Stop the Prune!

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Button bloat (and in result class homogenization) is what killed WoW's PvP. Hopefully the pruning can recover it at least a little bit.

Prune on Blizz.

Except wow pvp died the moment the big wod prune happened. MoP had more than 400k ppl participating in the 3v3 bracket, while wod at peak had 40k, right now not even 15k...

[Reapocalypse]

Except wow pvp died the moment the big wod prune happened. MoP had more than 400k ppl participating in the 3v3 bracket, while wod at peak had 40k, right now not even 15k...

Couldnt agree more, if theres anything why PvPers quit the game its because PvP is too boring to play, unbalanced comps/classes/items was always a major concern too but never a big reason to quit.

Major Thread/s from several (top) PvP players on the US forums about this topic btw.

[Thrif]

There is no "button bloat problem".

Agreed, so very much. Stop calling it "a problem" just because you can't handle more than half a dozen buttons. There are tons of games for people who can't handle too many choices and want their available buttons to be single digits, we don't need that here.

Couldnt agree more, if theres anything why PvPers quit the game its because PvP is too boring to play, unbalanced comps/classes/items was always a major concern too but never a big reason to quit.

Major Thread/s from several (top) PvP players on the US forums about this topic btw.

Agreeing as well. That many buttons gives you options is what people doesn't seem to realize. And options allows for higher skill plays, which seperates the skilled from the not so skilled.

Blizzard is turning pvp into people just mashing their toons into each other and whoever gets the most proccs wins. No wonder why serious PvPers feels like it's a joke.

[Orangetai420]

I'm ok with some pruning to consolidate rotations but the pruning that annoys me is when they remove abilities like Mind Vision or Eyes of the Beast - fun stuff that wasn't needed in combat but added a lot of flavor. I see no reason to remove spells such as these. Blizz has yet to find that balance. They prune too much.

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Except wow pvp died the moment the big wod prune happened. MoP had more than 400k ppl participating in the 3v3 bracket, while wod at peak had 40k, right now not even 15k...

Correlation doesn't mean causation. Personally I think balance was just shit from the start of WoD, I'm not convinced the prune played a major role.

[Seefer]

I think there are far far too many abilities right now, most are situational at best and you have to have too many keybinds, right now I have 3 rows of 8 abilities on my bars, that is far too much. I would rather have encounters be challenging and not the classes, you shouldn't have to read a novel just to be able to play your class.

[Deleted]

Grats OP on your first and currently only post.

Pruning is fine as long as there's good and thoughtful interaction between what remains. That's a problem for a lot of specs atm.

[Saracens]

Prune away, from what I've seen of how they're handling it, everything is looking promising.

[Dadwen]

Pruned sucked there is nothing wrong with having buttons you don't have to use all the time. (more people I know left WOD because of the prune more than any other reason)

[BeneditaNBeatriz]

iam glad for this ability prune. we had already too many buttons. people could be more focused on the avoid / attack instead of 50 macros

[Mafic]

There are no buttons left to prune from WoD.

This is why Blizz is seeing resistance to the pruning in Legion. They are now cutting into the bones of the classes not just trimming the fat....

Say no to Legion prune. If this triggers or hurts the feels of the MOBA crowd...good.

[Deleted]

I for one welcome the prune, pita to bind it all, other than that most is so situational that 99% of the time it's just screen clutter.

If you want a 5 button class, please go play HotS. WoW is an RPG and RPGs have many abilities.

[A dot Ham]

so you all the "FOR PRUNING" better listen:

whats the point of pruning warlock curses?? there were 6 curses

doom - dealing damage every 15 seconds lasts for a minute
agony - damage over time
weakness - reducing attack power and armor of the target
tongues - increacing cast time of abilities
exhaustion - reduces movement speed
elements - increacing magic damage taken

so you HAD to choose which one to use and when to use them in order to gain advantage in pvp.. you had to track them and maintain them.. you had to choose between more damage(agony) or more damage for your arena partners(elements) or maybe you wanted to increase your opponent casting time or you wanted to slow them..

whats the poing of pruning mage armors or warlock armors or priests wills??

for example warlocks had 2 armors:

fel armor - increasing your spell power and healing you for X% of the damage done

demon armor - increasing your armor and healing you for X%(way more than fel armor) of the damage done

so you again had to choose when you stay in fel armor in order to deal MORE damage and when to switch to demon armor to heal for more and have more armor..

same with mage armors.. you had frost armor, mage armor and molten armor

same purpose basically but different design:

frost armor - reducing physical damage taken, if hit reducing the enemy movement speed and time between attacks
mage armor - increases resistances(but since we dont have them anymore you can take that away no big deal), causes you to regenerate X% of your maximum mana every 5 sec. reducing the duration of harmful magic effects by a X%
Molten armor - increaces your spell crit strike by X% and reduces the chance you are critically hit by X%

so again you had to choose when to switch them in order to have an advantage.. and it was ALL IMPORTANT

same with priests: they had inner will and inner fire

inner fire - increasing armor and spell power
inner will - increasing movement speed and reduces mana cost of instant spells

so basically if you sit in inner fire all the time you'll go oom faster.. so again you had to choose between them to gain advantage..

i cant go on and on with stuff like that..

and its not even about pruning abilities, its about giving too much retarded abilities also.. why are some classes having TOO MUCH mobility(especially melee)? how about your baseline damaging abilities(like frostbolt or backstab) dealing no damage? why casters arent casting?(partly because they cant kite melee anymore, because melee has too much mobility(some casters have too much also), so they just cant cast with melee having 100% uptime on them)

its almost impossible to explain everything.. it will take forever cause even if i will try to explain everything even a half of it will take me like an hour..

i mentioned pruned abilities that were never BAD for the game.. if you were only PVEing and you really had no reason to choose between them(or dont use them at all) IT DOESNT mean that they should've been removed.. there are other parts of the game that you might not know anything about where these abilities were very useful. just think about that please

Because there was a better/best option in all cases.

Warlock armor... there was a choice that all warlocks used. If you didn't choose (x) you were bad.

Same thing for mage armor, those were typically used in tandem with its respective specs. If its something you're going to use anyway... why not just build it into the spec.

Priests, same thing... there is a better/best option and if you aren't using it, you're bad.

[Deleted]

I think there are far far too many abilities right now, most are situational at best and you have to have too many keybinds, right now I have 3 rows of 8 abilities on my bars, that is far too much. I would rather have encounters be challenging and not the classes, you shouldn't have to read a novel just to be able to play your class.

That's the whole point of RPG skills! You have a core of abilities which you use in every fight, and a bunch of abilities which are either useful for specific situations or used for out of combat experience or utility. That's a defining point which separates an RPG from an action game like HOTS or Diablo (technically, Diablo has many skills, but you have a very limited keybind space, while an RPG has a lot more keybinds).

If you cannot handle the complexity of an RPG, then stop harming those people who CAN.

[Regen]

Couldnt agree more, if theres anything why PvPers quit the game its because PvP is too boring to play, unbalanced comps/classes/items was always a major concern too but never a big reason to quit.

Major Thread/s from several (top) PvP players on the US forums about this topic btw.

The wod pvp scene compared to mop is abysmal and quite frankly almost depressing. Class imbalance has always been present in some form or another, and even comp imbalance so I would credit the majority of it to ability pruning. The thing about wow pvp that is so attractive to me is the amount of abilities a player has available to them and can use to outplay an opponent. Cdew said it best when he said "if you want to play pvp with 4 buttons you can play LoL" or something to that effect.

[Lightwysh]

Prune baby prune!!

There is absolutely no reason to have more than 5-10 buttons. 3-4 rotational 1-2 dps cool downs, 1-2 survivability cool downs, everything else can be hidden in menus.

[Littleraven]

Less is more. It is not fun having to macro a ton of shit together just to fit everything useful. It doesn't add depth or anything of that nature. It just adds clutter.

Now that said. There is a tipping point. Take away too much and things become boring. Add too many and people get headaches. Wildstar had the right idea by limiting what abilities you could have at any given time. Helped with build diversity to a degree. Would just take a lot of balancing to make work right. They would need to make sure that each ability had a purpose and gave you a reason to take it over just using some cookie cutter build.

Not a perfect system but I would not be against it if they did something like that. Give us a pool like like 30 or 40 abilities or something and allow us to have maybe half of those bound at any given time.

[Deleted]

Button bloat (and in result class homogenization) is what killed WoW's PvP. Hopefully the pruning can recover it at least a little bit.

Prune on Blizz.

What button bloat? We already lost the option to use different spell ranks long ago. I could fit all my abilites on my action bars and I used them. It's a shame what they are doing now, killing the whole RPG aspect and leave behind a hollow shell. There is no need to to this. There is a MOBA in their portfolio and a Diablo hack & slay. If people dont't like to play an RPG but a more action style thing with a few buttons, there are 2 games for them from Blizzard.

[Littleraven]

Except wow pvp died the moment the big wod prune happened. MoP had more than 400k ppl participating in the 3v3 bracket, while wod at peak had 40k, right now not even 15k...

I think that has more to do with WoD being a bad expansion as a whole. I can only imagine what activity must look like right now.Most people dropped out pretty early on.

[Deleted]

Less is more. It is not fun having to macro a ton of shit together just to fit everything useful. It doesn't add depth or anything of that nature. It just adds clutter.

Now that said. There is a tipping point. Take away too much and things become boring. Add too many and people get headaches. Wildstar had the right idea by limiting what abilities you could have at any given time. Helped with build diversity to a degree. Would just take a lot of balancing to make work right. They would need to make sure that each ability had a purpose and gave you a reason to take it over just using some cookie cutter build.

Not a perfect system but I would not be against it if they did something like that. Give us a pool like like 30 or 40 abilities or something and allow us to have maybe half of those bound at any given time.

This is a good middle ground, and this is what we already had up to WoD. Most of the time, we are using about 10 skills, and occasionaly some more. In WoD, they have already reduced these additional, optional skills. I don't have the option to use some fire or arcane spells on my frost mage anymore, which is stupid. I lost an instant, spammable AOE to use on the move, I lost another instant spell which could be used as a finisher when FoF is not available to boost my Ice Lance. I lost the option to use an alternative spell school if I am locked out of frost. This is crappy compared to the gameplay I had up into MoP.

[Deleted]

Prune baby prune!!

There is absolutely no reason to have more than 5-10 buttons. 3-4 rotational 1-2 dps cool downs, 1-2 survivability cool downs, everything else can be hidden in menus.

Its the situational abilities that you have forgotten. The gouges, the dark simulacrums, the intimidating shouts.

The numbers you have for rotation and cooldowns is fine. But it's the layer of complexity that comes in the infrequently used abilities. It's required for both interesting pve and pvp encounters.