I agree with you to a certain point, but this is not the main reason imo. There's just a certain amount of people willing (or able) to play an MMO(RPG) on this planet and a lot of those people have been exhausted over the years and are fed up or just cannot (due to RL changes) commit the time they used to commit.
WoW was one of the most shallow (not in terms of magnitude or anything, but you get my point) and most accessible MMO's out there at its prime and that probably was one of the reasons it is what it is. But the fact that it's getting more complex doesn't mean that's what is "killing" WoW.
I say too many buttons. Pages of pages of situational abilities and similar abilites crowding the spellbook. In this aspect WoW is too complex, but there are other areas where it is too simple. Spellbook should be slimmed down. I think this is good video on complexity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVL4st0blGU
There are al ot of reasons for this occuring. One of them is that WoW has this arms race with itself. Every expac people expect MORE dungeons, NEW talents, NEW skills, improvements to everything. So it gets more and more complex.
I fill up about 30 buttons and I don't use anything like focus macros (just one) or targeting partners in arena or anything. PvP definitely takes more than raiding. You can probably raid with 12 right?
There's definitely no such thing as the TBC warlock rotation. I remember in Vanilla when we couldn't even use special attacks because threat was so bad. I would backstab then SnD on my rogue and nothing else.
TBC is brought up a lot as the best time for wow and I totally agree. I felt like there was complexity, but not too much. Bosses had mechanics and were hard, but weren't unforgivable.
I think we have to cut Bliz a break on this. They tried really hard to cut down abilities--but it just proved a bit harder than they could have imagined. I suspect they really, really need to combine talents into one. No reason for rogues to have a sunder-skill; just include it in as some kind of specific attacking ability. I'm sure warriors are the same way (although prot may want it, I don't know).
So I come on MMO-Champion and the top post I see under "recent blue posts" is a response to a thread called "world of casualcraft" where someone is going on about how the game is too dumbed down and simple.
I look over and the most recent forum post on MMO-Champion is "Wow has become far to complex."
Blizzard just can't win.
Well I don't know what the OP is on about really, but I do kind of have a headache trying to think of what I should do in the game each day because there's so damn much I could do!
Not really. Most rotations were relatively simple, a few were hideously complex. Because they were badly designed. Nothing about PVE DPS rotations has ever been difficult, just annoying, tedious or frustrating.
A number of classes have too many abilities on their action bars (for me the worst is my Hunter, almost every Hunter talent was a whole new on-use ability and/or cooldown!). Blizzard keeps mentioning that they tried to trim but every ability is precious to someone so they weren't that successful. They might be more ruthless in future.
I think the game is more complex. Doesn't mean it's necessarily harder.
Take things like reforging, gemming, weekly caps, etc. There are a lot more factors in the game now to distinguish good and dedicated players.
Yeah, fair point about the rotations being simplified in MoP. I just meant in comparison to vanilla and only in combination with the other factors in that same dot point. I like having more to do with my rotation, but I generally wish Blizzard would pick either 2-button rotations and complex encounters or complex rotations and simple encounters. Personal preference.
And yep, that's just the way I actually talk :-P
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