I missed TBC class simplicity

[Akka]

Considering the heavy pruning and the removal of nearly all non-rotation tools, I can only conclude it's a troll thread.

[ThunderTaco]

Have anyone else?
Remember when your rotation was 4 maybe 5 spells at max?
I feel boss fights were a tad easier as well, now both aspects got harder.
I always figured we'd get harder and harder boss fights and not so much rotation complexity.
Not sure if it's just me growing out of those piano mash games, or having 12 skills rotation is just annoying in general.
Granted I'm no serious raider, nor PvP beast, just your average Joe enjoying WoW from time to time.

Yeah i miss my warlock gameplay :
Farm dozens of shards before raid.
Sacrifice pet, soulstone tank, healthstone tank.
Apply doom (or elements/shadow curse if you are designated)
SPAM THOSE SHADOWBOLTS.

Was so fun.

[Aggrophobic]

My warlock only had shadow bolt. That was my rotation back then.
My hunter had a few more spells... all macroed into one button though.

"Good" times.

[Sencha]

Legion gameplay is even easier than TBC.

[Doffen]

I was one of few that was a MM hunter in tbc wich actuwlly had a few buttons to push, but when sunwell came out and BM just were too good I changed. And I used literally one button(clicked BW) and topped the meters. Everything was in there, KC, steady vs cast sequence etc)

I tought it was real fun I guess thats why I have liked arcane that much the years I've had the mage

[Deleted]

Member Sunwell?

Having a four button rotation isn't the same as wanting more pruning. I for one want my decurse, amplify magic etc. Back as it brought flavour to the class. Heck, I even miss casting AI to buff people. The pruning they have done has increased complexity of the rotations and taken away all class flavour. I don't mind the rotations we have today, but I know alot of people who would otherwise raid has stopped raiding because of the effect doing a few mistakes does on the meters making them look garbage when infact they were not garbage as late as HFC.

As a fire mage, I frickin love our new playstyle, but I know alot of people who doesn't.

If they could drop this awful talent swap system, I would have like nothing to complain about. 500g to swap talents as a fire mage or having to be summoned after virtually every boss fight? Now thats total BS....

I member. My fire mage was toping meters on Brutallus and M uru just because being the most geared out of the 2 fire mages in our group i wasnt keeping scorch up (inb4 elitist jerk . Anyway , TBC was in my opinion the most balanced expansion maybe because that s when i joined WoW (call me bias).

[Armourboy]

Class complexity in TBC had some pretty big gaps. Certainly you had classes like Warlock that were reduced to Shadowbolt spam, but then you had something like Fury Warrior that felt like it had a million things to keep up and look after ( yay Rampage and HS spam). That doesn't even get into things like seal twisting for Ret Pallies.

I think what lots of people miss isn't that the rotations were more complex then, it's that you had abilities and things that with certain specs could separate a good player from a bad one, and at the same time wasn't really just about button mashing. Holy Pally is kind of the example for me. Yeah you spent most of the time spamming either FoL or HL, but you had different ranks to use so you didn't burn through mana and overheal a ton. You also had all of the hand spells to use, which brought some added interesting play into the mix. It was more about situational awareness imo.

You also seemed to have a bit of time to think about what you were going to do if something happened. Now we aren't talking about multiple seconds here, but the reaction times didn't seem to need to be nearly as nuts as they are today. Especially for something like a healer the game felt a bit more cerebral back then.

[Lightbull]

Legion gameplay is even easier than TBC.

Begone, troll.

[thesmall001]

I subscribe to the belief that you can get a lot of depth out of only a few abilities. Tactical decisions about using your resources or when and how to use cooldowns, getting the most out of your self-buffs and not bogging down the rotation with superfluous buffs and free direct-damage abilities you hit on CD. I think Blizzard often fail to allow for decent gear-scaling in their rotations from fear of over-complicating the gearing process: Breakpoints aren't such a hassle if you hit them often enough or if there's a smooth enough gradient to their contribution to your overall DPS.

But I also feel like DPS (and the communities obsession with it) isn't super healthy in general for the game. There should be far more emphasis on what you, as a player, bring to the team and I wish there was more emphasis on (and freedom to participate in) hybridisation and roles outside of the "Big 3" because the overlap between roles can give a lot more wiggle-room in terms of balance.

[Hottage]

No, I do not miss my 4 spell rotation as Retribution.

That said, it was already a 100% improvement over my 2 spell rotation in classic.

[HumbleDuck]

Play arms.

Not as "good" as locks back then, but still can make you weep.

[Pull My Finger]

Have anyone else?
Remember when your rotation was 4 maybe 5 spells at max?
I feel boss fights were a tad easier as well, now both aspects got harder.
I always figured we'd get harder and harder boss fights and not so much rotation complexity.
Not sure if it's just me growing out of those piano mash games, or having 12 skills rotation is just annoying in general.
Granted I'm no serious raider, nor PvP beast, just your average Joe enjoying WoW from time to time.

I get that, and there's a certain beauty in simple things that flow well. But I think the class design is in a pretty good spot right now. Not too shallow, not too simple, but definitively a little more like it used to be - clear, elegant, flowy. It's not the ridiculous clusterfuck any more that the class design started to grow into for a while.

I'm not raiding any more so I can't really comment on the bosses ... but I remember that one of the reasons why I simply lost interest in it is how ridiculously convoluted, forced, overfraught and silly the fight mechanics had become. I remember sitting there and reading up on Ragnaros heroic in Cata and thinking to myself: my God, this is complete nonsense. Am I supposed to enjoy memorizing all this bullshit? It felt as if it was so completely out of touch.

That was just something that started to turn me off enormously. I don't agree with that kind of thinking where overladen and convoluted design gets confused with "complexity" and "depth".

Compare that to a simple, clear, but engaging fight like the Big Bad Wolf - that's just so much more fun.

[Relapses]

I'm not raiding any more so I can't really comment on the bosses ... but I remember that one of the reasons why I simply lost interest in it is how ridiculously convoluted, forced, overfraught and silly the fight mechanics had become. I remember sitting there and reading up on Ragnaros heroic in Cata and thinking to myself: my God, this is complete nonsense. Am I supposed to enjoy memorizing all this nonsense? It felt as if it was so completely out of touch.

Compare that to a simple, clear, but engaging fight like the Big Bad Wolf - that's just so much more fun.

To each their own. Outside of the Geyser mechanic in P4, Heroic Ragnaros made a lot of sense to me. Every ability he used had a purpose and there was a clear method of dealing with each one of them. There was a ton of personal accountability, too, which meant that you couldn't have much dead weight in your raid. I personally felt like H-Rag was one of the best designed HM encounters (again, minus Geyser) Blizzard has ever come up with.

But I get what you're saying with encounters like BBW. Simplicity has a place, too. I personally prefer a mixture of less mechanically intensive encounters which ramp up in difficulty as the instance progresses. (SoO was a pretty good semi-recent example of this.)

[TheVaryag]

Have anyone else?
Remember when your rotation was 4 maybe 5 spells at max?
I feel boss fights were a tad easier as well, now both aspects got harder.
I always figured we'd get harder and harder boss fights and not so much rotation complexity.
Not sure if it's just me growing out of those piano mash games, or having 12 skills rotation is just annoying in general.
Granted I'm no serious raider, nor PvP beast, just your average Joe enjoying WoW from time to time.

It was simpler and harder. Giving us more abilities and making bosses weaker just made the game worse. I remember the giant backlash at the difficulty of bosses In TBC dungeons "Amg, amg they're so hard, nerf" and then wrath bosses were so pityfully weaker In comparison.

TBC was fine, that was good, we need difficulty, tactics, strategy, CCing, single-target dps/healing/taunting, that's the skill. Not managing 12 rotations. Sadly they've slowly replaced devs from those older times for new ones who have no idea what difficulty is.

[stomination]

Remember the threads here who say that classes today are boring because of too few buttons and the game is gutted because abilities and spells get removed and how much better it was when classes were more complex?

But I swear my Destro Warlock from SWP with just Shadowbolt spam would totally get upvoted and loved here today. It would be called a masterpiece of class design. Especially since I could also top meters with it.

Or chain heal resto shaman spam.

[schwarzkopf]

ehrm, wait, what ... ???

Indeed, the simplicity inherent in a more complex system.

Seems reasonable to me

[Armourboy]

To each their own. Outside of the Geyser mechanic in P4, Heroic Ragnaros made a lot of sense to me. Every ability he used had a purpose and there was a clear method of dealing with each one of them. There was a ton of personal accountability, too, which meant that you couldn't have much dead weight in your raid. I personally felt like H-Rag was one of the best designed HM encounters (again, minus Geyser) Blizzard has ever come up with.

But I get what you're saying with encounters like BBW. Simplicity has a place, too. I personally prefer a mixture of less mechanically intensive encounters which ramp up in difficulty as the instance progresses. (SoO was a pretty good semi-recent example of this.)

I think a lot of times Blizzard falls into this theory that more stuff going on is better. Fights like Opera were fun and interesting. They weren't really hard, but you still had to execute and learn the fight. I look at most of them like this, if I'm trying to explain a fight, and a couple of different people need to remind me of this or that and I've already said about 3-4 things to watch for, it's probably swung too far the other way. Complex fights can be good, but they can also be some of the most unenjoyable and least remembered fights ever created. That's not to say everything should be " do this one thing and win " either, but sometimes even those fights are a nice enjoyable break.

[Deleted]

I miss WotLK Retribution paladin, insanely powerful AoE/Cleave, immense amount of tools to fuck someone's life up in PvP and ability to solo shit easily.

Sure it can be said that Ret in Wrath was literally smash your head on keyboard or spam the infamous "/castrandom" macro, but it was still a great spec.

Yeah I miss wotlk ret pala as well, had so much fun playing it. The same goes for wotlk arcane mage.

[Kolvarg]

Remember the threads here who say that classes today are boring because of too few buttons and the game is gutted because abilities and spells get removed and how much better it was when classes were more complex?

But I swear my Destro Warlock from SWP with just Shadowbolt spam would totally get upvoted and loved here today. It would be called a masterpiece of class design. Especially since I could also top meters with it.

Maybe it's just different people with different tastes defending different things?

I don't believe the majority of players experiences more than a few classes at a level where the rotation matters each expansion, so it could be just specific classes or specs.

But most of all it comes down to different complaints, I think, because there are different perspective. The reduction of flavour and utility abilities, which has been happening before but mostly from MoP to WoD and WoD to Lgn. Same for simplified rotations and overall reduction of abilities on at least a few specs, again from MoP to WoD and WoD to Lgn. I've been subbed since patch 5.4 came out, and before that played it also in WotLK, and as a Prot Warr for isntance I do feel quite a few were taken since then. Vigilance was baseline, flags are gone, intimidating shout, heroic strike, stances, challenging shout, commanding shout, on top of my head, I'm sure there's quite a few more.

I think on this side of things it comes down to the reduction of skill cap. I might be wrong, but along with the removal of many stats, for many classes the difference between a new player and a good player in the same gear used to be quite bigger. In fact I'm pretty sure Blizzard has adressed this at times stating that they deliberately wanted to reduce this gap. Overall it might be a good thing for the game (especially for the less dedicated / more casual players), but for those who had put themselves to master those little things that really made a difference by the end of the fight, the game simply became more boring.

So I think the majority of (reasonable) people who complain about rotations/specs being dumbed down are talking about the "downgrading" that happened especially in WoD and now Legion at least to some specs.


The people who are comparing it to older times Vanilla/TBC, maybe even WotLK, I think are doing it from the "flavour" / situational abilities perspective, plus the class' difficulty being more RPG-ish and less action-like. For instance, even if many rotations were simpler in WotLK, stats were more important, the talent system was different, there were usually more utility and situational abilities to keep track of, and there were little things you could do (for instance master the usage/re-application of dots) that made a big difference in dps.

I don't know just trying to see both sides.

In the end, there's stuff I like more now, and there's stuff I liked more then. Obviously it being my main since then probably doesn't help, but I certainly feel a bit bored/limited sometimes and miss some missing complexity on Prot Warrs that they seem keen to keep removing (as per their planned changes for 7.1.5, that trend isn't dead).

[Nozuka]

i liked playing with my BM hunter in TBC. basically spamming one macro button. only had to manage some CDs and the pet. made it easy to concentrate on boss fights, while topping meters. even better: no one expected the BM Hunter to actually make this much damage now. Many thought the meters were broken.

but also got boring fast.