How does “more buttons” equal “less dumb” gameplay anyway? Everyone is using macros and weak auras anyway.
A lot of games like mobas and shooters have much much less buttons to press and are much more difficult.
Using addons is the easy setting in this game. Just set it to hard by disabling them if it’s boring to you.
This game doesn’t have aiming. The more choices of abilities you have to make at any given moment = higher skill cap. If you want to see what happens with too few abilities then look at DH.
“no aiming”
Mentions one of the few specs that have manual aim.
Bruh, are you baiting?
You consider eye beam to be aiming?
Eye beam is as much of an aim as BoS is. While some may mark it down as “manual aim”, this is not the spell I was talking about.
Fell rush and the rest of the mobility of DH is full on manual.
Sure the game has aiming. A lot of aoe and conal abilities have to be aimed.
And how are more choices more difficult when dbm and weak auras tell you exactly what the best choice is in a moment?
A lot of mage abilities come to mind.
For the same reason that if you reduce all classes to a single skill, it would make the game easier. More useful skills for different situations = higher skill cap
You say that, but still gave DH as example?
Do you have the slightest idea how loaded a DH kit is?
Please, do share what abilities do DH have with us, and if they are “high skill cap”
EDIT: TFW someone’s bait is so trash, that I have to defend DH design.
If you want an example of high skill cap spec it’s disc priest. Havoc DH can’t even be compared to disc priest in terms of skill required.
Still waiting for that list of DH abilities.
I don’t think you understand. I said DH is an example where LESS abilities means LESS skill cap. A DH can basically play on tunnel vision and just spam chaos strike and blade dance when it’s off cd.
Not really thought. ye icelance does alot of our damage but we only do that when we have procs. very reactive playstyle atm frost mages.
Why is DH always singled out here? It is not the only spec with 4 core buttons in the basic rotation. Frost DKs, Arcane Mages, BM Hunters come to mind. Heck Ret paladins have an exceedingly simply rotation outside of their burst windows, basically “press this to build, and press either ST spend or AOE spend”. It’s not exactly rocket science.
This isn’t me claiming DH is hard, it isn’t. I guess the point is very few classes in WoW are hard. And if you think having 2 more buttons that you essentially “press on cooldown” makes a spec much harder, then I don’t know what to say.
The only specs that are “difficult” in my mind is stuff like current iteration of Sub rogue due the consistency in which you have to balance your output around frequent burst windows whilst working with a semi-RNG resource gainer in shadow techniques. It requires you to pay a lot of attention to your inner class as well as the fight. A vast majority of classes follow the same formula otherwise, except some of them have 1-2 more buttons they press when a massive flashup tells them to and this is apprently massively more difficult than DH.
Also it’s current iteration DH (the meta one) that is braindead. Hark back to when Momentum was the higher performer and tell me that’s easier than several specs to play. Playing a Momentum build DH properly is extremely hard because two of your abilities core to performing require you to actually aim them properly else you have tons of downtime.
I agree that momentum makes DH a way more demanding spec. The problem is that Blizzard always nerfs difficult specs to perform worse than passive talents. (yes I consider momentum an active talent)
I think you have no idea what you are talking about, nor do you know how DH works, yet you give it as example.
Just because a damage ability is high on the chart, doesn’t mean it you just press 2 buttons. The only two specs that do this are UDK and BM hunters. But you would not know those stuff, would you?
Difficult means not just the total number of buttons, but the amount of VIABLE choices you can press in each situation. Havoc gameplay is basically just a simple priority system of abilities, using eye beam and blade dance when off cooldown. It even uses the same rotation for single and multi target.
“basically using eye beam and blade dance” is a very good way to step on your GCD, do mediocre damage and 0 utility.
Outside of the fact that you have to weave your resets properly in order to milk the most out of Meta, you just described every DPS spec. Generating and dumping, while trying to milk out the most of your windows of bursts.
And you moved the goal post - from “How simple is the class” “no aim shots”, you turned it into the “how the DPS comes out”, in which case again DH are not the biggest offenders.
But hey, if they were that easy - why aren’t you playing one?
We can agree there. The issue is blizz have a huge disjunction between “difficult increasing” talents and “difficulty lessening” ones in that even under optimal play, the ones that make things harder parse worse.
Initially I was playing with a Momentum spec and it was great fun and very engaging, but sadly eye beam goes brrrrttt spam build just outperforms it by miles and takes far less effort.
Similar for Frost and BoS. There’s a common thread that the talent is the most braindead and least satisfying talent to take in the row, yet if you take the others you are gimping yourself for no good reason. At least in SL the Obliteration build with 2Hfrost may get something of a look in.
Regarding Havoc, i’m not sure the Demonic nerf will be enough given Furious Gaze is now baseline (admittedly massively nerfed) and Cycle of Hatred now reduces EyE Beam cooldown by 3 secs when it procs which means the build has not been discouraged really, the whole “Spam Eye Beam to ride the haste wave” build will still probably be very popular due to it performing well in ST and AOE and the fact that obscene haste for free is always good picks (especially at start of expo) and tends to work nicely with other effects like procs from soulbinds etc.
That’s principally the reason DH havoc has performed as well as it has in SL. All that haste works marvelouslly well with corruptions. It’s not about the damage the beam deals itself, it’s about the fact it pumps your haste to spam those corruption procs. I don’t even have full Furious Gaze nor corruption haste buffs atm due if I eye beam when i’ve procced meticulous scheming I get something like 4100 haste for free on top of the 420 haste from my essence minor.
There are sections of the DH community that don’t want this to continue. It would be cool for blizzard to give us more stat value. At current our kit gives us tons of haste, eye beam crits on its own reducing crit value and mastery doesn’t buff our physical damage (first blood) which means it’s stacking versa yet again and aiming for procs.

I dont have beta access
Maybe you do now?! They send out a LOT of new beta invites (even I got in too).