The real problem with class design

Community General Discussion
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You wanna know the real problem with class design?

The real problem is this, there are thousands of people with different preferences, not all of them are good or valid, or well thought out.

And some of these preferences are along the lines of: I wanna sacrifice anything that makes a spec dynamic and actually fun to play so i can maximize everything down to the last percentage.

If you follow this line of thinking this is the spec you would get:

1: No rng at all, so no, stormbringer, no hot hand, no opportunity, no deepening shadows, no divine purpose, no elemental mastery etc…

Why? Because rng while it can spice up the rotation and make it more dynamic and fun to play as long as it’s counteracted with some deterministic aspects that guarantee certain results, just having rng by itself means variance, and variance means that the damage you deal is not 100% up to you. So rng goes.

2: No cdr or cde mechanics. Why? Should be obvious, because muh uptime! If you’re not on boss, you not only don’t do damage but also don’t get your cooldowns back faster than you otherwise would. So this means that if a fight has intermissions, or you need to get away from boss for a mechanic you lose more damage.

So even though dynamic cdr and cde is very cool, it has to go for the sake of balancing, and damage potential.

And let’s not forget about ludicrous amounts of burst damage, because we all know: Burst damage is the best kind of damage. Which usually means no high uptime on main cds, because you’re a lazy thinker and cannot come up with another way to have good enough burst other than having low uptime on your main cd.

Outlaw feels nice to play with high rush uptime due to the energy regen and the faster gcd? Meta high uptime is nice because of the haste? Combustion is higher uptime than it used to be thanks to legacy of the sun king, resulting in a overall more enjoyable experience with less problems and better gameplay? Well screw all that, now cds are only low uptime, and you deal like 3 times or 4 times as much damage than normal inside them.

So let’s look at a spec that would result from this “design”.

You press your buttons in a strict sequence, because there is nothing that actually procs or spices up the rotation, so everything is basically on a cooldown, and you just press abilities in the same way over and over and over.

Inside your cd your abilities do more damage, there is no feedback to the rotation, no wow moment, but everything is balanced down to the last %.

Maybe add in some deliberate downtime to the rotation, which would allow you to get off boss without losing damage.

Does it sound fun? Because it certainly doesn’t for me.

So ill just say it, the problem is people who think like i described here, providing absolutely trash feedback, and terrible ideas.

And just being a good player doesn’t mean your ideas are worth a damn when it comes to actual design.

Because you know, a game is played first and foremost for gameplay, and everything else is secondary to that, balance included, balance is irrelevant if the gameplay is garbage.

And the result of these types of ideas are not just bad, but absolutely terrible gameplay.

The reason you have fun gameplay is because of interactions, and those interactions add complexity, that complexity almost always has drawbacks, if you have a proc that works when you press an ability you have to press that ability, which means you must attack something, you cannot add interactions without adding certain conditions.

Seal fate, cool mechanic, must crit, which means you have to attack a target
Stormbringer, no abilities being pressed=no resets on stormstrike so you must attack something
Old gwd, soul shards spent reduce the cd of your infernal/tyrant/darkglare, which means you must be attacking something. Now this is gone and it’s just a fixed reduced cd, which means there is no interaction anymore, and they might as well remove this and make it baseline. There is an overall effect on the gameplay, 2 min infernal is better than 3, but the feedback from doing your actual rotation is gone, which means the interaction between correctly spending your resources and cd reduction is GONE, therefore the interaction is GONE.

Not so difficult to understand either when you actually stop for a second and think.

Does that mean that it shouldn’t be done because “balance”?

I’m just tired of people saying rng bad, or cdr/cde bad because muh damage, without understanding a single thing about actual design, and what makes a spec fun to play.

And that’s all there is to it. Maybe if some of you were to think a little more about your ideas you would come to realize this.

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Some random procs are fine, if they fit into the rotation nicely. But some specs have way too many, to the point where it’s impossible to play them even half-way decently through intuition and with the standard UI. When class complexity reaches the point where one needs 3rd party simulation and log analysis tools to figure out how the rotation/prioritization works, and lots of WeakAuras/addons that remind you as a player which buttons should be pressed, then I think the game design has failed.

Retribution paladin is one of the best designed DPS spec at the moment, in my opinion. There is a fairly obvious rotation that probably most players can figure out without sims and guides. There is a nice amount of burst every 30 seconds, with additional stackable CDs that align perfectly at 60/120 seconds. The holy power resource system is intuitive. There are some procs, but they don’t have much impact and don’t require much additional cognitive load or WAs/addons. Their core abilities are easy to use, but the spec isn’t boring either, because it has a lot of utility, such as Blessings, that requires more skill to use properly.

I like it when I can improve my skill at playing a spec throughout a season. But learning a 20 item long priority list that involves multiple random procs, which needs to be relearned every few months when Blizzard makes tuning changes, or optimizing my UI to better show me what to press, isn’t really what I find fun. M+ and mythic raids are already hard enough; I don’t want a super hard spec on top of that.

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Btw, I played a few rounds of Heroes of the Storm again yesterday. The hero design in that game is so good. They mostly only have 4 abilities, with some harder heroes ones having a few more depending on which talents are picked.

I think HotS and Overwatch prove that you don’t need a class/spec/hero to have 30 abilities to make them fun. On the contrary, it’s more fun to have 5 really cool abilities that actually do interesting and useful stuff.

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Exactly what I’m hinking. However, WoW has the difference that most abilities aren’t aimed like it’s the case in HotS, that justifies a few buttons more to keep gameplay from getting boring… but not turning each class’ spell bar into a piano.

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I dont know the only thing I can say about current WoW i think we have too many buttons to click (for instance as shadow priest). As I am getting older its not easy to keep up :).

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Some classes defo has too many buttons.
I got no solutions on how to fix classes but I do wish it was simpler

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I must say I really like outlaw right now, I hope it doesn’t change much. I like how restless blades work, and even if roll the bones is random I don’t really feel like that’s a problem.

The spec plays nice even with a bad roll, but when it’s good, you go full bananas and it’s SO fun!

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One step would certainly be to go back to all abilities doing damage by themselves… not only buffing one other ability or depending on the perfect use of long cds to enhance your abilities to actually do damage. I hate how cd-dependant class design has become. Back when I started playing, you kept your large cds for boss fights only, where it made sense to use them… nowadays your character simply doesn’t do damage if you don’t use them all the time and as often as possible and in the right combination with 5 other buttons.

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Fun is subjective. Not everyone enjoys reactive Proc based gameplay. I certainly don’t.
I liked when Shaman had proactive totems like Tremor Totem that lasts 30 seconds and you dropped it before the mobs cast fear. Now it last like 5 seconds and you have to react to the mob casting fear instantly. So I haven’t used a Tremor totem in years, I doubt it’s even on my action bars.
So the only totem I use these days is Healing Stream totem. I can drop it and it will trickle out a little healing. Plus it has the class fantasy of the totem on the ground.

Dance Studio react to the shiny colours flashing is fun for some I guess. Not for me.

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I’m just tired of fighting my own class and its cool-downs. I want abilities for different situations, and the pressures that cause me to have to choose should mostly be external, eg AoE vs ST, defensive against large attack, nova against being chased, etc.

I really couldn’t care less about having an almost entirely rigid 12+ button rotation just to optionally hit a training dummy. Waste of brainwaves.

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Nope, i’m gonna have to push back on this.

These days people are throwing words like ability bloat without actually thinking about it.

Frankly speaking the word has been said so many times that it frankly lost meaning, and there are more than a few issues with it.

1: Everyone’s got a different definition of what constitutes ability bloat and what does not.
2: People complain about “ability bloat” Because they are incapable of playing the spec, even though most specs are actually pretty easy to play even considering all the buttons
3: People willfully and consciously pretend as if you have a 30 button rotation by adding thigs like defensives and utility that you press once in a while in the mix, and this is just dishonest.

So i will make an actual comparison and then explain what actually is bloat and what is not.

Let’s take outlaw rogue, and pit it against ret in terms of ability count.

Outlaw: Sinister strike, ambush, dispatch, between the eyes, pistol shot, ad rush, vanish, roll the bones, shadow dance, slice and dice, blade flurry, and ghostly strike.

Iv’e actually been pretty generous towards your argument here, if i were to be more realistic, you could already remove flurry for st, ambush because realistically you will only use either sinister strike or ambush so you don’t really have to think about it, especially next patch since audacity proc replaces sinister strike, and shadow dance you only press once every min. So realistically you only have around 8 abilities that you press on the regular. if you wanna count them all it’s 12

Ret pally: Final verdict, judgement, wake of ashes, blade of justice, divine storm, hammer of wrath, final reckoning, wings, divine toll, and you may or may not have templar strikes. That’s 9 to 10 abilities, 11 if you wanna consider consecration or divine hammer if you have it talented.

10 abilities. Not that different right? Just 2 abilities, one is “fine”, or rather as you put a “well designed spec” the other is “bloated”.

So what’s the actual issue? Frankly speaking i would say that the issue is player skills because that’s frankly the truth, ret pally has a very simplistic and frankly speaking mediocre rotation, i did not like the rework in terms of actual gameplay.

While outlaw rogue is faster paced, with more stuff to think about. It’s also really fun, especially on the ptr.

So here’s the issue, the only ability bloat that matters is the one where an ability either doesn’t fit the rotation, or could be provided in a better way as a passive, or integrated into another ability.

Out of all the spells i listed for outlaw, only slice and dice is bloat.

And this is why i will stand against this kind of argument, because it’s poorly thought out, it’s 100% subjective, there is no thinking, it’s basically just, i feel like 10 abilities is not bloat but 12 is.

And also because people in the past wanted back the talent system partially for this reason, because they wanted more abilities to play with, they finally did it in dragonflight and it resulted in better gameplay for basically all the specs in the game, aside a few like warlock. But that’s only because the devs actively made it worse for some reason.

Although you do have a good point that blizzard should make an effort to provide tools to track cd and procs in a better way baseline, and not just assume that people will get addons.

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same! It’s true. Pro wow players are like lobbyists who talk to the government (Blizzard here) and make things hard for us plebs hahaha

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I’m not even a pleb though. I mean sure, compared to them, but I’m frequently in the top 2% of whatever I do, and I’m getting really tired of this over complicating things for no good reason. So I can only imagine what the actual average player feels like.

There’s no gameplay here. It’s just busywork.

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For me on some classes/specs it sort of feels like chess. If this does that then that should be activated but if that other thing happened you should not, or you should combine it with that yet again other cd, and then you should do this but if the situation is different because that procced you should do that other thing instead. I suck at chess. My brain is not good at… this does some random handwaving.

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You lost me right here. Everyone’s preference is valid, but if their preference is detrimental to the majority, the shouldn’t expect to get what they want.

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It is and it isn’t.

The problem is that we live in a world where there are a lot of variables and conditions that change things.

Ill make an analogy.

Morals are subjective, morals are effectively the values of a person.

Does that mean that all morals have the same value? Obviously not.

Because morals can still be judged by their outcomes, and if your morals lead to bad outcomes even though you think they are good subjectively, when you stack them up against reality they are not.

Much in the same way, all opinions, do not have the sale value, some are better thought out, some are worse, some lead to good results others do not.

If you followed what i talked about in the original post to the logical conclusion you would get a spec exactly like i described.

This is the problem, people wanna think that just because it’s subjective that means that all opinions have the same value, and it’s just not true, therefore you shouldn’t really criticize because “it’s all subjective”.

Well, i think a little beyond that.

In this case we are talking about what you VALUE in gameplay, and i am telling you about the results of your values.

And the result is some pretty garbanzo spec with no interactions at all if those people got their way.

And that’s the actual result. You may like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Just like how some people might like spamming frostbolt 24/7 and only frostbolt. But i challenge you to make an argument on why such a spec would be well designed.

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Bad analogy. Morals are not preferences.

Preferences are personal taste. Morals are principles of right and wrong.

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They are though, that’s why morals are subjective, morals are effectively your preferences on what’s right and what’s wrong based on your own perception. That’s why they have a tendency of being self serving.

And that’s why i judge results and not preferences.

And this is no different, some people here have a preference for a certain type of gameplay, the problem is, that preference leads to classes with little to no depth, and no interactions. Ultimately i would not like to play such a thing, you might prefer that type of playstile, i definitely don’t. I think they can do a little better than just a bland, boring class with no interactions.

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Preference: Pineapple is a tasty pizza topping.
Moral: It’s OK to stab someone who drives into your car.

Do you see the difference?

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From the point of view of the person doing the stabbing it might be justified.

If everyone were to think like this though having a stable and prosperous society would be impossible, and that’s why we have the justice system to punish behaviors that are not conducive to building a stable society.

As i said before, morals might be subjective, results are not, and morals are simply your personal preferences on what you think is right and wrong.

And that’s why i judge results.

You frankly cannot argue otherwise, morals are subjective because there is nothing written in the universe that says what’s right and what’s wrong, and that’s exactly why different people have different standings on the same issue. Is it wrong for animals to eat meat? Well if a carnivore doesn’t eat meat they literally die, and so does their offspring, on the other hand the deer that was hunted certainly isn’t happy with the situation.

If there were objective morals then we wouldn’t even need to have this conversation.

Anyway, this is getting a little too philosophical, the idea was to make an analogy.

You might disagree with the analogy, but it’s not incorrect if you understand that morals are just preferences.

Don’t confuse 99.9% of people agree with me, with, that means it’s objective.

In the end, your preferences may be valid, but that doesn’t mean your argument is.

Everytime i hear someone talk about things like “ability bloat” And talk about “too many abilities” Like what does that even mean? What’s the criteria to judge what’s too many?

And that’s why you actually have to look at the ability itself, and you cannot say that a spec is “bloated” Just because it has more rotational buttons than average.