Hey,
Why we have such a enormous number of Buttons in WoW?
I wanted to level the Shaman here and i have almost 40+ Keybinds… and its feels like Button bloat…
Classes like Ret/Frost DK/BM Hunter/Destro WL for example feelling awsome with less Buttons.
Why they dont squish it to like 20-25?
Does people like it to press 40+ individually Buttons?
40? are you including the menu to connect to the game, right?
Do you even play a Enhancer for exmaple Shaman?
And no there are no menu buttons included
9 Enhancement Spells
27 Shaman Skills
Racial
Health Potion
Health Stone
Battle Potion
Maybe some macros for Focus, marks and so on
yes are a lot. but 40?
I think i got to just over 30, including (health) potions and racial.
But obviously not counting something like the raid buff or spectral sight.
ok i gave up. but in this way as BM i should consider Eagle eye and other stuff i never pushed in my life. Since i never mained ever enh how many buttons do you use? really 30?
When you wanne play the full Kit of the char you will use constant 36+ Skills yes.
And yes you can play without Totems, Kicks, Purge, Dispell then you need like 13-15
As a mistweaver I really use 30-35 buttons throughout a fight (depending on how much utility it needs). And these are all individual spells, I don’t use macros that have the same ability with different modifiers or anything.
I don’t think there’s any specialization right now with less than 40 combat-oriented actions. This includes abilities that may not be used even during an entire raid run or mythic dungeon, but can be used in PvP (like Polymorph, Hex, etc.), the extra PvP abilities near the Warmode button, up to 2 trinkets, up to maybe 1 other item with use (neck or ring?), potion, engineering device etc, and even 1-hour duration raid buffs that may need to reapplied if died and resurructed during combat.
Oh, and as @Rubmytotêm said, a racial ability too.
Include other stuff as well like Hearthstone, fishing/archaeology action, food/flask consumables etc., and you easily fill up 5 bars and need a 6th, 7th and 8th and the extra 2nd bottom bar to organize everything according to context.
I mained BM hunter in DF, trust me they really don’t feel awesome right now 
When our Big Red Kitty theme (iykyk) died out and got replaced by this god awful zookeeper fantasy is when the class truly went to sh*t.
Lol paladin have like 15 that I have to bind 
because blizzard devs love bloated rotations with duplicate abilities, though it is improving
New buttons are exciting.
I think that’s the gist of it.
In every expansion since TBC Blizzard have added new buttons to classes (which most of the time translated to more buttons in total). And the one time in WoD where they tried to reduce the number of buttons the playerbase didn’t take well to it.
So Blizzard just adds more buttons. They have a way of slipping them in here and there, piling them up over time. And then there’s the occasional class overhaul where some buttons are consolidated and reconfigured and reimagined and otherwise given the equivalent of a plastic surgery to try and maintain a facade of gameplay elegance, hiding the Frankenstein design underneath.
I also think Blizzard are afraid of simplicity, because a lot of the combat is really simple in design. Mobs auto attack and occasionally there’s a fire on the ground - don’t stand in it!
Most of the depth and complexity of WoW comes from just playing your character and pressing the proper buttons in the proper order. If that gameplay becomes too simple and perhaps too easy, then maybe it also becomes boring?
I think that’s something Blizzard are conscious about, that they front load a lot of the gameplay emphasis onto the character and not the world of the enemies you encounter. They’re already overly simplified. The many buttons a character has is the counterweight to that.
How do people want more buttons? Are you all finger benders? My hands can’t break dance over the keyboard like you guys do. I was never any good with finger skateboards as a kid either.
There are limits to have many ways I can bend my fingers for keybindings.
I’m yet to find a class that has 40 buttons.
It’s usually dps rotation 11-15 and everything else is personals and utility
I think another aspect may be their attempts at trying to somewhat balance classes/roles. Defensives, self heals, cc’s, movement abilities etc. Compared to the first few years with more strict class/spec flavour, everything seems to be more swiss army knife these days. Whether that is good or bad is a very different discussion (with inconclusive results haha), but it naturally means more stuff on our bars.
The game has gotten more complex than vanilla, where a boss might have 2 mechanics, this has resulted in more classes needing to do more stuff in order to allow most people to be able to try the content.
The net result is large toolbars. Filler spells certainly don’t help.
People constsntly whine on this forum about not having certain utilities, or not being as mobile as other caster.
Days of swiss army knives were in MoP (and legion probably), blizzard backed down on homogenization in dragonflight
Absolutely.
I think already when WotLK rolled around, and especially with Cata, there was a sort of arms race between classes. And if some class could do x, then my class should definitely also be able to do x. And then Blizzard adds x to the class.
That led to a lot of class homogenization that peaked in Cata before Blizzard did one of their big redesigns with MoP and class specializations and talent system and such.
But yeah, even today there’s a lot of class homogenization going on that results in more buttons being added. M+ and Delves are good examples right now, because some specs are meta and can easily find success. And those that aren’t meta immediately give the feedback that they want the same good stuff that the meta specs have (be that poison totem or AoE dmg or whatever). And Blizzard usually ends up caving in and homogenizing more, in an effort to balance.