Power Creep in World of Warcraft has Gone Too Far

Community General Discussion
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I never said Feint was a DPS CD, I said Vanish was turned into a DPS CD, which is okay if it’s a small bonus put at the right time, but making it an active part of the rotation is madness.

I also think you have to keep track of more than you claim, but even if we ignore that, the main thrust of my argument isn’t how much you have to track, it’s how hard it is to see and figure out what you do need to track. Things aren’t intuitive and abilities do a million things, each of which deal almost no damage.

Maybe you don’t want to talk about positioning, but I do. I want the game to be full of things that say “You can’t do this in that situation, so you must find another way, and here is a tool which you should use in other situation, but not generally”.

Different DPS and CC spells should exist to attack different ways against different enemies. Sometimes there’s a mob that won’t face its back to you. Sometimes there’s a mob with a lot of armour so you use bleeds. Sometimes the mob literally can’t bleed. These need to be the core of the gameplay, and I don’t think there’s a problem if there’s a single button or two which isn’t useful on a given fight.

They did it pretty decently to start. The talents cost 2-3 points to max out - some cost even more if you account for the talent that immediately followed that enhanced the talent you just took.

Then came the feedback that everything cost too many points. That was the community that did that. That was a very stupid piece of feedback. The problem isn’t the idea of a talent tree - it worked fine in vanilla through Cataclysm. The problem is that the trees are REALLY big and talents are really cheap.

I wasn’t talking about deathstalker. I’m talking about that thing that gives you blue combo points that you need to hit. I don’t remember the name. I could go and look it up, but I know you know which one I mean.

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That mechanic doesn’t exist anymore.

Animacharged combo points were reworked to just be a thing that stacks and gives “2 extra ones” to whatever finisher you use. They’re not on specific combo points.

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Thank God… that was hell. Congrats, rogues. :clinking_glasses:

Doesn’t change the fact that there’s a ton of this kind of trash all over the game though.

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I think the process of just doing your rotation on most chars is fun, but also think the amount of extra procs that are just passive and uninteractive, and everything being cleave/aoe is stupid.

Boomkin f.ex. has like 4 different procs baked into just sunfire and moonfire. No wonder game lags everytime you have more than 2 moonkins in a fight.

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I broadly agree, but I think I set my limit about what counts as uninteractive a little differently than you do.

I do not consider it interactive when my spec generates procs for me that must be consumed ASAP and consuming them means pressing a particular button at the expense of any other plan I might have. It’s just playing whack-a-mole.

Whereas I think you delineate at things where a spell does something on its own accord entirely.

We agree completely on that part, but I consider the problem to be a little bigger than that to also include abilities like Fingers of Frost, having both Icicles and Splinters, etc. One forces a cast of Glacial Spike, the others forces a cast of Frozen Orb. Not a lot of decisionmaking there - it’s just whack-a-mole.

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You said defensive cooldowns being used for dps. This implies plural. Vanish has been used offensively and defensively since Vanilla.

Think what you may.

You have two arguments. One that there is so much to track (which is wrong. At least your examples are wrong) and that the base UI is trash in tracking buffs.

I agree on the UI in regards of buffs. On debuffs I would say it depends because you no longer have to deal with seeing every players debuffs on the target anymore like you did back in the days. The issue arises if you fight a huge boss and the nameplate is in the skies.

We, this includes me, have pointed this out for over a decade and also pointed it out when edit mode was implemented how it still fails to address the essentials.

There wasnt a “find another way” in my prescribed scenario. You could not use backstab during the ENTIRE encounter. Yes people could and did use sinister striker but it just felt horrible as a dagger sub.

Thats still the case. Positioning is still a case unless you play a ranged dps and you get punished severely for standing infront, especially if the boss/mob parries your CD.

We had that. It locked certain specs or classes out of the encounter. It can stay in a single player game, not multiplayer unless you make me get the required gear to swap for free every time I need it. And yes its a problem if it locks out core abilities of a spec that the spec evolves around unless you want to add a different ability that serves the same purpose in which case were back to useless clutter.

You missed what I said. People didnt want 1% buffs in the trees but they wanted “to feel” the talent they picked. And this is the result. Vanilla to Cata pre patch never had these many abilities that apply a dot or damage proc even without the decreased ranks we have now.

Kyrian ability. No longer a thing since the anniversary patch. You also did not play around it as assa in the first place, you either hit them or you didn’t given the nature of Mutilate.

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No, I have several more than that.

  • The world is hard to read because there are too many effects appearing that may be irrelevant
  • The game is lagging
  • Abilities do not behave consistently
  • There are too many random numbers
  • We are too busy spinning plates and not busy enough fighting enemies

And yes indeed, the UI is trash. The funny thing is though, it has only been enhanced since vanilla, and that UI works fine; so the reality is that Blizzard added so much junk to our classes that the UI can’t cope with it from a readability point of view. So the question arises - fix the UI or fix the classes?

And what kind of UI could possibly deal with an enemy having 200 debuffs or you having 40 buffs? How do you design a UI that correctly extracts the relevant information and, if you do, why is the irrelevant information part of the game? If the information isn’t important, it shouldn’t be there.

Well that, or the fact that the enemy will be affected by hundreds of debuffs if you add it all together for the 20 players, and that you yourself will often be affected by 35-40 buffs, most of which just appear and then disappear and and did nothing noteworthy - and in order to sort out this mess and find what you need to find, you need addons.

The other way is don’t use Backstab for that encounter.

Yes, but it’s not the same thing at all. I’m talking about abilities with positional requirements, like maximum range, minimum range, having to cast it so you can get interrupted when forced to move, etc.

Of course parry and frontal cleaves still exists. Whatever.

That’s only a problem if there is no other choice that deal well with the situation you’re in. For example, a mob may be immune to bleeds but have little armor, so you swap one finisher for another.

It’s important when designing an encounter to make sure that, whatever you design, each spec has a way to handle it. They already do this in many different contexts except DPS rotations. Why? I don’t know.

Yeah I mean it’s both of those, sure - but my point is it’s not the concept of a talent tree which is causing this mess, it’s the talents themselves, or alternatively how many you can attain.

Yeah pretty much, there was no way to play around them. It was stupid as hell. And since you can’t actually play around it, trying to is this kind of weird distraction - things just presenting themselves as something that matter, but don’t, creating a ton of noise and garbage all over your poor screen. Happy for you that it’s gone.

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Yeah the issue isnt as clearcut as “procs that demand attention good, procs that don’t bad” since not all of them are made equal.

(In the context of pvp) I like my shadow priest and afflilock procs for example, I don’t exactly love the one proc I have on my unholy DK.
The reason probably is that I can use the procs on affli/shadow to set up a burst, whereas on DK it’s, as you described, whack-a-mole.

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Yeah, if it’s acting like a resource you can collect and make choices about to find the right time to use it, that’s fine. But just a button lighting up that must be pressed immediately because it lit up is trash. I don’t like it.

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As far as I see we’re sitting on the two sides of the Iron Courtain, including the Berlin Wall.

Asking to change the system won’t happen because both sides are filled with believers.

What you want to achieve is make all content available in both games. The East has nice forests and so does the West. There are seashores everywhere.

Currently content and gameplay are tied.

To be completely fair, SoD is retailified Classic, so one side now has both.

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If they gave me retail WoW with more old-school like class design, I’d switch over to it in 6 seconds.

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There is a streamer called Jdot or something. 50 year old healer guy. And he did this interview where he talks about how good M+ is and how Blizzard have given us everything ´´we`` wanted. Yet the guy is spending all his time beating up children in some crappy Overwatch clone. Literally plays WoW for a LIVING, and still prefers to play another game, even though he claims M+ is great currently.

All these streamers don´t realized they pulled off the biggest you think you do in WoW history. Created a game for themselves that isnt even enjoyable, and they don´t even understand why and because of their cognitive dissonance, cant get themselves to disown the monster they created.

It´s even funnier when they rank their favourite patches or expansions for m+. They all mention Legion or BFA as their favourite and not the current iteration of WoW that they basically asked for and got.

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You laughed because u didnt even understand how tier sets were able to add bloat to the game because you have such a poor understanding of a game that you have 15 000 forum posts in.

This time a lot more people are agreeing with me. Look at the video, look at the discussion in general all the comments, not just in this thread, but in the comments of the video.

There has been a massive vibe change in the community, it is pretty much undeniable at this point. I have sadly been vindicated, and I say sadly, because all the hero talent changes have only made all of these issues significantly worse.

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Sure, post on your retail char and we’ll see whose more accomplished with a better understanding of the game.

I stand by what I said, you just throw buzzwords like bloat and power creep and don’t even understand what they mean.

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Not entirely. People want to be challenged, and simultaneously want to use the tools they have to their best. Switching to the best specialization is a tool we have at our disposal.

However, Ghostcrawler’s post from 15 years ago is also true, the one that says that making the game challenging will drive down participation.

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This may be a question where the answer is too expansive but what would you like frost mage to play like to get the right amount of simplicity and complexity? I’m curious about your take on what would be a nice balance.

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For Wrath i have enjoyed class gameplay for what I have played: Hunter, Warrior and Reesto Shaman.

What I did not enjoyed how raids have been handled, i say that blizzard should have added the flex technology on all raids at least on normal diffiulty.

Plus minor thing that I dislike like “you can only use one potion in combat”

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I was using frost mage for classic levelling and…
While the damage rotation is rather simple (Frostbolt), that alone isn’t going to get you far. The spec has a lot of utility that you need to use increasingly more.
In fact, the official efficient levelling style of frost mage involves carefully rounding up creatures, freezing them and then using Blizzard to wear them down. Due to pushback, you need all your CC kit, shields, poly the odd non-compliant one, and if things go south, you are dead in two seconds. I’d say that’s very interactive. “Blizzard spam lol”

Target audiences of each game (iteration) have shifted but I’m quite happy with a design of roughly 10-12 ability action buttons to use. On top of that there is aiming certain spells and movement, to dodge or otherwise avoid stuff. That very much includes Classic Frost Mage gameplay.

Retail frost mage was standing still and pressing 1233233 on repeat. Practically pinning the target, so virtually zero risk. It looks a little more virtuoso, but that’s it.

Raiding is a different animal because certain aspects are controlled, so suddenly the only thing you need is the rotation. But rotation and movement together suddenly creates an overwhelmingly difficult gameplay. The solution is to make Fire better for raids by trading control for damage, not fun to quest but better for instances. That one has some rotation.

The vast majority of modern (and even Classic) is bloat.
Do we need bufffs? Well, they could be auras.
Do we need resource food? Well, out of combat it could be near-instant.
Do we need resources? I actually think so, adds a layer to how much you can do. Many games purely rely on rotation (cooldowns), however.
Do we need rotation? If I casually press 123123123 and my big button is 456 then it looks complex but in reality it’s not. Sure, it can be optimized (say, only using 45 and saving 6). On the flip side, many people macro it, so it’s just 11111112111111 anyway.

If you look at Core Elementalist with Scepter-Dagger, it only has 5 abilities (4 stances though) but they require stuff like positioning yourself to place a ring, casting the fire bird to hit the targets on the ring for combo bonus, and so on. It’s generally considered one of the most difficult.

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Telling me you didnt have watched the video. He simply does not play M+ anymore because when he does he wants to win the MDI. He is married now and he knows how much time and commitment practising for the MDI takes. He does not have time for it anymore.

Oh right, he is almost 40. He even says that in the video.

I do not know what you try to do, but everything you claim is just nonsense.

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That’s a very big question as you correctly guessed, so my answer will have to be pretty long, too. You’ve asked me to redesign a spec and a bigger part of a class.

Let’s start with some cooldowns.
Mages notoriously have A LOT of cooldowns that are defensive in nature and seem to do the same thing all of them. Mages having a lot of defensives is part of their class fantasy, so this is entirely fine, but there are some questions to be asked about also having large amounts of health at the same time. I would probably lower mage health by about 10-20% and remove defensives similar to Ice Barrier from many other classes that don’t need it to even out the ability to take a hit.

Arcane Intellect stays. It’s very inoffensive.

A lot of the cooldowns do many things in addition to what they are designed to do.

  • Greater Invisiblity should be an invisbility spell for a quick get-away or sneaky plan. It should not reduce damage taken. In a world with more reasonable amounts of DoT’s, that may be good enough, but given the state of the game, a guaranteed invisibility time might be a good idea, similar to Vanish.
  • Cold Snap is fine and it’s always been with us
  • Ice Block is fine, but there is no need for it to be regenerating health. One of the challenges of playing mage is that you don’t heal very much - you have to be pre-emptive.
  • Alter Time also resets the cooldown of Blink and increases movement speed. There is no need for it to do that other than a similar arms race with the melee classes. Get rid of that, and theirs.
  • Shifting Power has no need to exist. I’d rather have food that lowers cooldowns for everybody.
  • Icy Veins does a metric ton of things. It grants haste, it summons an elemental, it conjures splinters, it doubles the amount of splinters you conjure, it stops pushback from attacks, and it automatically shows up for no apparent reason as a random proc. Get rid of all of that, leave behind the water elemental, and allow the water elemental to generate some control. More on this later.
  • Ray of Frost isn’t really that interesting in a world where non-CD spells do decent damage. Remove it.
  • Mass Barrier feels decidedly outside the range of what mages ought to be doing, and we did just fine before its inclusion. Remove it.
  • Mirror Image is a misdirection and aggro reduction spell. It does not need to reduce damage taken.
  • Blink should not increase movement speed, and it should not heal you.

So that’s a pretty big nerf. Yeah, this is gonna happen a lot - there’s a reason the thread calls it power creep. It isn’t, exactly, because enemies just scale to match, but if you look at a list like that it’s going to look like a nerf; but if everything gets nerfed, is it really a nerf?

Rotation, then.

Right now, Frost Mage can be played a few different ways, but the main method in PvE is to use Spellslinger’s Frost Splinters to generate a surreal amount of Frozen Orbs, which then generate tons of other procs that allow you to gain Icicles which then can be used for Glacial Spikes.

For AoE, the whole thing is based on like 5 different spells as well that all do broadly the same thing but reset one another’s cooldowns or make each other proc.

I want to get rid of almost all of that.

The first thing we’re going to do is buff Frostbolt by 1,000%! Omg w0t?!
Yeah, it deals less than 1% of someone’s health as damage. Enough of that, nobody wants to play that. I am also going to remove its ability to cleave from talents such as Death’s Chill. Death’s Chill is gone.

We’re going to kill off Ice Floes. We need to do that for what comes next - we don’t want players casting on the move, because it means forcing the player to move can’t interrupt their cast, which is something we want them to do. The fact that Ice Floes is janky isn’t helping it.

Blizzard is now a channel. It doesn’t reduce the cooldown of Frozen Orb and it is never instant from Frozen Orb, but instead it deals 400% more damage! It is your filler AoE - when all the groups are gathered and the frozen orb is out, you’ll press Blizzard. You can move it freely. You can’t cast while casting it, but it’ll do tons of damage.

Comet Storm goes out. It behaves exactly like an instant cast single tick Blizzard except it’s actively built to abuse how Winter’s Chill works. It doesn’t need to exist.

Flurry is something I may want to keep, but I haven’t made my mind up yet.

I haven’t made my mind up about Frozen Orb. I am inclined to remove it, seeing as the role it plays is very similar to that of Cone of Cold, which shouldn’t do any of the things it does right now except slowing the enemy by a lot and be a little longer than melee range. Instead, it does INSANE damage. Definitely worth getting up close and personal with an enemy if your positioning allows you to get away with it. Watch that aggro though…

I want to see a 3,000% buff to Cone of Cold’s damage! There was a talent that allowed you to stack Cone of Cold to being stronger and it’s been removed. That’s good, we don’t want stuff like that. We just want a strong Cone of Cold.

If Frozen Orb should exist, it simply deals damage wherever it travels through. That’s it. The main difference between it and Blizzard is that you can cast while Frozen Orb is active, and it has a cooldown. Maaaybe it could be applying Winter’s Chill to what it hits when it hits it the first time, but I’m not sure about that one.

Glacial Spike and Icicles are completely deleted.

Ice Lance no longer splits, no longer AoE’s on impact, no longer reduces the cooldown of Icy Veins, no longer reduces the cooldown on CC, etc. What it does, is if you hit a target that’s considered frozen, it crits and it deals triple damage and breaks that condition causing the target to be considered frozen.

What does it mean to be considered frozen? It means it either is rooted with a frost-based ability, or that it has Winter’s Chill on it. Winter’s Chill is applied when such an ability fails to apply or when such an ability is dispelled. This means you can use your Water Elemental’s Freeze ability, as an example, to gain an Ice Lance cast. Frost Nova takes the role of the current Cone of Cold, but of course a Cone of Cold into that is heavily encouraged. It also means that while you can hurt a frost mage by dispelled all their roots, it isn’t an automatic mage killer to just remove all their roots.

The whole hero talent tree is just deleted. Poof!

I want a drastic reduction in the amount of passive effects that apply debuffs to enemies or buffs to me. Examples include things like Bone Chilled.

But yeah, that’s what I’m going for. Less rotational busywork, less self-interaction. There’s some, mages are after all about shattering frozen stuff that you freeze, but it’s simple and it’s focused. It doesn’t have all sorts of little effects and combo points and procs all over it, and defensives and control do what they say they do and what they look like they do, and no more.

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