Then you could formulate your questions properly, I’m not a psychic to guess what you mean. Regardless, I’ll answer you to the best of my ability, but I’ll tell you in advance that I think it’s a very dishonest direction you are trying to steer the conversation towards, and that I find that you are doing it in ill faith anyhow. Regardless, here goes.
Yes, plenty, but since I cba to write an essey on class design for no reason, I’ll do a short version with one single example: my main, my priest. In MoP, most of the class gameplay was extremely situational and positional. Abilities like well aimed Divine Star would make a huge difference depending on where you aimed it from and where you aimed it to. Apart from that, the MoP version of atonement encouraged the direct healing style through such abilities like Prayer of Healing (that has been pruned from discipline), PW:Shield (that has a different function nowadays in the overall class toolset than it had then), even Flash Heal and Greater Heal (while Shadowmend tries to fill the same role, in my opinion it is doing so a lot worse because of how it is extremely inefficient and hardly part of the toolset outside of the emergency situation). Buffs such as renew were used as dispel protection, and besides the existence of a hot did come in handy sometimes, such as when you knew you would come into CC you would not be able to avoid in PvP. Utility abilities like Spectral Guise were multiuse abilities - you could Guise to get a fear off in Arena, or you could Guise to prevent a wipe in PvE, or to pass a trash pack in Challenge Mode dungeons, or to simply avoid aggro in PvE or to simply buy a few seconds when focused in PvP. Cooldowns like Spirit Shells, the MoP mastery, all had great synergy together, all would have different roles depending on the medium of play (dungeon, raid, pvp), and different ways of exploiting their advantages.
BfA disc priest is a lot more, at least in my meager experience, a preprogrammed bot. Every single decisional crossroads have a very clear cut better choice. For example, in a raid you are there to provide raid cooldown surrogates via your atonement ramp-up and aoe healing dump. In dungeons, compared to the more traditional healers, your toolset is simply slightly inadequate, and that much is apparent in how discipline priests are never the preferred choice in high end mythic+ groups and haven’t been since mythic+ begun in Legion (it’s a large scale design issue, not the fact that disc would be somehow undertuned - the toolkit isn’t actually great for 5 player content, and only overtuned numbers can actually make it viable there). In Arena pvp, the base class mechanic of atonement is an afterthought at most, and discipline priest viability is determined almost solely by these three factors: how well is the priest added damage, fear and (maybe) dark wings synergy with mage or hunter CC and burst at a given time, and that is evident from watching how since the beginning of Legion, the only setups that actually included a discipline priest routinely were RMP and jungle. This is all fine and dandy, but the truth of the matter is that the central class mechanic that is designed now, which is atonement, has practically no bearing on determining what the class is good for, and that’s not optimal to say the least. All these things added up make me feel how the class is half-arsed, with no thought put into it in multiple sections of the game.
In the end, gameplay in my book means the ability to make meaningful choices, and a choice is only meaningful when it meets this criteria:
- it isn’t obvious - when the proper course is obvious, every single person put in that situation will make the proper choice, given the fact they have the minimum knowledge on the subject to make the determination, which essentially turns the choice into a non-choice.
- it has consequences on a gradient.
- the consequences are like ripples, can be seen to affect meaningfully subsequent decision nodes to various degrees.
The BfA design doesn’t do that, it’s simply binary - 0 or 1 - and not on a gradient, and the vast majority of the choices made during gameplay are obvious. The MoP design was very different in this way. And to finish it, while I do not want to write any more essays on other classes, every single class I played for an extended amount of time has the same issue when I am comparing it with the MoP version of itself. As a disclamer, this does not mean that BfA classes are completely devoid of meaningful gameplay choices, it simply means that in my assessment there is a huge gap between the amount of meaningful gameplay choices BfA classes offer and those that MoP classes offered. And it also means that in my opinion, the culprit for this is the ability pruning, because it essentially deleted lots of choices that previously existed, and to me this feels so horrible that I can’t get myself to play WoW any more.