I have been going through changes on many specs, convenant abilities, watching videos of gameplay, reading feedback forums for community reaction and so far it seems that the devs are making SOME progress and I am glad they do.
However, I have a feeling that the core of most specs is still in a bad, post Legion, gimped state. We all have 4 buttons build/spend rotations with a cooldown and a random proc. There is no nuance to most specs. Fury is still this fast paced 3 button spec like it was at the start of BfA and Retributio is still a slug with holy combo points. While I can see some appeal in these, others specs are absolutely broken like Shadow Priest being unplayable, Fire gamepaly being dependant on niche items and azerite traits which are gone in SL. Demonology warlock still doesn’t have a real interrupt despite being the only spec really suited for M+. You can make this list go on and on.
Meanwhile we are getting these useless abilities that don’t fit at all into rotations or gameplay. I get it, Eyes of the Beasts are cool to roleplay in front of Stormwind Cathedral with your pet. Take a look at warlock curses and auras. They are so underwhelming and yet it adds so much unnecessary hassle. Curse of Doom and Retribution Auras are both ridiculous examples. The first one is 60 seconds debuff after which dmg is dealt and some minor chance to summon a dumon. You will never see it, most of the times you won’t use it since things either die too fast or you will be assigned some curse that reduces/buffs dmg. Ret aura makes you swamp aura using GCD to benefit off ally death instead of trying to save him with a blessing or heal. As a paladin, really? Let’s go over totems, most of them are just upkeep buffs that provide no depth to gameplay and with already heavy GCD they are very disruptive and annoying burden just like they were in the days of classic. This feels like a fan service nostalgia trip, like the one they pulled out with new Star Wars movies.
And this goes back to whole GCD/prunning systems that we have been getting since Legion and yet we mostly dislike it. I have a theory why this all happens so put your tinfoil hats on. I think the reason why we have really bad and simple core specs is because of rental power AND scaling.
It’s harder to make specs complex like in MoP, balance them every patch or expansion. It’s harder to make progression systems while we have so many abilities and passives and tier sets etc. so we have to remove them and bring new ones. This is why they have this “core”, to fill the blanks. The problem is, they are not doing a good job at feeling those blanks and they have presented it in BfA for most specs and it seems this problem will still exist in SL because of convenants being choices.
The second thing, scaling. How do you appeal to casual and hardcore player with a class? It’s very hard. Some people will just yell that their class is too complex, they don’t perform good, it’s too much tracking all these debuffs, buffs, dots, synergies. But then hardcore players would mostly love complex as they can distinguish themselves and do better than others. What do you do then? Make class as easy as possible while maintaing some illusion of diversity. Then, scale content. It’s easy to scale content, we have 4 raid levels, we have M+ which just scales every key.
They have put emphasis on external systems scalling instead of the player. At the end of the day most specs just aren’t fun and aren’t cool to play. It’s a 2020 MMORPG, lately leaning more into ARPG and I would expect more cool stuff that I can do with my class both in terms of visuals and gameplay. And then, even with so much homogenization of specs, they still can’t get the utility and dmg balance right. But, that is a topic for another discussion.
Anyways, tell me what do you think, do you think this is enough job done, should they do more, are you for a complete overhaul, should classes be more complex and diverse. Whatever you think please just don’t use “it’s only an alpha/beta” argument, it’s the worst to the game.