Unpruning: Can we just go back to MoP class design and take it from here?

[Ishayoe-frostmane (Ishayoe)]

@Redoctober-frostmane

Part of it yes, and I agree with you that MoP simply had unreasonable amounts of CC. But if you are being honest to yourself, if you had to pick between Legion or BfA class design and MoP, wouldn’t you also choose the latter?

Ohai Red :3

It’s hard to say. They are both ridiculously terrible in their own ways.

MoP has the problem of swifty stacks, especially within damage, overpowered healing, ridiculous levels of CC, and just way too many utility and mobility buttons.

It then also features some very complex rotations but with little choice within them, though some of them didn’t work correctly and could just be put into castsequence macros (also called lazy-macros) and played perfectly or near perfectly.

It had so many buttons I literally had problems playing it. To be fair, I have small hands, but I shouldn’t have to bind abilities to ctrl+shift+E and things like that.

WoD has a new set of issues. The CC is toned back substantially and the DR’s I believe were ultimately settled on 8 categories, the healing is more reasonable, but the ridiculous mobility and some of the crazy utility did remain, and the swifty macro was now a swifty spell. They just merged the swifty macro. Nobody asked for that?!

WoD falls flat on class design because it does a lot of work to reduce the intricate complexity of the simple, rotational spells for no apparent reason, then slides in a bunch of wonky RNG to try to break the lazy-macros, which it does perfectly. Snap shotting is gone is a good example, because Blizzard just couldn’t help themselves simplify gear even more.

So what’s an appropriate jumping off point here? Well, neither honestly.

@Redoctober-frostmane

Cataclysm isn’t exactly an expansion quoted by people as having great gameplay or even being good, and the original trilogy will become available through Classic in all likelihood. So if they would ever consider taking inspiration from a point back in time, it’s really possible the best realistic point they could look into would be MoP in fact.

I mean… I get where you’re going, but I really don’t think we should have to play older versions of the game just to enjoy great class design (and a social experience). Obviously it’d still be different in Shadowlands than it was in tBC - a bit more refined - but I don’t really agree that, because Classic would have good class design, therefore it’s okay that retail doesn’t.

And I’d go so far as to say that people who miss MoP class design just don’t know what came before it. I would certainly prefer Cata class design to MoP. Absolutely.

Anyone remembers how MoP had like 80% PvP Power and 70% PvP Resilience, and any time it broke, which it did quite frequently by the way and most infamously with BM hunters, people just got pretty much globalled.

MoP was just all sorts of ridiculous.

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Here’s what I would do:

First you take my gaering system. I actually got a lot of this in Shadowlands already, but it’s important to read this to understand the rest:

My ideal gearing system

Many opinions have been given on this subject. Here is mine. It might be too late for Shadowlands, but nevertheless I want to get my thoughts out there. I’ve bottled them up and given fragments about them for a long time now… This gearing system is radically different from the one we have today. I am not going to talk about the art design. I think Blizzard perfectly know what to do in that regard at this point. The feedback they have gotten has been very clear and concise. Goal: Gear should…

Then we have to kill the current talent system. Just take it out back and shoot it. We don’t need it. Get the old trees back. I don’t care about whatever perceived weaknesses they have, they are just plain better. I prefer having my talents and loadouts concentrated in a single tree as opposed to having them on Azerite pieces, necklace, talents, spec, corruption gear, and PvP talents all at once. Blizzard, calm down ffs. xD

Once we’ve gotten things a little more settled and a little bit less overwhelmingly full of RNG, and we’ve got a more varied, set-in-stone, less RNG’y loot system, we can begin to focus on the classes themselves.

Take the swifty cooldowns out back and shoot them. It is not fun to be useful a minority of the time, and it is not fun to be on the receiving end of a cooldown stack.

Introduce far more complexity in the rotation. In other words, don’t have a rotation at all, but make a dozen, or maybe more, spells that all have a unique use. If the enemy keeps doing the same, then you get to keep spamming the same, and that’s fine. Your abilities should be a response to what an enemy does, not a response to whims of the Gods of RNG. I really don’t care if it’s fun to play against a target dummy. Unfortunately, people like Bellular and Blizzard themselves are working against me on this.

Fortunately, there still is some of it being done, like all mages having Arcane Explosion or Frostbolt again. Great decision!

Once we’ve gotten these things under control and we reintroduce snapshotting (BUT KEEP TRINKETS SANE. THEY DON’T NEED TO ADD TO THE SWIFTY MACROS!!!), we should find ourselves in a kind-of hybrid scenario between tBC and WotLK.

Then you sprinkle the covenant abilities on top, which gets us a little bit of that MoP juice, but not too much, and then I think we’re there.

So, if I have to be honest with myself - would I rather have MoP or WoD class design for PvP? My answer is: No.