The failure of class design

Community General Discussion
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To me the game feels awful right now.

Almost every class I have feels incredibly slow and boring to play.

I absolutely hate the fact that Blizzard dumbed down the classes and increased the difficulty of Raid mechanics in return.

This philosophy ruined the game for me.

In BG’s you immediately die in teamfights when you have no personal healer, its a cycle of running in doing 5 sec of your maximum dmg rotation then die and run back again, repeat.

It’s not a rarity anymore that people get to 15+ deaths in a bg, not because they have bad gear and get oneshotted, but because you have almost no utility to survive on your own for more than a few seconds.

This has made Bg’s an absolute awful experience when it was my favorite thing to do pretty much since I started the game in WoltK up until WoD.

The game has lost so much of it’s flavor and things I would get excited about.

Blizzard really sparked my hope for the new expansion in one of the Q&A’s they did for BfA. I thought they learned their lesson after so much negative feedback about the pruning from the Class Development forums in both US and EU when Ion Hazzikostas himself admitted that they went to far with removing so many iconic abilities.

The first BfA beta Build crushed those hopes again.

Not only are we getting almost no new abilities except those classes who got reworked for BfA because they were absolute garbage in Legion, they also turn baseline spells into talents yet again with the most famous example probably being Shadow Word Death, an absolute joke.

It gets even more mindblowing when looking at Blizzards reasoning behind the removal of so many abilities.

Initially when pruning was first introduced on the WoD Alpha the outcry was immense and the reason they gave us was “we are pruning now to make space for new abilities in the future” and then later on (I think it was during Legion) they said “we want to prevent the game from ability bloat”.

At this point the first statement was strait up a lie because 4 years later we got almost no new abilities except as I already said the classes which were so garbage during Legion, they needed a complete rework for BfA.

The second statement boggles me even more because I want to enjoy the game right now and not somewhere in the future. Even if the game somehow reaches a state comparable to MoP in terms of abilities they easily can pull a WoD and remove half our spellbook overnight.

The thing I enjoyed the most in this game was always the excitement of leveling towards new abilitie/talent and then learning how they interact with every single class in the game and in every scenario.

I became a pretty good player because I was so excited and therefore motivated to always keep improving and learning.
When I learned everything on class X I immediately rerolled to class Y just to experience that whole process again.

Also knowing how to play your class to the fullest potential was much more rewarding than it is now because the skill gap is almost not existent anymore, at least when talking about ability usage and rotations.

The dps/hps difference between a average player and a really good player would be 50-60%, now its like 10-20% tops.

I know I really sound desperate throughout the post but that’s because I am.
I really used to love this game for things that are no longer there at the same capacity.

tl;dr
I wish this game would get some of the excitement factor back when initially learning about new spells and interesting talents to work towards and test.
This was always the biggest part for me when playing WoW and where 90% of the excitement for this game came from.
Blizzards reasons for the pruning are not valid in my opinion which makes the whole situation even worse.

~ a really sad player who knows that this post wont change anything but had to do it regardless

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Wether you think so or not, this is a good thing, it gives people who are not that super ultra good at the game a chance and engage in raids and mythic+ and such. Sure, too much inclusion is bad, but how do you make new players stay ? Make sure they can be one with the community, not outside where no one wants them.

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What made them stay during expansions like WoltK/Cata/MoP when the game and combat system was way more ruthless when it came to skilled vs unskilled player ?

As I described in my post above, you should learn from your mistakes and be motivated even more to get better and put in the effort it requires to have an 100% optimal rotation in every scenario.

If I would start this game now as a new player from scratch I wouldn’t be nearly as motivated to min/max my character when I see that almost everyone is equal and there is not much you can do to differentiate you from the rest.

I think especially the newer / younger players want to have a challenge/learning curve, something you can always improve and someone to always look up to, that’s creating motivation or why do you think so many people play Fortnite when 95% of them are garbage and die within the first minute of almost every game.

I hate fortnite too, don’t worry but this game has actually proven a very important point for the gaming industry: people wan’t a challenge, you can say what you want but Fortnite is one of the most complex game out there at the moment with the Building aspect, but as I said people are motivated to get better and put in hours of time every day.

tl;dr

I think the “making the game easier and more accessible for new players” mentality is strait up wrong and responsible for some lack of depth WoW is experiencing over the past years.

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Personally i like the new scaling thing when it comes to PVP, you’ll still lose to someone that is 20ivl higher than you but it’s not a gibfest. Also when playing my high-level characters i appreciate the fact that any low-geared teammates won’t be completely useless.

But as to class design issues i agree that many specs didn’t get the passion and attention that others did.

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That’s not quite what I have experienced.
I played RBG’s on a really high rating before I quit like 4 weeks into the current season.
In the starting area my team was always checking and immediately celebrating when they saw someone with 80 - 90k health when we had around 150k, calling it an easy kill/win.
Rightfully mindblown they were when that low geared person would top dmg meters by a margin and is far from “easy to kill”.
I myself experienced this when I hit max level with my alt DK and did my first RBG’s with maybe 315 Ilvl. I immediately did a lot of dmg and as I was gearing up from 315-360 I felt no difference when it came to dmg output.

I think the only thing that has a bit of an impact in how well you do in PvP are the azerite traits, everything else is basically Legion level of scaled.

some people like it but I think PvP has been in a much healthier state prior to all those scaling mechanics because we are playing an RPG after all.

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For me most pvp players i have met are trash mobs , and i do not find funny crushing insects which tries to dirty my new shiny boots.

I loved legion scaling this is not so great scaling.
For 99% of pvp scrubs running in literally no gear compared to raiders which sometimes do pvp and want to have some fun not annihilating this “insects” with their op shiny gear they got from them.

And not your english is great i wrote it very badly/stupid this is what i was trying to say.

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I don’t really understand fully what you mean in your post, maybe its because my first language isn’t English maybe not I don’t know.

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@Goneviral i reeedited it
TLDR without scaling huge % of pvp players would get destroyed by pve players as always.

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Nah, you just sound frustrated, there are a lot of other topics around where people complain that the game was “dumbed down” because blizzard hates skilled people or something. Like the others you think you’re better than everyone else but the reason you can’t show it is because blizzard is limiting your potential, deluding yourself by thinking other players feel bad when outplayed, cried to blizzard and this is the result of those complaints.

It’s sad really, especially when you try to mask it by associating it with the vaguest of concepts, like fun.
There have been many changes to the game, however i think the ones that hurt the most are more subtle than you realize. This “38 buttons is more than 34, therefor the game was dumbed down” line every simpleton is copy/pasting doesn’t make for a very convincing argument.

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Blizzard themselves said that one of the reasons they are removing certain abilities or mechanics is because of the “punishing” feeling when messing something up.

For example I remembered the watercooler they did when they removed the majority of snapshotting bleeds/dots in this game.

they said something like “we don’t want people to feel too frustrated only because they aren’t quite as quick / on point with their rotation than other people”.

You sound like the person who doesn’t like anyone who thinks he’s better than the average player and you try to talk that person down to achieve some sort of “overall equality”.

It’s some true Blizzard mentality you have there.

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That’s a bit weird because i remember them blaming addons when they removed the snapshotting, and that’s plausible because it wasn’t about quickness but about doing what the addon told you to do.
Obviously there was a big difference between warlock dps back in MoP however this wasn’t because some were “quicker” than others but some had that addon while other didn’t, it was about knowledge not skill. Also a record number of warlocks paid for a race change to troll, but i guess you never wondered why those also were the “quickest and most skilled” players.

And i care about equality as much as i care about what you think my motivation is, i’m juts pointing out that your arguments are laughably ridiculous and even in the instances you MAY have a point, you still manage shoot yourself in the foot by not thinking 2 seconds before recycling the same old crap we’re already seen a thousand times.

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Nearly all classes need haste these days, thanks to the GCD changes. I always get to some stage during a boss fight where I’m literally just waiting for an ability to come back up, and having nothing to do. I generally impatiently spam the button until it’s able to fulfil it’s function xD.

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Do you realize knowledge is a form of “skill”. ?

If you would have played RBG’s or some form of PvP during MoP you wouldn’t claim stuff like that to be true.

I don’t remember any of the top locks in MoP using some sort of addon that tells them when to use soul swap on which target at what time, just a addon to track the dots above their health bars, maybe in PvE there was something like that idk.

why should people stop giving feedback about something that hasn’t changed ?
weird logic

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That’s one thing that I hate as well. What’s the point to even learn to play right if it’s all for a few % points anyway…

Ditto. I can’t get myself to play longer than a month or two before getting utterly bored because of how dumbed down classes are.

I can safely say that BGs were never less fun that in Legion and BfA to me. Never. They are a zergfest now, with almost nothing that points out to the better players unless they queue together in a semi-premade.

Well, they took the thing we use all the time when playing the game, our classes, made them into mindless three button things that are hardly more engaging than watching paint dry, and then took all difficulty and put it behind boss mechanics, which is frankly boring and dumb, because prior experience and mastering of your class does almost squat later on, as you have to go through learning new one-time mechanics for a new boss.

And in PvP, I feel it’s even worst, as there are no bosses to gate the mechanical difficulty behind. In Arena, already on an individual level there is little difference between players, and all the difference is made in how accustomed they are to the script of the setup - that is to playing together in that composition. In RBG, it’s even less interesting because it is at it’s core, just like random bgs, a zergfest, with the added “tricks” that you will simply learn from playing a higher volume of games (what is the best spot to ninja cap a base in EotS, how many stacks of debuff should a tank optimally have in flag bgs before your strike team should really make a go for it, and so on). In other words, the whole game now favors quantity over quality, and that sucks.

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mhm… look how successful incredibly hard games like dark souls are.

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exactly, that’s what I mean with my Fortnite example.

those games have disproven that this “making a game easier to play/access” is resulting in more people playing it/liking it.

it is actually quite the opposite if you ask me.

WoW didn’t get famous because it was made for the generic casual, maybe its like that now but I remember WoW having the reputation of being an absolute no-life neckbeard game.

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they cant even make the forums right

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My biggest issue is how all classes function, spam a basic ability to fill up a bar to open up stronger abilities which dumbs down the gameplay to 3 basics abilities and 1/2 big hitters. There is nothing unique about any of the classes you either fill up a bar or gain a stack of something.

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very true although in the past there were classes with similar mechanics like shadow priest with the shadow orb build up and devouring plague spender for example that still felt amazing to play.

so there are ways to have such system without making the rotation feel boring and scripted but there hasn’t been a class where this was implemented successfully for a while now, in my opinion.

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I think having unique things in classes would artificially improve the fun, for example having an overheat mechanic on fire mage where you can go into a sort of rage mode and your spells would change in appearance but then you would need to cool down. Instead of having a buff that just increases your crit chance to 100%, anyways I don’t think they will ever overhaul classes but they could add some effects to make them seem unique.

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