Out of those 35 buttons u got, you’ll use maybe 10-15. If you can’t manage and figure out which ones to use and when, that’s a you problem.
I think it’s fair to question why the designers have implemented 35 buttons if you conclude that you only need to use 10-15 of them. Why have the other 20-25 buttons at all then?!
Bloat is not something worth preserving just for the heck of it.
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So players can find depth, to find those little quirks that give them extra 1%, something situational to use, as I said, it’s not a MOBA, you can make use of things like eagle eye, or mind vision. Is it needed? No. Is it nice to have? Yes.
If you can’t differentiate between mind vision and flash heal, it is a you problem.
Rubbish.
Let me illustrate it for you.
This is my Frost Death Knight:
This is my Holy Priest:
Trust me when I say that my Holy Priest doesn’t have 2x as much depth as my Frost Death Knight.
Is it nice to have Shackle Undead? I don’t know, I never press it! Maybe once a year I find an opportunity to use it. Is that depth?!
It’s terrible design. For a new player it is an absolute disaster to pick Priest, because you get so many buttons and it’s absolutely overwhelming to figure out what to use and when. But does it say anywhere that Priest isn’t a newbie-friendly class? No.
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That’s because DK and DH are easiest classes in game.
Priest is highest skill capped, why does it have so many abilities? Because it relies on you using variety of spells to handle situations. Can’t handle it? Play a resto druid.
Yeah, so maybe Blizzard should friggin’ advertise that somewhere! They’re smart enough to recommend a server for new players, so surely they can recommend a class as well. I mean, you talked about MOBAs, and Blizzard’s own Heroes of the Storm describes its various heroes as easy, medium, hard, very hard.
Here’s the “help” Blizzard gives a new player who wants to play the above-mentioned Holy Priest with its insane amount of buttons:
I mean, c’mon, that’s absolutely terrible game design from a newbie perspective. How the hell is that supposed to help you wield all of these buttons:
???
Dude, I’ve been playing Priest for 16 years. I have over 1000 hours played on it. When I think it’s too much, then it’s obviously not going to be easy on a newbie either. So who the hell is the target audience for this?! Who is it that looks at all those buttons and says: “I’ll take a few more please!” (because yes, I still have to squeeze some Covenant abilities in there somewhere…).
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Then suggest that, not that they squish the entire class.
It’s high skill cap heal, which means that people who get good at it, can get far with it. That’s why you see lot of holy priests at the top.
But it’s the same for Discipline and Shadow!
Where do I see that?! Holy Priest is historically a bottom-tier healer in both PvE and PvP.
There’s absolutely no correlation between the amount of buttons you get and the depth and performance it relates to. The fact that Demon Hunters have reigned supreme since Legion with their bare-bone toolkit speaks volumes in that regard.
The design consistency is absolutely terrible and for a new player it’s a jungle to navigate in.
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Depends on tier, discipline has been at top lately, but holy priest was pretty high at times.
You’re probably looking at absolute top, mythic raiding.
Holy shines best in middle, heroic raiding.
Holy falls short on very high end, but really around normal and heroic raiding, holy is very powerful as healer.
If you aren’t a mythic raider, holy should be pretty strong healer, especially with 10 years of experience.
No it wasn’t. Holy Priest has almost always been a sub-tier pick for both PvE and PvP. The exceptions have usually been due to stat imbalance and not gameplay depth or the volume of tools it has at its disposal.
But your point was that having a lot of buttons correlates to gameplay depth. But clearly that’s not the case when Holy Priest – which has the most buttons of all – doesn’t translate that supposed depth into anything. It’s just buttons for the sake of buttons.
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It does contribute to depth, if you learn how to manage your holy words and stuff, you’ll be better at holy priest.
Once again your claims are based on mythic raiding, and at very top.
Holy priest is like what prot paladin was compared to prot warrior during BFA mythic+.
Prot warrior was top tank due to high damage mitigation and uncapped aoe.
Prot paladin on other hand, was perfect for mid-tier keys and runs where you don’t pull several packs at once, high damage on 3-5 targets, selfheals and absorbs.
Same with holy priest, issue comes with mythic raids where damage is just too high to manage, but in normal and heroic raids, holy priest is pretty damn good.
Considering you do LFR and maybe normal raiding, you should have no trouble whatsoever with holy priest.
It makes me miss the times where at max level we just had to pick the items with the bigger numbers relevant to our spec
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There’s a difference between depth and bloat.
Here’s the single-target damage-dealing abilities for a Holy Priest:
There’s 5.
You’re not getting more depth from having 5 buttons to press instead of 3. And the depth isn’t going to increase if it was 7 buttons.
It’s just more buttons. It adds complexity, because there’s more stuff to keep track of and more fingers that needs to play piano across the keyboard, but it’s not depth.
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Once again it’s an MMORPG.
I know you’d like nothing more than to have just 2 damaging spells, 3 healing spells, but it’s just not how it works.
You think other healers don’t have as many damaging attacks? Rdruid needs to alternate moonfire, sunfire and wrath, even use cat form to maximize their usefulness.
Monk has several abilities as well for damaging.
Paladin as well, and so does the shaman, on top of totems.
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Yes it is. But MMORPGs do not have a tradition of having an excess of buttons. That is not a staple of the genre. It is however a trend within WoW because of pressure from parts of the player-base to have increasingly more buttons. But don’t insinuate that having lots of buttons is a core part of an MMORPG.
That is not what I have said at all. Don’t exaggerate my point just so you can ridicule it. That’s not respectful.
What I have said is that there’s little correlation between depth and performance (Demon Hunters perform exceedingly well despite having little depth).
And that there’s a lot of bloat as you get more buttons (like the damage-dealing abilities of a Holy Priest).
And that a new player has no way of navigating within the jungle that is class design when first starting out playing the game.
No, my point was more that the gameplay experience isn’t enhanced because I now have to press Shadow Word: Pain every once in a while, whereas before I didn’t. The addition of that ability doesn’t add depth, it adds management and upkeep.
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Which ones dude? I put the list of all spells above, tell me which are the 28 I should give up?
That’s because you don’t pvp. Getting locked out of one school allows you to damage with the other.
micdrop
A few thoughts on that.
- That’s also not gameplay depth. It’s just more management.
- The interrupt mechanic is pretty terrible design and it’s completely arbitrary why it locks you out of one school of magic (hence why Blizzard has to design around it constantly with secondary schools of magic and interrupt reduction mechanics and diminishing returns and what not. Talk about band-aid…).
- Other PvP games, like LoL or DOTA, show clearly that you do in fact not need an excess number of buttons to produce gameplay depth and high skill-ceilings. It’s just WoW players who have gotten caught up in the notion that spamming a ton of keybinds is skill. That may be true the way that a StarCraft pro can maintain high APM. But WoW doesn’t generate depth from it because PvPers approach the gameplay with a narrow set of strategies and tactics, not at all similar to a StarCraft player. So the gameplay revolves around execution derived from management and upkeep, and less from depth through choice and finesse.
You want that mic again? 
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That’s exactly what depth means…
This made no sense.
You compared a MMORPG to a MOBA. And then you wonder why your arguments make no sense?
Heck shooters have no spells whatsoever, let’s compare that to the SIMS.
I pretty much never lost it.
As other people have already mentioned using macros to tie multiple spells to one button greatly solves this issue.
Another way to solve this while also saving your wrists is to do smart keybinds, basically use 1-5 for the spells you cast the most, Shift 1-5 for the ones you use less but on CD and Ctr 1-5 for your major cooldowns.
Some other buttons to free up for potential keybinds are the one your thumb has easy access to, like C, V, B and N. Q, E & R are also fantastic buttons to put some spells on not to mention some mouse buttons if yours has the option.