Your lil’ bro’ knew what is a MMO or played one before or the concept was totally foreign to him when you told him about WoW and showed those things?
Totally new, he never played anything like this so far, it would be his first
I thought so
Don’t worry, he would have reacted to any MMO not juts WoW like that
Definetely, and probably WoW isn’t even the worst case, but the “problem” stands as a whole game genre I think
That is very true. I think the dynamic between Blizzard and addon makers is a bit problematic anyway. The game is built around the assumption you will have these addons installed. I’m not ‘anti-addon’ but it does seem to create a spiral of having to have a certain level of difficulty to keep players challenged with the addons in mind, which obviously makes it harder for anyone who doesn’t run the actual addons lol.
As far as specs and rotations go, I think it’s fine if external sources help you squeeze out a bit more, help you master a spec. I think it’s bad tho if a spec is not legible in game, and you have to go to external sources to make sense of it.
Starting a MMORPG is a daunting prospect, true, but looking at a raid as a start is probably a bad idea, since it’s the most mechanically complex part of the game.
A lot of people here are saying stuff like “Meh, it’s not that complicated”, but that’s speaking from years of playing, when i started playing i didn’t have a single clue what i was doing (And that was Vanilla, when talents were less intertwined and most trinkets were stat-sticks), sure, now there are more guides online, but having to “Do homework” before getting into a game is something that’s pretty alien to the average gamer nowadays.
WoW did stand out due to being the least complex game of its sort when it released, but that was 18 years ago (So around the time your brother was born), gaming in general changed a lot since then, games being easy to pick up and play is the norm nowadays.
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I do think there is a lot of truth in this. Being new is always harder in MMOs.
Also one of the things that always puts me off in other MMOs is that I don’t understand anything any more and I go from being expert level to complete lost noob. So I rarely stick to them. But that is how I felt first starting WoW in TBC and the game explained very little back then. It’s much better these days at holding your hand, directing you, explaining things.
I am so comfortable in WoW, even with every introduction of systems/revamps/updates etc. I still know my way around and how things work. This is my happy place 
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Sure thing, Johnny!
Combat ability definition: A spell or ability or virtually permanently available item which does something that is generally useful in any type of combat against any number of targets for any duration of time and which cannot simply be used before combat instead.
Now, I should preface: Not every spec has 29 combat abilities. This is something that seems to be happening to classes and specs that are older or were created during complex moments in WoW’s history. So DK’s, DH’s, and Evokers are similar to e.g. Warriors (removal of stances) and Hunters (removal of minimum range) while many other classes are completely wild, such as rogues, mages, monks, or priests.
I will now bring you my very own character and all her combat abilities in the standard M+ build:
- Alter Time
- Blast Wave
- Cone of Cold
- Counterspell
- Dragon’s Breath
- Frost Nova
- Frostbolt
- Greater Invisibility (damage reduction and can be used to juke casts, similar to Vanish)
- Ice Block
- Ice Nova
- Mass Barrier
- Mirror Image
- Polymorph
- Remove Curse
- Shifting Power
- Shimmer
- Spellsteal
- Time Warp
- Blizzard
- Cold Snap
- Comet Storm
- Flurry
- Frozen Orb
- Glacial Spike
- Ice Barrier
- Ice Lance
- Icy Veins
- Freeze
- Racial, in my case Quaking Palm aka pandapunch
- Now starting things that aren’t the class but need a keybind and are useful in combat all the same: Trinket (and maybe 2, but I only have one with active use atm)
- Health potion+Healthstone (can be combined to one bind, most people will probably have 2 binds here)
- DPS potion
- Now starting extra fun I could easily have accessed but didn’t right now, but sometimes do: Displacement
- Ice Floes (Currently not good in PvE because cast time of Glacial Spike was reduced, otherwise would’ve been mandatory)
- Ring of Frost (good in Neltharus)
- Ray of Frost (sometimes good on Tyrannical)
- Now starting extra spells that are used if e.g. a player dies or an enemy vanishes: Arcane Explosion
- Arcane Intellect
Making for a grand total of 38 combat abilities that are actually useful in some way in combat.
Honourable mentions, spell that should be useful in combat but are not:
- Fire Blast
- Slow Fall is sometimes useful but so rarely I won’t include it
There’s also slow and mass poly but these really only see use in PvP, where you add those onto all the “extra fun ones” above and then on top also add Frost Bomb, but here the DPS potion keybind falls away, so we go to 40.
And indeed, 40 is the exact number of keybinds you need to play the standard frost mage PvP build. Enjoy.
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Your list reminds me of back in MoP when I’d just capped my mage, I looked up an opener and it was a huge long list and I was like nope!
xD
Oooouuhh I forgot a few. Freeze! How could I. Lemme go back. I don’t think I made my point quite well enough, clearly frost mages are easy and need more abilities. /s
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Doing damage on frost mage is at least intuitive and if you understand the goal, then it’s clear what button to press provided you track your stacks and cooldowns with weakauras.
But yeah, the fact we rely on 3rd party apps like curseforge in such an expensive game, because the engineers couldn’t figure out a good in-game tool is kind of bananas.
The only minus you might have as a newbie is when you reach level 70 and are bombarded with all sorts of different campaigns and you don’t quite know which ones are important and which ones can just be skipped and don’t unlock anything important.
And yes, some chars are a bit difficult to play, so newcomers often choose an easy one like bm hunter etc., and then they get bullied because they play hunter, but as a brand new player you don’t start playing a difficult char, so of course they could make some a little easier so new not just chosen hunter hehe
I think you and I have a different definition of ‘important’. 
You know what, I should take out AE and AI. Although you do sometimes need to use them to knock a rogue out in PvP or re-buff your allies during combat because somebody died. I’ll humour you and take those out, bringing us to 29, which is conveniently enough exactly what you asked for.
I don’t think any of those are unimportant. Name one and tell me why it’s unimportant.
EDIT: By the way, when are we going to talk about /cancelaura ? Mages have two /cancelaura, one which is quite important in combat: The ability to cancel Alter Time and end Alter Time while avoiding accidentally double-clicking alter time (secure ability toggling)? That’s another 2 binds for you although you can combine them with other binds.
You mean like every class in PvP having to cancel aura Bubble and freedom to deal with mage spell steal? xd
The irony of reading your comment as I see this in game
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Dunno if it’s harder but ESO’s combat bored me to death 1 hour in and I just could not continue
I haven’t played enough mage to talk specifics, but I do know that in the keys I’ve done - 19s, a couple of 20s, just over 2.5k score - I’ve used AT MOST 24 key binds, and that was plenty for my needs. Do you need more to push to 3k? Possibly you do, but that seems fair enough. It isn’t supposed to be easy.
I do think mage is one of the classes with the most keybinds (along with druid), though. The other classes I play - paladin, DH, hunter, rogue, monk, warlock - don’t have nearly as many.
Well, just tell me those 24 binds - what’s on them. Maybe we can work out what isn’t important by taking the difference between the two lists.
That’s excellent! x’D
Obviously he’s trying to cancel any cast, cancel block, and then use Counterspell. He’s shortening it to CS as well which the game won’t understand. Because normally if casting or in block you can’t interrupt, which is VERY bad if you don’t realise.
He was probably trying to do something similar to this:
#showtooltip
/cancelaura Ice Block
/stopcasting
/use [mod:alt,@focus][]Counterspell
To each their own but 1 hour is not enough by far to get around to understanding the ESO combat system. 
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