Allow me to disagree. As pointed out in my OP, some classes did get some improvement - paladins, for instance, although there’s still much to do if you ask me - but others haven’t gotten much yet, and druids are a very good example of that. Bears can’t have typhoon and vortex at the same time, ferals got barkskin and lost SI and artifact abilities are still talents. Fire and frost mages just lost their tempo shield and locks their curse of weakness. One step forward, ten steps backward.
I took unpruning for what it means : undoing pruning, which consisted of removing abilities (for the sake of nothing if you ask me). Not only we’re a long way from it, but they’re only bringing back some abilities at the cost of others. I personally fail to see any unpruning in this.
Just the same, there are currently abilities which are core to each class’ gameplay and we don’t need any further removing. See examples above.
You’ll always have abilities that you use more than others which would be more situational, doesn’t mean that they’re useless, least of all that they should be removed. Those abilities, in my opinion, were the “flavor” added to each class. Then again, I’m not against removing useless abilities, because back in WOTLK I would never, ever use arcane blast on my fire mage. But why remove alter time ? Why remove deep freeze ? Why remove forst armor ? The list is long…
But the macro issue didn’t apply to all abilities, offensive or otherwise, and even if it did, what’s the problem ? I’m personally very bad with macros, I’m still a clicker 15 years later and none of this has ever made my experience in WoW any wose than yours.
i will say this before hand : I mainly play PvE, and have never really touched PvP. so loss of abilities such as PvP Talents have 0 Impact on me as a player nor did i care about them to begin with.
While i agree, there are defintly class choices… i did write in my inital post there are still some critism surrounding Mages and Priests currently… due to their SL Changes do not appear for the better.
its very true some classes are losing abilities… but room needs to be made, u cant just bundle everything into speccs it wont work out properly… and on a GCD now… with too many CDs would come some major gameplay problems.
and yes arguing taking em off the GCD is valid, but then we cross into a Balancing nightmare with too many classes just able to instantly stack up against other choices.
what im stating is, saying they’re gonna unprune doesnt = every ability in the game is coming back. They’ve chosen to go back and Bring SOME of the abilities that were deleted back.
this is very opinonal arguable… just because 1 player wants something back doesnt mean every player does.
While valid there are more abilities i’d want to see come back… Mits obvious why macroing defeats the purpose Of returning abilities.
From a PvE background, a button you never see or Specifically use and Just let go off on A copy and pasted text. Makes the quantity of buttons Mute.
If a rotation is 40Abilities condensed into 5 buttons, your not Actively performing a 40 button rotation… your Pressing 5 buttons to activate a Cinematic.
icy veins and tons of guide sites gave u the ability to copy and paste those macros into your game… so did guides, and youtube tutorials.
if u a 40 button rotation, Condensed into a 5 Static Macros, you havent expanded ur possibilities, as your abilities statically go off without consideration.
5 button rotation
5 Macro cinematic.
are as bad and bland as one another, and it was Never the fix to the problem… nor is it a fix now. returning to a time where players took a DPS Loss to IGNORE the quantity of buttons they have to deal with in classes… Statistically shows ALOT of people did NOT like MoP times.
from a PvE Perspective MoP class Design wasnt amazing… however i do hear from a PvP Perspective it was Alot better.
I’m not main healer, so didn’t knew aboot that one.
I do consider a spell back if it’s baseline once more. Moving a baseline ability to a talent is imo taking away said spell.
That’s true, but it was great to have a cleave builder, which we’re lacking of.
Yeah, it was a talent, I may be confused aboot spell names !
We had a 6 buttons rotations in wrath. Sure, it was a dull priority system :
Judgement of light → Divine storm → crusader strike → Hammer of wrath → consecration → exorcism (if Art of war proc )
In cata, it didn’t worked imo, till 2P T13 that granted a holy power when using judgment.
Just to strawman a bit, Wisdom was regarded as being the better Judgment for retri
On a more serious note, I guess it was a bit dull, but having Art of War proc very often did make retri a lot more interesting, even for PvE. On top of that, we also had Holy Wrath, which was useful for most of Wotlk.
Many people think Retri is still dull today, and I’d agree with that, as our spells barely hit for anything if we don’t have wings up. Having downtime on Retri isn’t that huge of an issue as people think, as we need to fit in our hybrid kit as well. Throwing a couple heals around, buffing and whatnot.
Divine Purpose and the mastery made retri very enjoyable in Cata. Sure, it was an RNG train, but you could actually count on having good RNG, because of the amount of procs you could get. What a lot of Retris didn’t actually know during Cata, is that Holy Wrath procced Divine Purpose, and the fact that it dealt damage to everyone.
Yea Legion did far more damage to class/spec health than WoD did in my opinion, Blizzard just managed to trick most players into thinking their class is functioning because all the “bolt-ons” that came in form of Artifacts/Legendaries/Relics and PvP talents.
spells going from class wide to spec specific like arcane explosion, fire blast, cone of cold, blizzard etc., (and that’s just for mages) all happened in Legion, people tend to forget that and only bash WoD for being the “main pruning” expansion.
Legion was way worse in terms of gutting classes, in WoD most classes somewhat played like they did in MoP which was still fine, it was just the expansion that first introduced pruning in a larger capacity, that’s probably why it is always referred as the “great pruning expansion”.
if you think balancing is everything like you seem to do, I can’t take your statements seriously anymore.
Do you seriously think those are just balance issues? w0t?
How about it not being fun? It’s just not fun to have a 40 minute game only to then get arbitrarily 1-shot because the warrior figured out to hold his Slam button for 30 seconds?
It’s just not fun. I don’t care about the balance when these sorts of problems are about.
well most people seem to had fun in MoP, especially in season 15 how’d you explain that ?
I think being 100-0’d in a stun by someone how managed to proc 3 tentacles or 3 stars in a row is more frustrating than getting killed by someone who is at least pressing their abilities to deliver the kill.
I don’t know? I certainly didn’t. My entire duelling community died as well. MoP lost 4 million subscribers. MoP also brought us phasing - no doubt a significant contributor to the death of my duelling community as well.
Now, you may notice that I’m playing a Pandaren, so obviously I liked that expansion, but I cannot understand how people can seriously claim that MoP’s combat and PvP was an improvement on what preceded it. WoW’s PvP in terms of viewership also took a sharp decline in MoP.
So when people come in here and start talking about how WoW’s combat should return to MoP - no more and no less - then I get a little bit… flabbergasted.
Why?! Why MoP?! What on Earth has possessed this community to believe that MoP, MOP?!?!, was the pinnacle of WoW class design.
Even in PvE it had massive problems. I remember I managed to rebind the entirety of the Guardian Druid rotation and defensive abilities into a single macro for AoE, and one for single target. There were no dynamics at all. 0. Just press the button and win.
Why MoP?! Seriously? What made MoP’s combat great? Like, for real? And please don’t make the answer the idiotic “IT HAS MANY BUTTONS LOL”. You and I both know that combat is supposed to be deeper than just adding a myriad buttons.
And yes, of course corruptions are just as bad, if not worse. I already went over that. But removing corruptions does not mean adding all the buttons from MoP. Those are two different things. We can do one and not the other.
Because we still had a lot of class-wide spells, complexity (2 players playing the same spec in the same gear would get different DPS output, just because of personnal skill) we had so many tools to play with (I could agree that to a certain extent, we had TOO much utility/cc) thus there were less of class “segregation”. After pruning, rogue and boomy druids kept most of their suppportive tools, whereas other spec got gutted.
Overall, classes were more complete. Now, most of these active spells are either gone or are “talent”. I put quotes because those so called talents are mandatory to make specs functionnal.
That’s my opinion. For me, WoD was not that damaging as most of people would think. And I still think that WoD gameplay + Legion’s artifact abilities + some changes could have been great.
All design have flaws and blunders. The question would be : Which one is the worst ? Having bare classes or way too much complete kits ?
If it is indeed like this, then I am afraid they chose the path of borrowed external systems power for yet another expansion. And this doesn’t sound good.
simply answer why MoP class design was regarded as “pinnacle” by so many people was because every class felt powerful and fast.
I certainly didn’t get bored a single time playing during MoP, not even doing LFR because I constantly felt the urge to push my ability to play the game to the limit which was challenging and I liked that.
I could have played one single class and wouldn’t have gotten bored but I played many because everything seemed so fun to play, in recent expansions I felt the urge to level and test everything because on class is capable of binding my interest for no longer than a couple days at most, the complete opposite of what it used to be and should be.
I don’t necessarily think unpruning is the only and best solution to achieve a deeper and more engaging/skill rewarding gameplay experience but it worked in the past, at least for me.
one of the things I’d like to see more is interesting new abilities for shadowlands, alongside the comeback of utility. For example the priest covernant ability “mindgames” is one of the most exciting and fun sounding abilities I have encountered in a while and with an extreme high skill-cap, alone that made me instantly reconsider what character I level first in Shadowlands and this is one of the aspects I miss like I already mentioned, exciting abilities.
If every class would get 2-3 of those “high skill cap” abilities I wouldn’t mind too much if they would leave the rest of the classes as they are without doing too much of unpruning.
No he isnt clueless. MoP class desing was horrible. Classes were so homogenized and compleltly striped out of all uniquenes. Every class had answer to everthing. All classes had stuns, silence, kick, self heal, strong burst dmg, etc… Only difference was if you were meele or ranged. Every class had so many skills that skills start overlaping between classes all over the place.
Thats becouse classes were homoginized to the point that was actualy far more balanced. But this is rpg game and playing mage supostu feel like playing mage not like playinng warlock with differently themed skills.
Well that´s exactly how mage feels atm. My main is a mage. Everything fun and tricky has been removed. Left are only the basic damage dealing abilities + a few utility abilities (poly, nova, blink) we have had since this game launched, more or less. It´s a farce.
Classes feel more alike now than in MoP, that´s for sure. Less is not more this time, pal. Did many classes set up burst with alter time + shatter/deep freeze? Hmm? The only class that has had anything remotely like that is mage.
