Originally Posted by
Akka
I trust your word about it for Cata, but for Legion I really don't see how it's more interesting. At least it's not boring like prot, and the animations do a good job at making you feel like you're giving really heavy hit, but gameplay-wise it's quite poorer than WotLK one. So I'm really scratching my head here.
Yes, I've barely played since Cata (barely played Cata and skipped MoP entirely) but it's not really relevant since it's about Legion (which is current) vs pre-Cata (in which I had a pretty extensive game time).
I don't really see, again, how prot in Legion is more involving than prot in TBC, and I'm even more puzzled when you're on one side arguing for Legion by using "maxing out DPS" argument while arguing against TBC by using "it was just about managing threat". It seems pretty self-contradictory ?
It also rather confirm my complaint that playing a tank in Legion is too much like playing a DPS (though admitedly that's been the case since WotLK, it just feels even worse now).
Again, notice I'm not saying the content is easier or harder, I'm talking about the gameplay not being as fun. TBC tanking was fun because it was demanding and varied. Stance-dancing to be able to intercept/slow a mob was a big risk, so you had to not be reckless with it ; keeping aggro gave an actual tank-specific objective (instead of "do as much DPS as possible", which is in some way pretty close, but quite not the same and has nothing to do with the tank role in itself) ; you had at least two debuff and one buff to keep at all time, and all your defensive CD to use. In all that, Legion just kept defensive CD and added Ignore Pain - which I like as a mechanism, but which doesn't compensate for everything else, by far.
I'll need some context here. Either they meant affliction was "stupid" balance-wise (it was, Destro was able to pull out more DPS while being much easier to play), in which case I agree but that's, well, a balance problem, not a design one. Or they had a pet peeve against some element which is more about preference than actual "stupid" gameplay.
The concept of Affli was being a massive debuffer and DoTer, and the gameplay was about maximizing DoT and keeping them at all time. It was extremely intricate if you really wanted to get everything out of it (because of how DoT were affected by buffs), which might end up being a bit silly and overtly complex at bleeding edge level of competition, but it was really fitting for the class fantasy (the actual original one, not the updated one we got in Legion) and a truly unique gameplay. That's precisely what I find Legion lacking.
Most classes being bland outside of raid is actually, precisely, a flaw of the new design, and so it, actually, was NOT always the case. In fact, and I said it in a post before, that was actually the opposite in early WoW, and a major reproach I do to post-TBC design is precisely that gameplay is mainly down to "raid rotations".
As for raids, yes you need some measure of difficulty before the gameplay can start to be appreciated (that's the problem with leveling in fact, you can just spam one button and tear through it), but it's still two different elements, even if they interact : what makes me find the gameplay of Legion boring is not it's "lack of difficulty", it's that it's bland, doesn't reflect the nature of the classes well and above all lacks core variety. The "class fantasy" was supposed to break homogeneization, but it only furthered the problem in my opinion, especially by treating now each spec as its own class instead of them being subtle variation of the same core aspect. I particularly hate this later point.
No one used WA during Vanilla or TBC because it didn't exist. It doesn't mean people didn't use add-on to be able to function correctly, it just means that no add-on was as polished and efficient as WA, and so people used a variety of them. Don't confuse it with "people didn't use WA because it was so easy to play !".
Even as a person who usually use only the absolute minimum amount of add-on possible, I had to get some to play decently in TBC.