At some point during WoW’s lifetime, blizzard decided that talents, trinkets, spells, etc needed to be “interesting” and avoid the “passive” and “boring” stuff. We started seeing way more damage procs, stat procs, convoluted passives, and hardly never see boring passives like “increase damage of X ability by Y%”.
While I see the point behind this philosophy, I believe that it went a bit too far, and had the below consequences (either intended or unintended):
UI bloat (aura buffs are impossible to track with default UI does to there being 20-40 of them during combat with no filtering)
Barrier to entry on understanding the specs (without using outside resources you have no idea what proc changes your rotation, or needs tracking)
Contributing to lag problems with the game.
I think that in the following scenarios, blizzard should rethink their view, and change talents/items/effects:
If a proc does not need to be tracked
If a proc does not change our priority/rotation
If a proc does not need us to react to it
I believe it would be beneficial for the game to reduce random procs that give power to our characters that we need logs to notice, bloat our UI, or does nothing more than increase some stat by X/deals Y damage.
It is ok to bring back some boring passives that increase X ability by Y%, make it simply generate more resources, or even bring back simple stat stick trinkets.
So, I want to hear your opinions, are you excited about items like the new cloak, that will have a random proc a paragraph long that we would not need to track, or would prefer to have some trinket back that increases your main stat by X and a random secondary by Y?
I think the WoW game designers want to keep their jobs by making the game as convoluted as possible. And the product managers think that they need to add more and more abilities, talents, procs, etc. to sell the game without realizing that it’s making the game worse.
Making things simpler would have so many benefits:
More fun for 99% of players.
Higher chance of attracting new players.
Much better game balance due to fewer variables.
Better performance.
Less visual noise, making it less stressful for players and more enjoyable for outside viewers.
But no, they’re keeping the unnecessary complexity and instead created another complex band-aid fix by providing the 1-button rotation helper.
Not just procs tbh, but also ability interactions through talents in general.
There is a really good addon to showcase this problem - Harreks Advanced Tooltips. Install it, and every spell’s tooltip quadruples in size.
We definitely need to go back to simplier class designs. Procs and interactions that you cannot distinguish visually or feel through a meaningful rotation change are not worth having, imo.
I feel like restoration shaman’s talents are a good example of proc bloat - for example Undulation, Primal Tide Core, Tidebringer, Coalescing Water, High Tide - all are “every x cast” or “every x seconds” style talents. I only play restoration very casually as an alt but I highly doubt that anyone is tracking these without weakauras.
There should be 1 skill point per level as it is now and it should start from level 1, not 10. Whether that is assigned to a “boring” x% stat boost or a new gameplay-altering ability will be discussed further below
Trees should be reorganized so that any talent that affects a specific ability should have its own dedicated vertical line for it and not spread out. Every talent that will affect ability X should be right below X on the talent tree, and not spread out at the top left, bottom left, bottom right and specialization tree. We shouldn’t even need a search function!!
– Only exception to this would obviously be Hero Talents, unless they are remade to only affect the abilities they provide and nothing else.
Ability overload should be massively diminished. Every button should have at most 2 different effects on the player/target/world, and not 4+ that some exhibit. For example, using Blink teleports the player forward. It should not also remove snares, give a speed boost and a shield at the same time.
Similar abilities should either be made into procs or outright cut off. For example, Prot Warrior has Charge, Shield Charge and Intervene. Shield Charge is just Charge except it does more damage. Intervene is just Charge except it goes to a friendly target. So instead of having 3 different buttons for it, give Charge additional… charges… make it proc its powerful version every 45 seconds which is the cooldown of Shield Charge, and let it be usable on friendly targets too once every 30 seconds which is the cooldown of Intervene. Yes, players will lose some agency.
Ability overwriting through talents should become even more aggressive. For example, Frostfire Bolt should entirely replace Frostbolt or Firebolt when chosen.
Every ability should have at most 1 talent that makes it alter the gameplay properties of another ability, and at most 1 talent from another ability that changes its properties. Then it can have as many +X% damage, +Y% crit chance, -Z% reduced cast time etc. nodes as it likes.
They obviously don’t really care because they can’t make it the way everyone likes it. They know there are addons and people can do it the way they like. As long as addons are in the game, this is absolutely not an issue.
Every non boring MMORPG suffers this issue. I think WoW is doing it quite fine, in comparison.
But it’s generally up to the community to help out here and luckily for the WoW community you have the best sources that you can think of. No other game comes even close here.
?
What is contributing to lag problems? I have no lags.
Are you talking about performance issues rather than lags?
_
Overall, from what I’ve seen on PTR S3 is probably going to be one of the best seasons ever. It’s a very good mix of fun items, great tank and healer balance, good pace, decent dungeon pool (so much better than this season), no goblins.
Talking about the ones that come up when a number of players are fighting the same mobs (either open world and during big raid groups). The flood of procs/information to the server and how the server transmit information to us causes a number of performance issues, including lag.
This can be seen when comparing older versions of the game with retail, when you have better performance with 40 man groups, than a 20 man group.
TBH they pretty much care, otherwise they would not have spent some millions in developer time hours in order to overhaul the UI, and they already shared that they have plans for buff/debuff UI and nameplate reworks.
Oh yes, I do not disagree with that. The wow community is one of the most well organized. What I am referring to is small targeted changes that reduces the number of inconsequential procs, and instead introduce some of the more boring passives back.
Example: Talents like warlock reverse entropy, a simple 15% haste buff for 8 secs. How many people would notice if it instead increased your haste by 5%? Now do that for half the procs that we do not track, and suddenly instead of 20-30 buffs in your bar, you have 10-15.
But just to be clear, I am not calling for a dumbing down of specs or simplification of the game, I am just advocating for the reduction of bloat, in order to make it easier to understand what is going on.
Better performance with 40 man groups than 20? When? Where?
Now I don’t do any open world stuff but it was always lag issue once there are too many people. Never did I experience that you had less issues with more people than less.
And having “too many” people will always cause these kind of issues, in all games.
That’s just marketing. They see what a loud minority complains about and then pretend like they care in order to get their customers back.
I mean objectively tell that the changes were pretty much irrelevant and the majority of people still prefers their own UI with addons. Which is completely understandable because no company can make the perfect UI for everyone.
Isn’t there a command to remove that tho? I know you can do it with addons but I am not sure if there was something you can do without too.
But I guess it’s not about visibility but rather performance fix for you? Idk how much it would help, if at all, but I don’t think this is something really relevant for the majority.
There was something not long ago, that this weird “addon usage thing” was causing performance issue. I did not experience that myself but stuff like that should definitely not happen. Especially when there is no benefit in the first place.
Example with Queen ansurek and ovinax previous tier. Especially at launch but even on mythic, You would have way worse performance in those fights that even 40 man raids in classic.
It is not just the “too many people” factor, but also “how much communication” between players and server.
Take ovinax for example in the previous tier. Every time the adds would spawn, performance would drop drastically.
This happens not only because of 20 people and the 10-15 mobs in the fight, but the amount of communication that is happening between those people. Each player would use 1 ability each second, that would hit 10-15 mobs, and those abilities would proc between 5-15 procs on all those mobs. Suddenly for that single instance, the server would need to send you an obscene amount of information (and cause those performance issues).
Visibility is one side of the coin, which as you said, there are many tools that can help. Performance is the other wise which is impacted for this.
But the most important issue for me is the tradeoff. Once upon a time, those procs were “interesting” and that was worth it. I believe that we have gone far enough that they do not provide that upside, and we would not lose much to dial them back to more “boring” passives.
Idk about that, I had no issues, outside of that pull before Ovinax.
When Classic came out I don’t think anyone could truly play with 40 people I saw my friend playing it and it was a sh*tfest in terms of performance.
I didn’t have this issue but I heard some people complaining. Was is not because of WA tho?
Ye I get that but I can’t really comment on that because I don’t experience any performance issues myself. I also barely have any addons, maybe it’s that?
The weak auras were making the game unplayable, the fight itself was pretty bad with default UI.
Generally the addons add a level of communication between the game and addon, which make the performance worse, but even without that the performance it self is quite bad. This is the main reason that the game is 20 years old and is one of the most demanding game hardware wise.
I can think of 3 games from the top of my head where I have more issues than with WoW with the same build. That’s BDO, GW2, and NW.
I think compared to the most other MMORPGs WoW is probably one of the best optimized.
I saw my friend playing it and it was a sh*tfest in terms of performance.