOE.
Balance Druid has Moonfire. Single target Dot.
They also have Moonfire. AoE dot.
Not super interesitng casting two dots just for the sake of casting them.
Either way, there is really no reason to reply to each other further.
You like a thousand buttons, i don’t.
Use your thousand buttons, I use them with Hekili.
It’s boring to have the option between.
1: Dealing max AoE damage on multi target
2: Dealing funnel damage by using AoE generators and then dumping that increased resource into single target spenders
3: Deliberately not hitting adds to avoid their untimely deaths or provide someone else more benefit to them being alive, and instead nuking the boss / priority target with single target abilities even in AoE
?
This is the gameplay you want to get rid of?
I mean, why do you complain, you can still play like you do.
You do on average 25% more damage compared to people using OBR.
Why care