Haven’t posted in a while but this announcement has me somewhat worried.
I am all for helping new players. I haven’t played since Dragonflight season 1 and I’m sure if I were to return now it’d take me some time to get my footing, and that’s with thousands of hours of past experience. The game must be daunting for new players to get into, especially with how quickly you get access to all your tools. A lot of research is required to learn your class more optimally and some help from the game wouldn’t be amiss.
A Single-Button Assistant on the other hand will do absolutely nothing to remedy that. They will get used to pressing 1 for everything except non-damaging skills and have no idea what’s going on.
This does not teach them anything. No muscle memory, since they’re not getting used to new keybinds. They’re not getting used to resource management. They don’t know the difference between a single target and AoE rotation. They don’t know what abilities synergize. Everything that deals damage is 1. They won’t even know what ability they’re using because 1.7 seconds is barely enough to see the icon let alone understand what it really is. And as they progress using the Single-Button Assistant, it will become harder and harder to get rid of because as they progress, the content they’re doing becomes more challenging and they haven’t even started learning to play without it.
Eventually turning it off would be nearly the same as throwing them on a new class halfway through their character’s endgame progression. Which I think we can all agree is a worse proposition than actually making a new class right now.
A recommendation for what to use next is not a bad idea. I’m quite sure addons doing that already exist, probably like the one Ion mentioned. While it will slow down their rotation as they have to keep looking at what gets highlighted, this will teach them muscle memory and show them more clearly what they’re actually doing, allowing them to delve into why that button would be the optimal one to press. They’ll learn their class.
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again to another thread, single button rotations and add-ons have been around for years.
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I am not well versed in the world of these type of addons. However, in the offchance that an addon exists that does what Ion wants this to be able to do, that is still only accessible to players who actively search for it. Those are not recommended by the game to new players, they’re for more veteran players who do not want to learn and just want to play casually.
Adding addon functionality to the core game is normalizing it. This shouldn’t be normalized.
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This will not help people pushing endgame, or regular play, It will only help people who just want to log in and have fun.
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And as my original post stated, it’s a crutch they can’t get rid of. A new player that uses this to casually play will also use this when they start doing more competitive content, because they never even started learning their class and this will allow them to perform much better than they would when initially trying to learn. Yet the further they progress through the game, the more difficult it becomes to switch it off and try to learn.
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This will help more than it will hinder. There been addons like this for a while and they’re all bad, ive met and played with people with 660ilv doing DF levels of DPS and this “1 button” will most likely improve their damage as well as let them do content on their own instead of relying on others. Its not going to make them reandomly start parsing 99s like people seem to think.
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Where did I even make this argument? Just pulling this strawman out of nowhere. Nobody in their right mind is worried that this will cause players to perform optimally. This however will stop them from ever learning how to perform optimally.
Lets go off the random numbers that players starting the game perform at 30% efficiency and gradually improve to higher depending on how good they are, yet with the Single-Button Assistant they’ll be performing at 70% efficiency at all times. This means that when they use it doing content that requires 30% efficiency, they’ll be doing 70% and feel great. Then they do content that requires 40%. Then 50%, 60%, 70% which is their sweet spot, and then they can’t go further because the Single-Button Assistant isn’t built for it.
What options do they have? Turning it off. But when they turn it off, they have no idea what to do. They didn’t gradually learn to play because the game did it for them, so they are still performing at 30% efficiency when doing 80% efficiency content.
You are meant to improve as you continue playing the game and get better as you do more challenging content. The Single-Button Assistant allows players to do content they are normally not ready for and will stop them from ever doing content that the Single-Button Assistant isn’t good enough for. At least, without starting from square one, which is a lot more fun to do when you’re actually new.
the problem will be toxicity - and I can guarantee you, that new insult will be “stop clicking - go 1 button mode”.
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Its gonna be “Why is your dps so low? Are you using 1 button or what?”.
There are also some people that use noxxic. Some people cant be helped no matter what.
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Blizzard can just buff one button to make it do the same damage. Then there will be no toxicity as everyone will blast.
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You’re right… no one ever drove a Morris minor then learnt how to drive a Ferrari
if the problem is too many buttons- then solution is to cut number of buttons required for your rotation and all additional buttons you used should be moved from skills to gear.
For example you have Ice Lance - great! Do I have other instant cast skills? I do! RThen it could be casted by ring or trinket or my chest piece as bonus set after 3rd hamrful spell etc.
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They have got rid of buttons though. It’s one button. After this they might aswell remove all abilities except auto attack.
If they put a button to auto follow the tank the other players don’t even need to be at their PC to complete a key.
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The fact you use that as metaphor shows you don’t understand what I mean.
In car terms, you sat in the backseat your whole life while the car was automated, and when that automation failed you took over the wheel and realized you never learned how to drive in the first place.
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complete rubbish… people who want to use it will and people who don’t wont… just like the literal 1000s upon 1000s of addons.
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Since you clearly ignored the rest of my comment to hyper fixate on the final part im just gonna go ahead and ignore everything behond this sentence.
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If they do as I said “remove all abilities” the game will be tuned around auto attack.
You do understand that if they remove all abilities except auto attack there will be no abilities, except auto attack, right?
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That same argument could be made for having a kill switch for every non-mythic boss. You don’t have to use it, so what’s the harm in it existing? The harm is the same thing: they don’t learn from doing it, and people often take the path of least resistance.
I did not, it was part of the overall reply. Giving players a crutch to help them overcome content that they would otherwise not be able to is great until that crutch stops them from ever improving to begin with. Of course, it benefits you when those players use the assistant in content where it is performs adequately. But when you start doing harder content where it no longer performs well enough, you’d have wished they learned the game alongside you and improved as well.
May as well matchmake you with bots and have you accept you’ll never do any content more difficult than what the bots are capable of.
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The single button rotation is a nail in the coffin for this game and it’s like slapping a little bandaid on a giant problem, they have completely gone off the rails. Ingame rotation helper and 1 button automated gameplay built in is a major turning point where they go down completely the wrong path.
I haven’t even been playing retail this season, but I had planned to play again in future, but honestly this just gives me no confidence in the developers, they have no idea what they are doing or where they are going with the direction of the game, they have lost their minds.
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