THE POST IS ABOUT COMBAT ROTATIONS, NOT OPTIONAL SKILLS.
In some cases “UNPRUNING” added 1-2 skills and took away 1-3/ some changes were just purely cosmetic, eg. removing subtely’s dot and adding back rupture.
If you are so scared of adding new skills, just make them into a bit stronger active talents with additional passive effect to make any mechanics. And yes make it stronger than passive effect and think how to make it fun to play since you fear so much to make something more than MOBA rotation in MMORPG. You guys make classes like DEMON HUNTER to have top tier dps, when in fact even my 4 years old is getting bored of it’s spamming nature. So many players would want to play top class but just can’t bother to play cookie clicker version in mmorpg.
No wonder people quit wow for FFXIV where rotations are actually good and have good mechanics, where company doesnt treat their players like they are dumb or something.
Blizz, get it, even NEW PLAYERS are thinking that wow has dull rotations and too few combat abilities in rotation, IT’S NOT ANY FUN TO PRESS 3 BUTTONS IN A CROSS ON CD. Where is OLD CLASS DESIGN ? Where IQ mattered ? Where you had to think what you press and you were actually focused on raid? In BFA everything FELT forced because of how bad class design was, CLASS DESIGN IS WHOLE PRISMAT OF THE GAME.
I’d want to see back class design from mop or even wod.
Love they promised unpruning and then outlaw rogue was just pruned from skills in rotation… I’m really getting tired of this…
I can’t for the love of god understand why people want MoP class design back, when that was the beginnning of the era that players dread so much, which is that everyone has everything, to the extent that some classes didn’t even have enough action bar slots to fit in everything - and similarly, the era where the gameplay shifted to being heavily CD dependant.
I understand, the whole unpruning and class changing stuff has some specs and classes unfinished, or there are more to be desired, and I do want Blizzard to revisit Retri, because it’s still a very uncomplete spec (and I did leave feedback numerous times), but you can’t just revert to the old style in an instant and say it’s good.
Because we don’t have enough reachable keybinds. I would consider what they’re doing for SL to be the limit.
For the average EU player, we have:
½ 1 2 3 4 5
TAB Q E R T
CAPS S F G
< Z X C V B
That’s 21 binds if my counting is correct.
Now we need a focus modifier. Down goes ALT or ctrl probably.
But already most specs have around 30 spells, so we need another 10 or so binds, so they go on shift binds. Remember, however, that when you hold down shift, some binds that were reachable are now not. shift ½ 5 T G B are reachable, but awful.
And you don’t wanna use shift+movement keys for spells. That’ll mess you up real fast.
Then comes the items and Essence. They add another 4 binds or so. Add to that healing gems and healing pots, and damage pots.
Now add the PvP spells and arena 1/2/3 macros (because Blizzard won’t let us reuse the same binds depending on fight context because they don’t have macro conditions like [inarena] or [pveinstance] or whatever, which tilts me beyond all reason)
Suddenly we find ourselves running about 60 keybinds, and here you come in with “let’s add some more buttons!!” and I’m just like… how about no?
The game doesn’t need more buttons, it needs better buttons.
It needs buttons that are regularly or situationally useful, not billions of cooldowns. I’m tired of the whole “cleave with all CD’s up” gameplan that everybody is adopting because of the way Blizzard are designing their buttons.
If we get all these massive CD’s replaced with situational and interesting spells that change up the rotation in various specific scenarios, then you get your depth and you will soon realise you don’t need more buttons.
show me the average player with 60 keybinds, I’m waiting, not to mention Arena 1/2/3 macros.
your average andy probably has the 21 Binds you listed plus some shift and or alt keys, clicks his mounts and potions or doesn’t even bother using them since the content a average player is doing shouldn’t require those (Potions/consumables).
The only class I have that comes close to running out of bar space is my Unholy DK but only because of target Arena 1/2/3 + focus Arena 1/2/3 macros and focus macros in general for PvP of course on all my other classes I have plenty of space for more spells even with all my macros.
and with your logic how was even anyone able to play MoP if you somehow manage to have 60 keybinds in this pruned mess of an expansion called BfA ?
please explain
No. Core of mmorpg game is to have diverse and unique classes withs all the downsides and upsides. Going back to class desing where only difference was if you were meele/ranged and animation of your spells would be worst thing. Peole just feel entilted that their clasa shouls excel in all possiple situations and only difference should be skill of player. Too bad you play wrong kind of game.
Any decent PvP’er who also PvE’s a little. I’ve certainly got this problem, and so has most of my guild.
I don’t know what you mean by “average player”, but I’m not going to constrict my search to some type of player you have made up yet not specified.
One of biggest problems with your argument is that you go on to admit you have the problem as well, but only half of it because you don’t PvE with that character, and you still have the problem.
Just because you’re better at the game than “the average player” does not mean that you should suffer from having to fiddle around with 70+ keybinds.
This is a number of buttons that makes a Starcraft 2 pro-gamer, players with dozens of years of experience in what is arguably the hardest competitive e-sports ever made, howl in pain. And then you probably want to combine it with un-GCD’ing as well, leading to a situation with 70 keybinds being played at 120+ APM.
This stuff has absolutely no place in any video game that wants to be even remotely approachable. It’s utterly ridiculous.
They weren’t. The community called for a prune during that expansion. It arrived here for a reason. I’ll get back to that in a second.
But the problems in MoP were even more serious than keybinds, and so would it be in SL if Blizzard aren’t very, very, very careful.
In MoP arena, the healer in competitive arena games at BlizzCon were hard CC’d up to 80% of every single game, and it was unavoidable.
Players were getting trucked down in an explosion of offensive cooldowns all at once that multiplied together (also called a Swifty macro), but Blizzard created so many defensive cooldowns to match that, if your swifty macro didn’t make your enemies pop literally all of them, the game would extend out forever.
It was not uncommon in MoP for 2v2 games to extend past 30-40 minutes where 24 minutes of those were spent sitting in a CC.
People said that Blizzard kept adding a counter for every spell as a new spell to every other class, which then itself required a new counter on every other class again, etc. etc. etc. extends out forever, until the game had 4 billion buttons. Or, more specifically, around 2400. Yes, I counted them because that’s how sick I got of it.
At this point, casting any spell is impossible. Healers got tuned around being able to top people off with a single 2 second cast.
So obviously this had to be toned back, but when Blizzard did this they made some serious mistakes. They did tone down the CC to reasonable levels, and they did manage to prune some of the more ridiculous utilities out of the game, but the massive offensive cooldown zergs did not get removed. Instead they merged the buttons into one, thus creating the swifty macro for you, and they simplified or downright removed core, classic, sane utility and kept the avalanche of cooldown based defensives.
In BfA they finally realised that all those cooldown based defensives could be combined with hilarious offenses to create something completely ridiculous and unstoppable, and decided to add more GCD’s to spread this out a bit.
Of course the PvE crowd howled at this because they didn’t understand the reasoning behind this and it made them have to think a little bit harder.
And that’s not really their fault because Blizzard didn’t really solve the underlying issue by doing this, they just changed a fast sequence of popping ridiculous amounts of CD’s into a slow sequence of popping ridiculous amounts of CD’s, which just makes it feel like a complicated exercise in charging your laz0rbeam in the most intricate and annoying way possible. It also simultaneously slows down the game so much, breaking the flow to such a degree, that combat might actually end by the time you’re ready to go back into combat. That’s no good, either.
Nevertheless, both Holinka and Ion are rightly pushing back against interviewers in every interview where this gets brought up. I just hope that, when they get faced with this GCD issue for real, they start removing some of this garbage instead of going back to putting in macros everywhere. Yeah, Skye from Method won’t understand I presume, but every person that’s ever had to make over 30 macros in order to be able to simply play a class will understand.
It is beyond ridiculous that people who seemingly accredit themselves as game designers cannot figure out basic **** like this, and in this I include probably the biggest “I’m a game designer”-mouth in this entire community: Bellular.
I repeat once again: We don’t need more buttons, we need better buttons. And just for the record: By better I do not mean stronger.
Hope that explained. 
No its not, i agree with you here.
But despite these Classic Pro’s that found BFA ez dumb or whatever, if you notice the vast majority of them failed in it. Now they rolled mages spam frostbolt and are top DPSers in raiding with 1 key.
Thats what people want, 1-2-3 max keys AKA thats why classes like DH are powerfull, so new players can actually pat along because its kind of a shock to new players using 20+ Keybinds.
You claimed that the average player has about 60 keybinds and I simply said that i highly doubt that.
But in general man, you take that anti un-pruning stance very seriously it seems and all I want is blizzard to raise the skill floor a bit, what’s the problem with that ?
You don´t NEED to bind every ability. Some are very situational. If you wanna be competetive/top of the line and reach gladiator, yeah then you will have to bind most keys, along with macros, but that´s just how the game works and always will work. If you want the pay off, you gotta put in the work.
And MOP pvp was great fun - not everything is about the arena, and from what I see from prominent pvpers in general is a great love for MOP class design anyway, you are the exception.
I myself got much more spells off, since casters actually had tools to combat melee, and healers for that matter. Healers are too powerful now that so many control tools have been pruned. But I guess you like that.
MoP fire mage was incredible. Super fun. So much flair and options, without being OP, since all classes were strong utility wise. BfA fire is a one trick pony, an abomination. Bland and boring.
The unpruning has nothing to do with class design or class balance. It’s simply to give people rewards while levelling. Blizzard want to tie that whole issue off. They would give us “Throw Cheeseburger” ability if they didn’t have anything to unprune.
They wanted wow on consoles to get more mongoloid $$$ than they were already getting.
you dont need those binds you’re not top1 guild mythic raider lel
Im talking ABOUT ROTATIONS, not OPTIONAL skills
I have around 26 slots… Please no more 
Get rid of essence and trinket type of abilities if classes are going to get more~ Including Covenant that is +2 
and how many do you use in pve ? combat rotations ? please, blacked out pvp talents doesnt count, frost mage barely uses 4 skills in combat fire also 4 not to mention arcane…
the fact you are counting trinkets and 3 min cd abilities is laugh worthy
Am i only one who actually like Legion class design ? I think they should "weld " artifact abilities both passive and active into base line and use 3 most popular legos to make new talent row
Legion/BfA class design is much much worse than MoP/Cata
But I loved playing my fire mage with a demon pet.
/endsarcasm
legion class design was fun because of legendaries, but still some of classes were lacking on buttons to press dramatically (destro lock, dh havoc, frost mage, arcane mage, dks…) and now in bfa, not only they increased amount of classes that lack on pressing buttons but also had deleted mechanics…