Your post sounds like you want Frost to play like it’s Wrath again. Not Vanilla, because Ice Lance still exists, but it does sound like just Wrath or maybe Cata Frost.
It isn’t, but I see what you’re saying.
There are quite a lot of spells missing or added. For example, Great Invisibility and Displacement still exists, Mirror Image is a defensive cooldown and deals little damage, Frozen Orb works completely differently, there is no Icy Veins which existed as far back as tBC, there is no instant ranged stun (Deep Freeze), I’m keeping Ice Wall around and Dragon’s Breath exist for Frost (though I’m not sure if it should, but whatever) and so on.
And, of course, Cataclysm gave us Icicles in the first place.
So no, it’s a very different spec actually, but it does share a lot of qualities with how class design looked around tBC or WotLK, yes. Not the same, but certainly closer to it.
Thank you for the comprehensive answer, I thought it was an interesting read. I think our thoughts are pretty much aligned on what is unnecessary busy-work for seemingly no good reason, lack of readability and through that a lack of intuitive gameplay, and the weird result by now of multiple spells doing very similar stuff which just sort of creates bloat for the sake of… bloat? No idea lol.
I’m very curious about Blizzard’s rework of hpriest as it has struggled with rather similar issues in its own way as we discussed before. To me it does seem they want to remove some of the stacking of similar effects there and clean out the ‘this affects this which affects that which affects the other thing’ etc while trying to spruce up original spells which have been extremely lacking for years now.
Perhaps it’s a sign of where they want to go in the end, and not just with hpriest. I hope so.
1 Like
We’ll see. Looks like Cataclysm patch is coming out soon so my last session with Holy Priest is gonna be on Sunday - at least for a while, we’ll see what happens in the future.
Reason is it’s a project where we make a silly competition about who can do the highest key with characters that only get gear from M+ and we’ve all got randomized classes, and I happened to get hpriest. xD Also, we’re not allowed to play them otherwise.
What I can say is that the hpriest I’m playing right now is endlessly confusing. I have been able to sort of figure out what my spells are doing through experimentation, but overall I’d say it’s very messy and very hard to figure out. Look at my previous post for that screenshot, I mean it’s just ridiculous. I don’t know why anybody would design something like that.
So… I’m glad they’re doing something at least, on behalf of the holy priests. They may not agree with me and honestly their opinions should count for more than mine on this, but it just feels like everything I’m complaining about here.
1 Like
I have no idea either 
I think it helps when you’ve played a class/spec a long time, even its quirks and weird design choices still sorta make sense to you then. You no doubt have that with mage. But it does make me wonder why they are insisting on giving me a headache, and why seemingly straightforward things in the past feel more like a hurdle race these days lol. I can imagine for a newer player it’s just a great deal of ??? Even as a longtime player quite a few specs have that effect on me these days when I dabble in alts.
I find it mostly tiresome. And it wasn’t always that way. Something has shifted fundamentally somewhere.
This was an escalation. It’s been slowly going up and up and up for 20 years - even the prune, though it got rid of many things - did not even attempt to stop this development. Slow but surely it has been creeping up.
It’s like asking “How did I suddenly get so old?”
1: I would rather flame here that Blizzard doesnt know what “essential spells” means (mentioned earlier) in combination with a lot of graphical effects and more often than not very bad colour matches (red on red, blue on blue, purple on purple and so on. Or a massive boss blocking the view and if you try to fix Blizzards mess they remove your workaround (pixie dust in DF for example).
2: Adressed earlier already.
3: “RNG is bringing spice to the game” - Ion. I don’t have to repeat my detest for Ion (and that is just one reason of several).
4: Result of the Talent Tree in combination with stuff that does damage rather than % dmg buffs to abilities we are using (the talent dot that gets applied by rupture could just very well be a 5% buff on rupture instead for example)
5: I will say its the opposite. The issue isnt hammering down your rotation, its the rotation in combination with bosses that went out of control and have been asked (including by the world first guilds) to get nerfed. You have to pay permanently attention not to get oneshotted by pretty much everything and they said they would reduce that (they did not). Its also why you have such insane performance gains on bosses like Ansurek with the health % after the intermission shield at the start of progress in comparison with P1 progression being “done”.
Buff tracking has been an issue pretty much very early in WoWs history. Its one of the first things we started tracking. Debuffs are fine even with the regular nameplates (checked that during PTR testing. Debuff wise they are fine and arent much different from my plater (add a number on the symbol and all is fine). Buffs however are a complete nightmare because of the sheere mass we’ve got from everywhere (be it procs or big buffs) and the buff bar dancing around like they listenign to rythm of the night.
The UI doesnt do that anymore for debuffs. It doesnt track all possible debuffs anymore like it did in Vanilla. It displays only yours and calls it a day (just went into a dungeon and used default nameplates to verify. Was also the case for me during raid testing). And the issue isnt the designing part, its that Blizzard does completely rely on addon devs fixing their stuff and they rarely update their UI in the first place. They say they don’t advocate addons but they very much do whether they want to admit or not. And one doesnt need to implement weakaura, you could even use something as basic as TellMeWhen which is a lot easier to understand for simple stuff like track debuff A and B.
Buffs I covered above.
I already covered this. Its not what Sub Rogues wanted and we already discussed class fantasy.
Rogues had that in legion for sub with the lego boots. Everybody hated it.
We also had it with coup de grace (trickster hero talent replacing evis after a couple eviscerates) that causes you to charge at a certain range. You don’t want it to charge given how that very easily results in a heartattack or a dead player (or two).
Hunters also didnt like the min range etc.
You’re better off giving incentives for proper positioning that enhance your attacks (backstab from the back) rather than locking you out completely if you don’t even outside of boss parry.
Thats not how pretty much every spec works anymore and requires an overhaul of every single class in the game and adds a lot of buttonbloat (bleeds for example being roughly 20% of a ferals single target and 9-11% for Assa if I turn the talent that buffs rupture into well, a buff to rupture instead of an additional plague damage dot). And they wanted to give spec fantasies as well, which is why sub evivs, assa envenoms and outlaw dispatches for example.
Because people wanted to be able to get the same utility everybody else got because it was way more noticeable if you lacked one. It also required to get certain specs/classes to make your life a lot easier (its something DKs still cause today with their grip. Same with Warlocks and their gate).
I did say its the talents. And that its talents the community wanted becasue they wanted to feel when they picked a talent which then cause all the background calculations in combination with every other system including tier sets etc replicating the issues of BFA where everything lagged because the engine went “screw all of you”. I guarantee you that if they reduce the tree by half we would still have that mess because there are still some % buffs they could turn into “Additonal numbers to calculate” buffs like corrupt the blood and them baking a lot of talents into passives from leveling and faking to make the tree smaller since half of it already doesnt get picked (either by choice or neccesity) so they can swindle their way again.
We talked about Rets being the most, or one of the most, popular specs earlier right? Ret is pretty much whack a mole incarnate (and gonna be even more with the casino tier set that Ion thought was a great idea).
Other than when there’s bugs I have no problems seeing things that actually have an effect, which in PvE it all does. My problem is that I get overwhelmed with flashy, irrelevant nonsense.
But maybe I’m biased by having good very good eyesight and a high end monitor, idk.
RNG can bring spice to the game, but this isn’t just a little bit of RNG that can sometimes change the outcome - it’s insane levels of RNG firing off at all cylinders all the time and creating hundreds of special effects.
Yeah exactly, but I always worry that they’ll conclude going back to the Shadowlands talents is the solution. It’s not, and Shadowlands proves it. The solution is to simplify the talents or reduce the number of talents I can pick up to, say, half.
What the bosses do is trivial to avoid. Most bosses actually do something to you every like 10-15 seconds, and trash packs can be AoE CC’d like crazy.
The only thing that makes any of this hard is that you need to pump damage as well, and this plate-spinning is distracting you.
WoW’s enemies are much slower than those in Elden Ring, for example, and Elden Rings’ bosses are REALLY slow.
Even that is insane. Have you tried playing feral? Decided to dig mine up again after all those years last night. Holy hell, I as much as sneeze in the general direction of a mob, it’s got 8 debuffs. Just trying to figure out where my bleeds and CD’s are. That’s what matters, all this other junk is just irrelevant.
There are two problems with this statement. The first is that it assumes debuffs added by other players aren’t relevant or shouldn’t be, which isn’t always true. In retail WoW you just kindda have to trust that a player of a certain role will apply his debuff because there’s really no way for you to know - and generally debuffs from other players don’t benefit you because, if they did, you’d have to know about it, and there’s no way for you to do that.
The second is that it talks about nameplates, which not only doesn’t show every debuff, it doesn’t even show every debuff you apply. Take a look at a target frame and behold the debuffs and puffs being pruned in length at like 40 or so. If Blizzard didn’t do that the debuffs would scroll off the screen.
This is so confused - from the players. They wanna use Backstab because it fits class fantasy. Cool. Players are trying to figure out a way to stab enemies in the back.
Sometimes they can’t and they get upset, and instead of Blizzard saying “Well sometimes you need another method than stabbing things in the back, but you can still stab in the back 98% of the time” they cave not by finding a different method, but by removing the requirements for backstab to be a stab in the back.
So now backstab is not a backstab, and the whole point of the spec falls to pieces 100% of the time instead of 2% of the time. “Our problem is solved” screams the rogue “community” in euphoric unison, while the actual rogue players flee the class en masse because, as a concept, it had one job.
This was a STUPID decision. Very stupid indeed.
Charge and attack should never be one button. Remember what I said previously about keeping buttons simple and focused? This is a perfect example of what not to do.
But they should have it, because they’re busted and too easy to play when they don’t, and this has been a problem for about 14 years now.
Just don’t make their melee attacks worthless. Make them worse, but not worthless. Done. Also, allow macros to check for this range so we don’t fill their action bars with junk.
Yes it does! That’s what my post is about. They all need overhauls because they’re all stupid spinning plates garbage and there’s no room left for tactical choices or workarounds for tricky enemies or positions.
People want a lot of dumb ideas implemented into this game.
The sheer scale of the mess is the problem, or at least the most significant component of the problem. If there was half as much garbage in the background, it wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be A LOT better, and if what remained was much better chosen, it would be even better than that.
I know this is the feedback they got. As I posted earlier it was very stupid feedback given by people who have no conception of what makes for fun combat. They were all sitting on the PTR having a field day figuring out how to attack a target dummy or program another version of SimCraft.
Complete waste of time listening to these people. Actually, it’s worse than that - listening to these people is actively harmful to your game. They should’ve actively done everything in their power to make SimCraft as useless a tool as they possibly could, and they should’ve completely removed the target dummy. Make these people go into the world and fight something properly.
Rets are only popular when they’re good. I dunno what’s up with that class - more than any other it rises and falls as a function of FotM rerolling. Sometimes the amount of rets just increases by a factor of 5 billion.
I don’t think most people enjoy that spec, but everybody has one, it’s very easy to play even though it’s whack-a-mole, and right now it makes you pump at nearly no effort.
Amazing how you take it out of context to feed your own narrative. He explained why he is playing marvel rivals.
Theun, the creator of the OP’s video, doesn’t do a good job of defining what he means with “power creep”. He isn’t talking about the general difficulty of raid/M+ or the amount of relative power ones gains over the period of a season or an expansion. His main 2 points are:
- Baseline abilities are super weak and useless on their own, and they’re only being made useful by 10 or so different talent interactions. This is bad because:
- It makes the game very confusing for players. You can’t just read tooltips to understand what your rotation should be.
- It’s incredibly hard for Blizzard to balance. They don’t really know what will happen to overall DPS if they increase the DPS of a baseline ability by x% because there are like 10 additional modifiers.
- Every class got more defensives, interrupts, and CC in Dragonflight. This is bad because:
- Blizzard encounter designers think it’s fun to make players use all that, e.g. by requiring stuff like removal of roots in some fights.
- More bloat for players to have to deal with.
I don’t think relative seasonal power increase is a problem, and I think the general difficulty of retail WoW is decent, although mythic raids could maybe be tuned down a bit. But I agree about the talent system being an ultra convoluted mess that isn’t fun for me as a player and unnecessarily difficult for Blizzard to balance.
1 Like
Glad Im not the only mistweaver who goes completely dark on the talents and skills. Altho I dont got your rating, even in heroics people tend to stand in the fire and letting me deal with interupts.
Not fun at all…and Ive been healing since MoP so I know my mistweaver inside out.
One difficulty is that they keep adding levels again.
And, in general, an expansion keeps adding stuff.
GW2 adds new specializations (mechanically: classes). So you get something new without the need of affecting the old.
Edit: I mean, when a core class walks around, you see them as the equivalent of mage, warrior etc. But when an expansion spec walks around, you see them as summoner (warlock+), barbarian (warrior+), crusader (paladin+), thief (rogue+). So the spec is considered more descriptive, signature even.
WoW adds levels, they cannot resist, due to power creep with patches.
In Classic, classes were done at level 40, the rest was rounding out.
When BC came (memory from 2021), this moved to 50 but being at 60 meant that I’ve lost several perks. Same with WLK and Cata. I didn’t level, so my paladin forgot how to run faster again. Upon levelling my horde paladin during WLK, I noted how my tank is a cripple all the way until 60. And my rotation was finished at 74. Or was it 80. Divine Plea (fixing mana) was 71.
They tried to fix these with Cata (all necessary stuff at 10) but then what do you get down the line? Especially with scaling in place today where level 10 content requires fully fledged characters with interrupts etc. except scaling makes them OP.
And people still complain that they feel weaker as they level up from 70 to 80 or even in general. They want level 2 characters to be more powerful than level 1, and so on, all the way to 80.
Yes, that’s true, but there’s no reason for it to go this badly this quickly.
The problem here, in all its complexity, is actually super simple: During early testing Blizzard got the feedback that the talents weren’t interesting enough or didn’t change the gameplay enough, and that they were too expensive. A lot of them cost 2 or 3 points, people wanted them for 1 or 2.
Blizzard took this to mean that they should add some sort of proc or buff or debuff to every single one of them and that people should be able to take twice as many.
So they changed it!
This was a very bad idea and a very bad piece of feedback. I 100% blame the community for this one because the feedback was rather forceful, but only Blizzard can fix it now.
If they hadn’t done this, we probably wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in until like… level 120.
I mean it’s stuff like the new hero talent trees. Did it really need to be one completely new passive every level? You look at tBC or Wrath, they added like 4 talents per spec per expansion and expected you to spend ~3-4 points on each of them. This time we got 10, and they’re not simple talents like “Reduces the energy cost of Shred by 10” but things like “When you Shred you have a 30% chance to make your next Shred do 30% more damage and cost 20 less energy”.
These two things in combination are just overwhelming people, myself included. I just don’t think that was the right approach.
3 Likes
I do agree with this, and it’s kind of becoming a problem. A common question is “what ilvl should I be for X content” and the answer is “a range of like 30 ilvls depending on your skill AND the rest of your group”. It’s a tough answer to give to someone who just wants to know if they should sign to an M+8 tonight.
There’s players I would happily join for +10s on their 610 alt because I know they play excellently. Others, including myself, tend to need to be close to or above 630 to seem competent and can still fail hard if we have a bad day.
And I don’t feel like that’s been WoW’s traditional deal. Put in the time, get the gear, be a god - that is what people have come to expect, but they’re not getting the payout because high gear+average knowledge performs worse than low gear+high knowledge.
And I think that’s the reason for the above.
The dps specs I’ve tried have generally left me feeling like there is something I’m missing, but it isn’t clear what that something is or how to find it out. The game itself doesn’t help me understand how to play better, and “practise” isn’t effective if people are practising the wrong patterns. The burden on players to just know stuff is very high this season.
Probably another reason many have been playing Classic Hardcore instead of hitting up dungeons this season.
So… maybe what I feel is it’s not a lack of player power creep, it’s a creep of game difficulty. Who are the people asking for the game to be harder? And are they really the majority? If not, why are we getting this game design?
3 Likes