I went back to Blizz original post in which they justify their, in my view excessive, pruning of specs for Midnight. While I will argue almost exclusively from the perspective of a long-time Feral player, I am almost certain a lot of what I write also applies fully or in parts to other specs.
TL:DR: I think a lot of explanations don’t pass muster and there is no good reason to prune abilities to the degree that is currently happening. Feral at least is a shell of its former self on the beta with a stale and boring rotation.
All quotes below are from this Blizz post.
One thing we often hear is that there is a high level of complexity in WoW’s class and combat design. Classes have a lot of abilities to manage, and it can be tough to find comfortable keybinds for them.
I think the keybind problem is overstated. A lot of abilities are only cast out of combat and can comfortably be clicked (e.g. Hearthstones, Druid port to Moonglade, Flap, etc). Feral and Druid in general is a class with a larger number of keybinds but I never really found this to be a huge problem.
However, I agree that using all the Alt, Shift, Ctrl modifiers to bind abilities can be overwhelming for players new to the class. But: Blizz already had a working solution in the game! Simply by choosing the passive options for a range of talents, I was able to cut down my number of abilities by 3 (passive Thrash, no Brutal Slash, no Renew). Further, there are quite a few talents I could simply not pick if I felt I had too many active abilities (Innervate, Adaptive Swarm, e.g.) without loosing much DPS or utility. Adding more choice nodes would be an easy way for Blizz to allow players to reduce keybinds and active abilities further - if they wanted to.
Before the pruning, players had choice - do I want to use more active abilities or do I prefer a more passive rotation. While there was a performance gap between the two, at least for Feral it is of the order of a few percents and really matters only if you want to go for the 0.1% M+ achievement or World First raid kills.
Now I cannot know if players just did not use that option. Apparently so, otherwise why do the pruning? But if that is the case, why not just advertise the passive options more prominently? Provide a “Beginner’s layout” for every spec may be or some other clearly telegraphed way to play with fewer keybinds.
After the pruning, I no longer have a choice - I have to play the simple way whether I like it or not. While before a broad range of playstyles could be accommodated, this is no longer the case.
During combat, there are many buffs and debuffs to keep track of,
Here I tend to agree, there a way too many buffs and debuffs and modifiers currently - but almost all of them do not need tracking. These can be safely removed and baked into baseline scaling without affecting gameplay in any way. That would be a good way to reduce complexity. But buffs to track does not equate abilities to use, there is actually very little connection between the two. So I disagree that removing lots of abilities in any way addresses the issue here.
which is critical to playing well and can require intense concentration
How is that a bad thing? Of course challenging content requires concentration. It should, otherwise it wouldn’t be difficult? WoW has a wide range of activities, most of which do not require excessive concentration. I would argue it is good and important that there is some content that does require concentration. If this is removed, it will dramatically and fundamentally alter the nature of the game for all those players that enjoy challenging content (with no discernible benefit to those who do not).
players sometimes feel that their more inexperienced friends need a robust guide on how to play, manage addons, and more, to even get started.
While I do not necessarily agree with the way Blizz is doing it, I agree that reducing the importance of addons is good aim. Removing or changing some parts of rotations that really do require addons to track is also worthwhile. But except for may be Bloodtalons, not a single one of the abilities that were pruned from Feral required addons. Again, pruning does little to address the issue around addons.
Without reading a guide, they might miss a subtle aspect of maximizing their performance
So what? Then don’t. Also, see above, if you prefer a simpler rotation, just spec for it. While some awkward parts of rotation might benefit from a bit of streamlining, again not a single one of the abilities pruned from Feral was “subtle” in any meaningful sense of the word (I mean really, how is Renew subtle? Press it, get HP back.)
Expert players can spend hours configuring and maintaining addons to display information they need to play at the top level.
So what? This is only relevant for a tiny part of the playerbase. I am a Heroic andy and do up to 12 or 13 M+ and, in that, I am probably already at the higher end of what many players do. I have never “spend hours configuring” my UI. As above, if you aim for 0.1% or World First, you may have to put in more time, but do the concerns of such a small number of players warrant such a dramatic change to the game?
Also, your new UI is not exactly easy to setup. I personally fully expect to spend a lot more time on my UI in Midnight than in TWW.
so the path to improvement is more apparent for players at every skill level
Valid aim, I fully support that. But your pruning does not help players to improve their play, it basically tells us “we cannot hack it” and thus have to make the game so simple, there is not much of a learning curve left. Instead, how about better in-game tutorials, clearer tooltips, may be better rotation assist from the OBR? If you want to help players to improve their gameplay, build tools to do that! Instead, you reduce complexity to the point where little improvement is possible or needed.
while maintaining the depth of mastery that WoW offers.
Well, then you failed, at least for Feral. There is little depth left and I doubt much mastery will be required.
Ultimately, our goal is that once every spec has all its new class talent points, Hero Talents, and Apex Talents, it has what we feel is a manageable, fun, and appropriately challenging level of complexity
Here is your problem: what is appropriately challenging is very, very player dependent. By forcing a one-size-fits-all solution, you inevitably alienate players. Better talents and guides would have allowed you to craft a system where players can play at the level of complexity that they enjoy.
Sorry, the more I read the post, the more I feel that none of its claims and assertion really fit together or make a lot of sense. Hopefully I am wrong (certainly possible) and, in the end, Midnight will turn out to be both fun and accessible. But, at least from my experience on Beta and what I read in terms of feedback, the fun part seems to have gone missing.