As a mistwaver around the 2700 mark so not good or bad, I can truely say I dont know 1/2 of what I sould do for the spec, so I do understand what your getting at…
However for a casual player like myself u really dont need to know the in’s and outs of every talent as long as it works and you can understand basicly what your doing. Just like I don’t know every detail of a car engine to understand that I can get from A to B.
That said if your a hardcore player with mythic on the brain then yes knowing every detail is super important and the amount of passive effects is brain melting.
My problem when playing alts is that it’s overwhelming to remember every single tiny interaction between talents that ends up being huge dps gain/loss so you need WA after all.
Also, windwalker is basically horrible with all those interactions between spells, with CDR or dmg increase etc etc.
For dps some spell priority type addon like ovale is prolly ok but I guess ppl have pretty advanced wa setuped now aswell, and can also just make some castsequence macro for pull etc
We used to have Proving Grounds, and we now have Awakening The Machine. The problem with the latter however is that the game just gives a generic advice, does not show the player how to optimally deal with something and it also allows for some threats to be ignored or dealt by just damaging them.
In Awakening the Machine the enemies should be introduced first entirely on their own and only with 1 copy. As in the first 5-6 waves should have exactly 1 different enemy each to let the player understand when they should use their toolkit. So when the casters appear, the game should explicitly state that “When you see an enemy cast or channel an ability, you need to use an Interrupt ability to stop it and prevent damage”. And then it should have an exhaustive list of all Interrupts of the specific Specialization the player is in and if they are baseline or if they need to be selected as a Talent, and wait for the player to successfully use it on the enemy before proceeding. Similarly for the rest of the threats in there.
I’ll be elitist here but such warnings should only exist in training areas (like Awakening the Machine) and in levelling content. No content that can contribute to the Great Vault should have warnings intended to teach players; the base interface should be as clean and noise-free as possible there. The players should have learned or taught how to deal with the various threats before end-game content.
I don’t have an issue with most classes and specs, but Shaman is one that I play quite a lot and they definitely need to have a reduction as far as button bloat goes.
I do not think it is powercreep. But we do got a lot of procs and other crap with internal timers going on. I liked the previous 7 talentrows way more than this.
And the implementation is also crap since i enjoyed holy paladin a lot in s1 DF, but then the other specs needed a rework and with that they changed and ducked up my spec. Because we have a generic tree that actually is not generic when blizz wants (there are multiple talents in those generic trees that are only visible to 1 or 2 specs).
It’s not so much power creep as complexity creep, with the number of passives, procs, and other modifiers in play, it’s really difficult to judge talents without going into simming or just copying a build from somewhere, people like to mock those who copy builds from websites, but everything’s so entangled, most people can’t figure it out anymore.
“This skill does X damage, unless you have buff Y up, in which case it does Z damage and applies debuff A to targets hit that makes skill B do C additional damage”, at some point it becomes too much to keep up with.
I will comment same thing as i did under that video.
Personally, I can’t play older versions of WoW for a long period of time, even though I started during those expansions. Why? Because the simplicity of those versions doesn’t stimulate my brain.
For example, Wrath of the Lich King and cataclysm felt extremely easy and even a bit cringeworthy to me. I only have fun when I’m challenged.
If I look back 10 years, I would have thought Mists of Pandaria was difficult. But if I played it now, it would probably feel like the easiest expansion ever made.
What Blizzard does and doesn’t get enough credit for is helping players evolve. If you’re willing to adapt and learn, their design encourages you to become a better player over time.
Now, I will acknowledge that there are too many of those multipliers.
1. Button Bloat
I bought a new keyboard where the function key row is directly on top of the number key row, rather than being vertically offset as they usually are on regular keyboards. This layout makes the keys more accessible for my relatively small hands, giving me 12 keys.
I also bought a new mouse with 5 additional buttons.
Despite this, my Brewmaster has several active talents that I use regularly (i.e., every fight), which I cannot map to either key or button. For me, that’s just too much. It makes the game difficult in a way that isn’t fun. I play PvE, It also frustrates me that I’m not able to perform at the same level as the e-sports or PVP players.
It’s not only with my Brewmaster; I’m having similar issues with a number of other classes, such as Feral Druid, Retribution Paladin, and Vengeance Demon Hunter.
2. Meaningless Talent Complexity
I can no longer reliably assess the impact of a passive talent. Instead, I have to rely on WowHead, IcyVeins, Discord, or sim my character myself. This removes my agency almost entirely and reduces the talent tree to simply choosing between the “Best Raid Build” and the “Best Mythic+ Build.”
Instead of offering me more choices, it actually gives me fewer.
I wonder if Blizzard is too impressed by the success of Path of Exile. However, at least in Path of Exile, we have Path of Building.
What I would like to see are much simpler trees with meaningful, easy-to-assess choices, such as:
It’s no longer a Creep, it’s a Dash. And it is endless. There is no respite, no time to reflect, no time to enjoy the power you have as you endlessly chase the power that you will have (but won’t have time to enjoy either).
Talents in the pre-Cata version were for their vast majority of the type “Increases the damage of ability X by y%” or “Increases < element > damage by x%”. Very few talents changed how other abilities worked or gave them additional procs.
In essence one could say that the problem of the past hasn’t changed at all because you again had to check out from guides if going for more damage on ability X was beneficial over going for more damage on ability Y.
It was at least easier to figure out by feeling, the average player knows roughly how often they use a certain skill and/or element, but current talents (And skills they affect) are so intertwined that the exact consequences of picking one talent over another are pretty impenetrable to all but the most devoted theorycrafters.
Having to use 3 x different frost nova’s and 3 x frostbolt etc etc means there was a massive bloat and also how helpful was it to have 5/5 in wands as talent points?
I found the piece of mind for myself now with Wotlk and Cata, playing MM first and now Survival.
You one main spell (esplosive shot), 2 to use when explosive is on CD ( A shot for single and Multi for AoE), one minor dot (serpent sting), 2 major dots (Black arrow for single explosive trap for AoE) and finally steady shot to regen focus.
One single proc (TNT), one major cooldown (rapid fire) and depending on the pet you have an extra one (i have because im also herbalist).
Few things but with good sinergy between each other like steady shot that adda seconds to serpent sting or multi shot that puts 6 seconds of serpent sting too on all targets hit.
Plus i feel less demoralised about my dps if i dont push to 100%.
For example in ICC i was tracking only DBW to use my CD instead of tracking also the internal cooldown of death choice too.
I was referring to the fact that we still had to check guides for finding the “best” talents. The fact that talents in the very past were flat damage increases whereas now they change how an ability interacts didn’t change this behaviour from players.
Also, the only difference the very old talent trees and the current ones have in comparison to the simple MoP ones are that players who do not consult guides have more ways to be non-optimal.
5/5 Wands was probably useless for anything that wasn’t a niche build. But we still have such “dead” talents today too, like Voodoo Mastery for Shamans (I don’t know if it’s used for PvP) or Cacophonous Roar for Warriors.