Another expansion where we are drowned in cooldowns and everything is balanced around them.
Cooldowns are a huge problem, they are very powerful and they can stack. Instead of toning down the power of cooldowns and buffing the dmg outside of them, blizzard did the opposite resulting in seeing abilities such as Templar verdict hit from 3k to a Ludacris 23k crit or even more.
This is not fun in PVP or PVE!
Example for rogues:
Backstab deals 800 dmg, shadowstrike 1900 dmg, eviscerate 2500 dmg
DMG modifiers: shadow dance 20%, symbols of death 15%, nightstalker 12%, Find Weakness debuff armor reduction, shadow blades, conduits…
As a sub rogue, I have more dmg modifiers than abilities that do dmg.
Am I the only one that hates this type of gameplay?
I have to agree. I’m pro convoke for instance but I miss when fillers actually did some damage rather than being some sort of resource collector. Doubt we will go back to old times though.
Rogue, mage, monk, paladin, druid and I think warlock are the pinnacle of this unhealthy game design tbh. All classes which WILL GLOBAL YOU in the given burst window but outside of that its just meh, with the odd exception of feral hitting like a dumpster truck, fire mage being able to force cds up sooner, paladin getting RNG wings hence RNGing cds out of people for small burst windows. I think I’m getting at the point really. Oh and monk having crazy sustained damage.
Yeah, i agree. I really dislike the focus on cooldown and buff stacking. I mean, im fine with the idea of burst cooldowns. But i don’t want my damage to go up by practically 300%. Im also okay with the idea of one or two specs functioning like this. But it really feels like every spec works like this these days.
Ret Paladins are ironically one of the few specs i think should work like this though. I feel like it just make thematic sense for them to be relatively weak and hold back until they need the extra power and call on a “divine favor”. So to speak. I mean, that’s basically what forbearance is after all.
But back on topic. I have a feeling most people actually like this kind of playstyle though, of having an “ultra” or a “moment of glory” where you can just go balls to the wall.
Judgment debuff for 25% more damage. Righteous Verdict for 10% more damage. Seraphim for ~25% more damage. Final Reckoning for 30% more damage. Divine Toll. Gladiator’s Badge. Sephuz’s.
Pretty much the only DPS increase button I genuinely like pressing is Wings. My class feels terrible if I don’t have CDs up. The one place where I can genuinely enjoy Retri is in a random BG where I can get near permanent Wings uptime.
This is the reason why I like even Classic’s class design 10 times more than Retail’s. Even spamming 1 single button that deal consistently good damage feels better than doing virtually no damage for 2-3 minutes straight between short windows of being an unstoppable God. In Classic, you just cast a spell and it does damage. No build-spend BS, no waiting for a cooldown, no relying on 27 procs. Beautiful.
(That and also the rest of the non-core rotation abilities aren’t stupid, unlike Retail)
Class design has been a joke for a long while. I think most of my posts have been on class design and over a years I noticed two things:
1-I’m always right.
2-No one listens, so I stopped posting.
On the topic of CDs: yeah of course they suck and I’ve been saying that since Legion. WoD was the last expansion with good class design.
Why exactly is it a bad thing to centre things around cooldowns? Even if you left only a few specs that way there’s just so much power fantasy in amassing all this power to unleash on one’s foe at once. Rather than just having a barely noticeable effect in favour of being mildly stronger all the timer.
Brought this same issue several years ago, the Goku spirit bomb gameplay style is restricting and bad since you feel completely useless outside your big 1,5 or 3 min CDs as a lock. And its really obvious in PvP for the opposing team when a lock pops his CDs.
What, you don’t like being globaled in less than 5 seconds with no counter play? Oh, wait, sorry. OP is rogue himself. So then why complain when you play one of the most busted classes?
OP actually complained not about being globalled, but that they can global people once every 2 mins or so and they feel crap outside of that. Legit complaint tbh. It’s not good to feel amazing 15% of the time and as a turd the rest of the time and have the game feel like you’re simply waiting to perform.
1-2 specs fine, but way too many DPS specs ATM revolve entirely around their CDs and gaming them than having a consistent rotation.
Even though it is fun to blast people up when you use the CDs , i have to agree that the game design around that issue is a problem.
I do think that buffing your damage is essential and there should be buffs but to buff up your dps for a short time (usually the window is around 10 sec for most classes) but to buff up to 300% is stupid…
I think all abilities for most classes are weak when not in burst CDs and as you already said it, outside your CDs your character feel so weak but with CDs feels too strong…
I would love to see the base damage to be buffed up and the burst damage to be tuned down to up to a 50% or even 100% at most cases.
I agree. I hate I have to charge Stormkeeper prior to almost every other fight. It is so annoying… especially since the content is timed i.e. group is just rushing everything and is fighting the mobs while I charge myself… It´s the most stupid spell I have ever seen.
I tried to play mage but Combustion is so annoying… mage is totally OP when combustion is active, but totally useless when on the CD.
Rogue - I don´t like how I just keep waiting for my blade flurry to come off CD…
So yes, these short CDs are ruining my game. Give me one 3 - 5 min CD dmg boost to be used in boss encounters and I would be fine.
Rather, instead of dealing like 15k per SS with cds and 2.5k without, maybe balance it so it’s a bit closer so CDs aren’t increasing their output by 400% but maybe quite a bit less, so they offer a boost, but they don’t change you from “kill a target in 20 seconds” to “kill a target in 2 seconds” which is how many of them work atm.
Fire mage is a good example. Fireball/blast on their own deal mediocre damage at best, and a firemage (in pvp for example) will struggle to make a meaningful dent on a target with these abilities even if they play well. A healer can undo what a fire mage will accomplish in 5 secs with these abilities within a single cast.
Yet during Combustion they can kill a target within 1-2 seconds with the correct setup. It’s an utterly ridiculous state of affairs. Cooldowns should make a target more dangerous, but it shouldn’t be a case (as is for a lot of classes atm) where when they have no cooldowns they are essentially no threat whatsoever in a pvp setting so long as a healer is nearby or can attend to them once per 5 secs, whereas during cooldowns they can demolish a target even with a healer focusing on them unless said healer has emergency cooldowns like Ultimate Sacrifice for example.
It makes the game into less about general state of playing well (for example, positioning, kiting, maintaining rotation whilst dealing with enemies) and much more about “so long as u execute ur burst phase correctly u win”. Ie You can play extremely well in an arena game, LoS to high heavens keep pressure up all game and dodge all the right spells, but if you make a single mistake when the opponent has their burst ready- it’s completely undone and you lose. Cooldowns should not mitigate skill to that degree and player skill should not be almost totlaly weighted into “how you handle an enemy cooldown”. That should be part of the equation, but not the majority of it.
At the moment how well you fare against a fire mage is almost entirely determined by your approach as to how you handle their attempts to set you up for combustion. Nothing else really matters. It’s the same for Boomkins and convoke, and sub rogues and their openers. The burst is too unforgiving in terms of leeway whereas the skill windows outside of burst is way too forgiving because damage is so low. You can play crap outside of surviving burst say, and you’ll rarely feel the heat for it because the opponent simply won’t have the damage to make you pay for it.
I think arms warrior is the one exception to this where their sustained damage is pretty decent (and this is why they’re so popular) so so long as they survive the burst phase they have an advantage over many other classes whom will scramble to delay until their next burst, whereas Arms will just keep going. Their burst cds make an impact, but not a 100-0 type difference. Ironically their damage is balanced very well (the problem with arms in pvp is they have lots of very strong utility on very small cooldowns on top of this)
but what can we do about it?