Well this system works perfect for enhancement shaman it seems.
So u are not liking the changes to havoc while its going to be beyond broken on live? New meta 2 havoc dh - aug - holy pala - warrior tank - or prot paladin - or BDK
What are you talking about? Enhancement shaman is currently a great spec, especially after the patch drops.
And it has all of those thing. It had cdr, in fact it has cdr on 2 cds, procs, and abilities and passives that guarantee certain results, or almost guarantee them. High proc % is also a form of rng protection, for example doomwinds doesnât exactly guarantee you will get msw procs, but thanks to the increased proc rate on windfury, you can be pretty damn sure that you will get at least a few. Could it theoretically happen that you pop doomwinds, and you get not a single msw proc or a windfury proc? Yea. Is it likely? Not even in the slightest.
Enhance is literally the opposite of what you are trying to suggest apparently. It has all of those things, and itâs a GREAT spec, not just a good spec, but a great one.
And yea, i canât say iâm a super big fan of the havoc rework. Some cool stuff was added, but the one thing i really cared about which was demonic and shattered destiny was HEAVILY nerfed.
And the problem is, the gameplay suffers, less uptime on meta, less haste, slower rotation. Oh but at least now meta actually does damage⌠Yea you know you could have just tuned other abilities to provide you the burst you wanted right? For example, they could have buffed essence break, or even better bring back a second cd, like chaos blades.
There you go, you have high main cd uptime and you still have good burst every around 2 min or so, with some shorter bursts of damage every around 40 seconds.
And yea, damage might be good, so what? Damage can always be tuned, gameplay is what matters.
Yeah, how dare some people find boomkin fun
/s
Fixed rotations and rng procs exist in a spectrum in spec design.
If players like an rng heavy spec, they play one like enha, ele, outlaw, etc. If they like more rigid rotations they might pick fury, balance, unholy, or something similar. (only provided the above examples cause I am not confident speaking about more specs)
Liking rng specs is ok, same thing if you prefer rigid rotations. Seems that blizzard designs specs with both in mind, in a spectrum.
But boomkin does have procs, and forms of cd extension etc⌠I have no problem with boomkin.
Itâs not the best spec in the game, but itâs not bad.
Iâm not just talking about rng, itâs a whole lot of things that make a spec dynamic to play.
But if you remove everything for the sake of âconsistencyâ Like some people would want, what do you get? A bland boring as hell spec with nothing interesting going on.
Thatâs why i pointed out those things in the original post, some people have an axe to grind against anything that makes the spec actually fun to play.
No rng, no cd extension, no cd reduction, no procs, no nothing, what are you left with? The answer is nothing. Just a bland spec with nothing going on.
I read on the regular about people who dislike cdr because âmuh uptimeâ Like come on dude. Please, seriously? Thatâs the hill to die on? One of the coolest mechanics in the game, but: what about muh uptime?
Yeah but noone is asking for every spec to be the same. Some people like some mechanics, while others do not.
I do not find the point you are trying to make by making a strawman that noone is advocating for, while not actually being specific for what spec/specs it matters.
I think that when you want to remove or nerf certain mechanics that makes the spec more dynamic, in order to have a more predictable rotation with less âproblemsâ Thatâs already going about it the wrong way. I donât think itâs a good idea to sacrifice gameplay for balance 99% of the time.
In general. Unless you give me a very specific reason that is not just âboss uptimeâ or some other stuff like that.
One of the best recent examples, warlocks.
Warlock went from great in s4 shadowlands, to good at the start of dragonflight, to absolute garbage now. In terms of actual gameplay i mean.
Outlaw rogueâs design seems OK to me at the moment. Not great, but not bad. I see 2 problems with them:
- I consider Slice and Dice and Roll the Bones bloat. 1 short maintenance buff is already a bit annoying, but having 2 is just
. Thereâs nothing fun about that. Why not make Roll the Bones optional and make it replace SnD? But with the next patch and that talent that allows SnD/RdB/AR to pause while in stealth, maybe itâll get easier to maintain those buffs. - Energy. I feel I always have enough energy. The real constraint is GCD. Back in Vanilla, I actually looked at my energy bar, but now I completely ignore it. Needless complexity, i.e. bloat.
The worst offenders for me are:
-
Discipline priest. They had like 9 offensive buttons at the start of the expansion and half of them felt extremely weak and boring. But thatâs why Blizz did a lot of work on Disc in the last few patches, and 10.2.0 is going to merge a lot of their abilities, which I think is great.
-
Monk: they have way too many different defensive and offensive abilities. Blizz already addressed some concerns recently by giving passive talent options to some of their defensives, which I think is great. But I feel this is a bit of a work-around. Why should it even be possible to have 5 different active self-defensive abilities, especially as a healer and DPS spec? Most DPS specs have 1 or 2, but Windwalker can get up to 5. DPS specs want to hit DPS buttons, not need to use 5 different defensives to be able to survive their squishy self alive.
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I agree with slice and dice. The effects it has on the rotation itself are nice, but they are passive, and could be provided as a passive, there is no situation where i would rather press slice and dice than anything else.
Good thing you can extend it with underhanded upperhand, but the problem is, it forces you to use blade flurry in st, which is also not nice. If you pay attention, you basically cast it once and youâre done, but itâs just an annoyance.
Roll the bones is core gameplay for outlaw, itâs literally spec defining, no roll the bones, no outlaw. If you donât like roll the bones you essentially donât like outlaw. And roll the bones is completely fine now.
Energy regen being high is frankly good for outlaw.
In fact most specs are higher apm, which i consider good, i donât like having significant downtime.
Ww monk doesnât have significantly more offensive abilities than others, and they have many burst defensives, but thatâs not really a bad thing, and you donât need to use them at the same time at all. They have different purposes.
Oh, thatâs easy.
Whenever an ability is added we have to ask ourselves several questions:
Does it have strong fantasy?
Is it unique or are there abilities, especially within the very same spec, that does the same thing?
Is it fun and satisfying to use?
Does it feel fluid?
Is it congruent with the gameplay the class is known for?
Can we build unique and distinctive sounds and visuals for it?
Wherever the answer to any one or these is no, it shouldnât be there.
Next, once we understand that we have to ask ourselves what people have the mental and physical capability to handle. World of Warcraft is often played for many hours at a time, continually, so whatever we add has to be something that can be reached easily and comfortably by players.
If we add too many buttons or speed the game up too much, the game becomes uncomfortable to play.
Mentally, the game has to be readable. That doesnât bean everyone should know what every visual does exactly from the word go, but it does mean that there canât be so many effects on screen that it becomes hard to see the players and mobs, but at the same time you canât be hiding spells that âarenât importantâ because whatâs important can be quite subjective or difficult to work out.
World of Warcraft is failing catastrophically on these fairly simple rules.
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Yea, but the problem is that everyone has a different definition/limit to what they consider âability bloatâ
Thatâs why the word is irrelevant.
I prefer focusing on whether or not the ability actually feels good to use.
And some people are wrong. âOh but thatâs not objectiiiiveâ - let me explain.
We all have hands, keyboards, and human minds, and theyâre broadly similar, and we all see visuals on the screen, use our eyes and ears. There are variations in them but if you want a lot of players youâre going to have to accommodate a broad selection. If you want to make a game that can actually financially support itself, you have to have a lot of players. Everybody knows that. Unless the mystery of the combat is core to it such as in horror games (and WoW is not one of these games) it should be easy to see the state of the game and easy to control it.
It makes the game fun to watch, easier to get into, and fun to play for millions, and I donât really care if thereâs 20,000 uber ultra hardcore players whoâs played for 16+ years who claim that the game canât possibly be engaging without 50 abilities per spec - especially given the fact that I know that WoW had plenty of depth in the past regardless of the fact that it had fewer spells. They donât matter in the grand scheme of things and their ideas cannot be allowed to make the game unplayable for everybody else.
In addition, abilities can feel bad to use because of other abilities. If you add a bunch of stacking offensive cooldowns then either they donât do much individually and we get complaints like when warriors complained about ramp after the GCD change, or we get completely insane modifiers and then the baseline spells isnât fun anymore.
If we have too much CC then people canât ever control their characters and thatâs frustrating.
If we have too many defensives then nobody is going to die.
If we have too many cooldowns in general people will start trading instead of positioning and hard-counters will emerge, and people will get overloaded trying to track them.
The more cooldowns and procs and effects you add, the more addons people will use, because they canât figure out how to play it without the addons. This is not good. Any ability that plays entirely off another ability to the point where an addon can straight up tell you what to press next is a problem. In other words, the efficacy of addons like Hekili is a problem.
It would be much more fun if we could have our bars full of options, not mindless rotational busywork. This is how WoW was in the past and this is how WoW should have stayed.
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I think thatâs just assumptions honestly. If the cds fit well together there is really not reason to be confused.
Itâs only when unintuitive mechanics emerge due to bad design, or poor balance that people have trouble understanding the spec.
Or, sorry if i may be so blunt, itâs a skill issue. And in that case you just need to improve as a player.
For example, i think arcane is not a good spec, not because of ability bloat, but because those abilities interact in a bad way. The rotation is too static and rigid, with too little margin for error, setup is too long, especially with talents like arcane harmony, it is essentially âtoo longâ. Even though arcane has about the same number of abilities as other specs.
Outlaw instead is a good spec, even though it has lots of abilities, because they interact well with each other. It has quite a high skill ceiling, but you really canât say that itâs a badly designed spec, at all.
in general, i think gameplay is greatly improved for most specs. Thanks to the talent system. And if they go back on specs with less interactions, because âability bloatâ iâm definitely not gonna be happy.
You talked about the past, remember mop? One of the highest ability count the game has ever seen, and it was really liked.
Of course you may be so blunt but if you have to run around telling 90% of the player base that thereâs a skill issue preventing them from being able to attack a target dummy properly youâve got a problem. And for many specs we do have that problem.
Not for itâs PvP. xD MoP PvP was a disaster. You had a bunch of vocal people saying itâs the best thing ever but the population dropped to 1/4 of the last expansion and the Horde faction nearly died out due to imbalanced racials.
We needed 80% resilience, people were getting instantly globalled, healers were CCâd over 70% of the game even in pro matches. It was grotesquely bad and the start of WoW PvPâs fall.
But currently weâve got MoP PvP on steroids.
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The real problem with Class design is like you said people are different and what appeals to one does not appeal to another. A solution could be a character trait tree where some things are set and others are selected. Set it so it can only be changed once a week or month so you not stuck with a bad choice.
I think if there is the possibility of making talents that appeal to both sides itâs a good idea.
For example, i think that sub should have an option for cdr or no cdr.
So basically deepening shadow should be a choice node with dark shadow.
Or at least have a choice between more cdr, or more damage inside shadow dance, so deepening shadow is still there for both specs, but you can double itâs effectiveness with a choice node later, or go for more damage inside s dance.
What i was thinking was a choice node:
Dark shadow, and improved deepening, if you take dark shadow you get 15/30% more damage inside dance, if you take improved you get an extra 0.5 seconds cdr per cp, so basically 1 second per cp combined with normal deepening, and 0.5 sec per cp on shadow blades. Something like that.
I will never understand people who value low impact on downtime more than actual gameplay, but if there is the possibility of making a spec that appeals to both, fine.
The problem is when two design ideologies are mutually exclusive and cannot exist together. Thatâs when there are problems, because now itâs a zero sum game. What you want is directly against what i want, and winner takes all, while loser suffers what they must.
And i think this kind of mentality should be taken into consideration when making specs, rather that just removing.
I was contemplating this post of yours today Ishayo, itâs brilliant. You nailed it as far as Iâm concerned. Iâve made my peace years back (after being sorta upset with where WoW was going), but itâs a somewhat sad acceptance. The core of what made it so great, so satisfying, has been lost for quite a while.
Thank you for putting it so clearly.
i read your post 3 times and ran it through a google translate but I still do not understand what your point is
I thank you but it was actually a little poorly written imo. XD I managed to flip a question.
In any case, this isnât really complicated stuff. Art team and combat team work together. Combat team tells visual and audio and UI teams what they want and thatâs made - instead of reusing the same icons, having no spell effects for many abilities, and iterating super duper fast internally with no regard for the art. But I guess art teams are busy making pets and mounts for Bobbyâs next yacht.
Itâs frustrating to see that such a fundamental piece of game design is just lost some of the time. Nearly every spec has these problems, most have many.
Itâs not beyond repair or anything. Like this can totally be fixed without pissing people off too bad. They just⌠donât.
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Itâs not a bad post, but the post essentially amounts to: A good spec is made good by the interactions within the abilities. Which i donât even disagree with. In fact itâs one of the points i made.
But there is really nothing that points to: More than this number of abilities means âability bloatâ, because thatâs frankly completely subjective, and a spec that has many abilities isnât necessarily a badly designed spec.
I mean, you can try to disprove it, but you really canât, because this is the truth. If the abilities work together well, then if you complain about âability bloatâ thatâs frankly a you problem, no offense. You can complain about outlaw having too many abilities for example, but the people who actually play outlaw like it a lot, soâŚ
I donât like arcane as i explained above, but itâs not because âability bloatâ.
I donât like the new shadow priest that much, neither do i like ret pally gameplay. Itâs not ability bloat.
In other words, there is no absolute value in which adding another ability becomes âbloatâ, because âbloatâ Is not about the number of abilities, itâs about interactions.
It says the exact opposite. A class is not made good by abilities interacting with each other in a way that is independent of the gameâs wider state. It is made good when the gameâs wider state can be interacted with using individual abilities.
Someone walks too close to me or thereâs a big stack of enemies and I can move in without fear? Give 'em a Cone of Cold. Otherwise do not. That sort of choice - not Cone of Cold has a 45 second cooldown and resets other cooldowns so you should use them after those cooldowns so you can overlap those cooldowns so you can get more Blizzard so you can get those cooldowns back faster again, and also Cone of Cold can stack a buff that makes it stronger but donât delay it because although the buff can make it 900% (!!) stronger it still does fairly paltry damage.
How about this: Cone of Cold just does a lot of damage in AoE situations and in non-AoE situations you can use it for CC. Just like it was. It was fine before all this malarky through the last 14 years. Why did they change it? I donât know.
Itâs much simpler and it has more depth. I swear, some of the most satisfying abilities in this game are the simplest and most visually clear ones. Ice Wall for example is super simple. You place it somewhere and it forms a wall perpendicular to the way youâre facing when the cast ends. It has HP so enemies can kill it and blocks movement and LoS. Easy, clear, very visual, extremely satisfying to watch enemies scramble with it, and donât do 20000 passive effects. Itâs just a wall.
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