Were the classes the biggest mistake in BfA?

[Ivpiv1]

Absolutely Classes were the biggest mistake in BFA.
Our characters is how we interface with the game. It doesnt even matter if it is the classes, themselves, if the animations were terrible, or the pathing were wobly. Its all horribly fun destroying things to a game such as this.

The fact that our classes went backwards, and the fastest way to grind things like mats was to lvl a new C and freeze it in XP just before you couldnt use your legendaries is a statement of how horrible this expansions handling of our characters and thereby our interface is.

Alot of people have said they enjoyed WOD alot more than this expansion. OFCOURSE you did, the classes was more fun, the content can be MEH if the classes are fun.
Blizzard wants us to repeat the same 10( i dont know how many dungeons are in the game in this xp) a million time due to the m+ system how can we be expected to have fun, doing the same things over and over and over again, if our interface/classes are clunky or BORING AS **** to play.

This is the same problem with Hack n' slash games actually. You repeat the same content a million times, so you dont get fun through the content, therefore the fun must come from your character, and the only way to have long term fun from a character is to have ALOT of customization.
And by that i dont just mean transmogs. I mean buildwise.

If Blizzards intent is to make all content repeatable a million times and make the world scale, we need enormous talent trees im talking more in the way of Path of exile than World of warcraft atm. Else people will get bored.

You either get new content all the time, and make the content extremely fun, and at the same time make sure how you interact with, interface with the new content is fun.
Or you give the players a million different ways to do the content, and give them the power to make their own fun.

It is the only way to do things like this. The whole hack n slash genre is a testament to this. There is a reason why POE is a success and Diablo 3 is a horrible failure. They both repeat the same content over and over and over again. The only difference is in POE you can build your characters in a million different ways, in D3 blizzard dictates whats good from on high.


TlR. Classes is how we interface with the game, ofcourse it is the most important part of any expansion.

[Accendor]

I don't think its a one more button thing, more buttons won't make uninteresting abilities interesting, just being complicated also doesn't make specs interesting. I've been playing a Havoc Demon Hunter most of BFA, and it probably has the fewest buttons of spec in the game atm. At the same time it is also one of the more enjoyable specs for me to play. There is no downtime you have something that you can do every global. My only complaint about them would be that the rotation is the same while in Meta.

You (and me ) play the spec that was hit the hardest by the pruning amd simplification. I know that is hard to believe, but just go through the artifact tree and see how many of your abilities actually interacted with each other. It was still very simple, but so much more than now.

[Shakana]

@Irian @Ivpiv1 Totally. Some skills tied to talents are a mistake, some of them should be part of book skills without needing to take the talent or the only way we have to get a synergy is by choosing that trait on a azerite gear or essences. Make baseline abilities stronger and fun to play rather than needing to get the right gear for it. BiS should be for a bonus and not for a huge damage dealing related. The stats should do the work alone instead of fortifying them with traits, it's not appealing. Demon hunters:
You see the haste is low and you think: Damn, i'm in need of haste! Do you? Out of combat and out of meta you'll see a low number but with the azerite traits + meta haste, you'll have almost 100% haste. The stats are gated within the gear and not visible for you to understand what you're in need more if you don't do the maths yourself from those traits + your meta. Stats start being pratically a joke. And the amount of haste some classes need to perform well, being gated in azerite is really not helpful when you don't have the right gear. Making the classes feel slow and not giving performance at it's best.

[valax]

When we create a character, we need to choose a class. If that class doesn't fit you, you just simply feel like not playing.

When a class is not good as it used to be, we lack of interest for the game.

When a class has it's own and unique aspects, a unique extra gear ability, a unique artifact weapon, we feel good.
We feel powerful. We feel inspired to play because we have a great synergy between us and the class we choose to play as our main.

Even when we create alts. We just play them for the sake of it. To try something new, to have more professions, to farm something.
Sometimes you like an alt so much that you even consider it your "main-alt". Because the gameplay on that alt flourish within you, it's fun, enjoyable.

Sometimes, even makes you betray your main for that fun that your alt provides you and be your new main.

Saying the class changes doesn't matter on this game and it's not a problem, it's wrong in so many ways. The game content can be great, the lore can be great, but if our classes are not feeling good to play, you might not see it now but you'll see it later, it will make you feel bad because you can't have those glorious days you had before. Where you saw yourself being useful with your class and trying to role to a different alt class that is going currently better than your main. If your class for example, is a warlock that is good to play on a spec but you don't like and you can't just change for the sake of others because you simply don't like the playstyle, then you'll feel your only purpose to be on a raid is to get summons and give them cookies, passing all raid trying to adapt and the more you play, the less you want to raid with it.

Legion had a whole expansion dedicated to the uniqueness of the classes. We loved this, we invested time, we did the solo mage tower challenge content as well to unlock another appearances. Mage tower was a pain but it was fantastic. I had the most rage quits in my entire life doing Mage Tower when it showed up and had about 100+ wipes, almost seemed like a raid, but i had no help and no healer, so i really had to know my class to do it right.

The uniqueness of a class in BfA is so unimportant that even the tier sets no longer exists. You can even be the best player in the world, but without your class not been given much attention just makes the whole game dull. It doesn't help the expansion premise is a mess.

Now, i'm not saying that in Legion all classes were great and in all aspects of it were crazy perfect (Survival hunter for example, no one wanted to play it in Legion) but it gave us so much fun and BfA lacks giving us that. Our class/spec artifact weapon gave us a new ability that we grown used to. This was the first thing as a demon hunter that made me sad, seeing fury of illidari going. All classes had this particular ability that instead of being turned into a skill, it got turned into a talent or just completely disappeared. Dks got their Sindragosa's Fury turned into a talent. Do you see? So many things got lost in the process for this expansion. I can't just pretend anymore this doesn't affect me AND i don't think i'm the only one but for sure many people say it's not important, think again. I think the only true and big changes went for Shadow priests and Demonology warlocks that were basically dead in Legion.

If you praise Legion it's clear you have no idea why the classes started to suck in the first place IMO .
The moment they made them rely on artifact traits it's the moment the classes we knew ceased to exist , as you may be aware they butchered their kits and put traits there to cover the hole , but that lasts one expansion . Now classes are still butchered and with worse badly designed new traits , next expansion will be interesting to see how blizzard intends to pull themselves out of the hole they digged with these past 2 systems, as I stated before in other threads if they intend to keep AP and traitslike stuff into the game it will be the actual first expansion I won't even bother checking out as those are in my point of view what made gameplay suck horse dong .

[Shakana]

If you praise Legion it's clear you have no idea why the classes started to suck in the first place IMO .
The moment they made them rely on artifact traits it's the moment the classes we knew ceased to exist , as you may be aware they butchered their kits and put traits there to cover the hole , but that lasts one expansion . Now classes are still butchered and with worse badly designed new traits , next expansion will be interesting to see how blizzard intends to pull themselves out of the hole they digged with these past 2 systems, as I stated before in other threads if they intend to keep AP and traitslike stuff into the game it will be the actual first expansion I won't even bother checking out as those are in my point of view what made gameplay suck horse dong .

The reason why i mentioned Legion is because it worked for Legion but doesn't necessarily mean it's working in bfa.
Also interesting that you talked about that when i just talked about it on the post above you.

[Grevmak]

Most classes either don't play very well, are simplistic as hell or are tolerable. Enhancement for example just feels unsatisfying and bland to me, gameplay wise.

Visually they're great, but many classes played better in Cata, MoP, WoD and Legion. I would've been fine with mostly the same specs as Legion, but nope, we had to reduce even that.

For me this reduces replayability by a lot. I liked Legion's approaches to most specs, and wanted to play many characters, but thanks to Blizzard being hellbent on making them simpler and simpler, I believe it is one of BFA's biggest problems.

[Alkizon]

The reason why i mentioned Legion is because it worked for Legion

Well... this isn't true, and people even before Legion appearance pointed to this simple and logical fact: it didn't for Legion too. Oh... you won't belive how I don’t want to dig into detailed explanation (probably not less much as people tired of reading it ) of classes holistic design and their fantasy priority over any idea of “artificial fancy specs” and especially roles again, that none of which have ever worked in this game ...and I probably won't. We discussed this everything here on forum. Some examples of such discussions:

3. Classes philosophies+ (&thier coherence with whole design+supports/balance problems) +(+/+/+/+/+/+)+/+(+)+
4. Some words about talents (&their connection with classes, items=talents) +(+)+(+/+/+/+)

I’ll clarify it easier: artifact tied your character to a specific spec and its role, so without looking at what it expanded, it was bad in terms of design (character and artifact were interrelated = restriction on choice of characteristics → role → customization → gameplay). That is, non-character item had priority over entire class design, don't it even sounds silly? Everything is quite simple and logical, it's enough to add 1 to 1.

Ultimately Blizzard needs to reverse to the old design paradigm. And importantly there are two fallacies behind the "advantages" of their current design:
a) You can have all classes capable of most things with few pronounced weaknesses and that does not mean you homogenize. How you achieve this is part of gameplay; different mechanics and resources can allow for classes to create the same effect.
b) Class thematics are far more linked to visuals and gameplay pace than actual abilities. Legion which was Blizzard's strongest attempt at making recognizable spec themes focused mostly on visuals and unique gameplay.

This is homogenizing. You're making all the classes the same with different named abilities.

/b/ paragraph there rather caused me to have homeric laughter with sprinkling of saliva in different directions when I read it, such a nonsense, I don't even know how to deal with this, didn't even want to comment it.

[arkanon]

Here we go again.

I have serious concerns over gear acquisition, and i absolutely loath warforging / titanforging. but that hasnt ruined bfa for me.

Blizzard are amazing world builders. They have crafted some very nice zones in BfA - the setting is fine - they have added more and more things to do in game.

Azerite armor, the neck, traits, all an absolute clusterfuck. How they handled the communities very strong concerns during beta was dismissive, and patronizing. But this didnt ruin BfA for me.

My biggest is, the vehicle by which i experience this content is not enjoyable. So yes, the classes is the biggest issue i have with BfA, and it seems to be a very, very common opinion. Obviously opinion varies as to which classes are the worst / best, but it seems very common to hear "i just dont enjoy XXXX class anymore, and i cant find one i do"

Blizzard have been so busy building amazing racetracks and adding stickers and spoilers to the racecar, they forgot to service it and keep it current - now we are driving around a F1 track in our mums auto honda civic with flat tyres.

[FuxieDK]

Feel 100% the same.
It never felt like a good replacement for the weapons in Legion.

It's better than Legion, just more boring at the same time..
I don't want an item that is upgraded for eternity....and I'm not even doing it myself.

They removed Hit/Exp because you reforged your gear and forgot all about it... Well, guess what: I forgot about my neck at day one in this expansion..

[Peacemoon]

I would reluctantly agree with the OP.

The artifacts had lots of cool talents and abilities that were simply lost. When BfA was coming out and they had no big changes to my class (Guardian Druid), I was pretty happy. I had loved my Guardian Druid in Legion and wanted to carry on with him without a revamp or rework; everything was fine. But I didn’t take into account all the stuff that was removed. I had assumed wrongly that Blizzard would replicate the artifact stuff into the class and that would become the ‘new norm’.

Instead Guardian Druids lost so much, and in BfA we found ourselves as the worst tank. We had an artifact talent that gave thrash a snare - gone. And nothing to replaced with nothing so we had no snare anymore. We had ablative fur which gave us -10% magic damage to a particular school when we took damage from that school, e.g. shadow damage - gone. Again replaced with nothing so we have no magic mitigation outside of cooldowns. We had our artifact ability rage of the sleep which increased our damage and leech and acted as a dps or mitigation cooldown - gone. Guardian Druids have NO cooldown for increasing their damage - nothing.

There are lots of other examples but I won’t list them all. The point is we needlessly lost so many perks of the class that made the game so enjoyable, and they werent replaced by anything. So we started BfA feeling like we had lost a lot, and we never got that back with Azerite armour.

And Legion was pretty friendly towards changing spec. You had to level your artifact up for each one and socket it up, but once you had you could flip between them easily. In BfA Azerite armour traits do not switch with spec so you need multiple gear sets for each spec, taking us back about 10 years.

So yes I’m a sad panda. Not everything with BfA is crap but what they did to our characters was.

[Shakana]

I would reluctantly agree with the OP.

The artifacts had lots of cool talents and abilities that were simply lost. When BfA was coming out and they had no big changes to my class (Guardian Druid), I was pretty happy. I had loved my Guardian Druid in Legion and wanted to carry on with him without a revamp or rework; everything was fine. But I didn’t take into account all the stuff that was removed. I had assumed wrongly that Blizzard would replicate the artifact stuff into the class and that would become the ‘new norm’.

Instead Guardian Druids lost so much, and in BfA we found ourselves as the worst tank. We had an artifact talent that gave thrash a snare - gone. And nothing to replaced with nothing so we had no snare anymore. We had ablative fur which gave us -10% magic damage to a particular school when we took damage from that school, e.g. shadow damage - gone. Again replaced with nothing so we have no magic mitigation outside of cooldowns. We had our artifact ability rage of the sleep which increased our damage and leech and acted as a dps or mitigation cooldown - gone. Guardian Druids have NO cooldown for increasing their damage - nothing.

There are lots of other examples but I won’t list them all. The point is we needlessly lost so many perks of the class that made the game so enjoyable, and they werent replaced by anything. So we started BfA feeling like we had lost a lot, and we never got that back with Azerite armour.

And Legion was pretty friendly towards changing spec. You had to level your artifact up for each one and socket it up, but once you had you could flip between them easily. In BfA Azerite armour traits do not switch with spec so you need multiple gear sets for each spec, taking us back about 10 years.

So yes I’m a sad panda. Not everything with BfA is crap but what they did to our characters was.

Oof you explaining this is compelling. Nice to read. I talked about guardian druids somewhere on my thread aswell. It's what i noticed for tanks, that guardian used to be top choices for raids and m+ and in BfA barely you see people accepting you as tank anywhere and prefer choosing another tank.

- - - Updated - - -

Ah! There we go, found it:

For me Guardian druid lost it's touch. It was in a good place in Legion. In BfA they want Frenzied Regeneration out of GCD and the change they do instead is:
Frenzied Regeneration, at rank 3, now costs 10-30 rage (was 10-40 rage).

Their reason:
It was to stop the bear form to frenzy regen macros that pvp druids used.

[ShimmerSwirl]

Ultimately Blizzard needs to reverse to the old design paradigm. And importantly there are two fallacies behind the "advantages" of their current design:
a) You can have all classes capable of most things with few pronounced weaknesses and that does not mean you homogenize. How you achieve this is part of gameplay; different mechanics and resources can allow for classes to create the same effect.
b) Class thematics are far more linked to visuals and gameplay pace than actual abilities. Legion which was Blizzard's strongest attempt at making recognizable spec themes focused mostly on visuals and unique gameplay.

This is homogenizing. You're making all the classes the same with different named abilities.

[Peacemoon]

Oof you explaining this is compelling. Nice to read. I talked about guardian druids somewhere on my thread aswell. It's what i noticed for tanks, that guardian used to be top choices for raids and m+ and in BfA barely you see people accepting you as tank anywhere and prefer choosing another tank.

- - - Updated - - -

Ah! There we go, found it:

I was going to mention the GCD debacle but forgot. Frenzied Regeneration being put on the GCD is the worst thing. As a reactive self heal it should be off the GCD, it is now hard to use properly and it costs you an attack. And if Blizzard wanted they could take it off the GCD for just the Guardian version. A lot of classes suffered from the GCD change, which compounded the other changes.

[Shakana]

Well... this isn't true, and people even before Legion appearance pointed to this simple and logical fact: it didn't for Legion too. Oh... you won't belive how I don’t want to dig into detailed explanation (probably not less much as people tired of reading it ) of classes holistic design and their fantasy priority over any idea of “artificial fancy specs” and especially roles again, that none of which have ever worked in this game ...and I probably won't. We discussed this everything here on forum. Some examples of such discussions:
I’ll clarify it easier: artifact tied your character to a specific spec and its role, so without looking at what it expanded, it was bad in terms of design (character and artifact were interrelated = restriction on choice of characteristics → role → customization → gameplay). That is, non-character item had priority over entire class design, don't it even sounds silly? Everything is quite simple and logical, it's enough to add 1 to 1.

A lot of stuff they are talking there i had said it here, i choose some of my posts about it on this thread:

[thunterman]

100% yes. If the HoA gave us everything we lost, the azerite system and all the classes would feel so much better. I've got all 12 classes at 120 now, gotta say, the only specs that feel fluid are : Fury war, Frost DK, Havoc DH Everything else feel like there's a button missing. those 3 specs are the only 3 I can tolerate long enough to actually play. Fluidity as a healer / tank is less important, because the RNG panic that can occur keeps it interesting IMO, but EVERY DPS spec should have fluid combat.

Gotta say as its on subject though, I really REEALLY miss healing touch on my resto druid.

[Shakana]

100% yes. If the HoA gave us everything we lost, the azerite system and all the classes would feel so much better. I've got all 12 classes at 120 now, gotta say, the only specs that feel fluid are : Fury war, Frost DK, Havoc DH Everything else feel like there's a button missing. those 3 specs are the only 3 I can tolerate long enough to actually play. Fluidity as a healer / tank is less important, because the RNG panic that can occur keeps it interesting IMO, but EVERY DPS spec should have fluid combat.

Gotta say as its on subject though, I really REEALLY miss healing touch on my resto druid.

Frost DK? I couldn't agree less tbh. All others i agree but Frost dk is not one of them. Havoc DH barely suffers from GCDs and the uptime is really good. Frost dk stays there auto attacking for ages because of the lacking resources, they are so bad atm. Where are they fluid? I really don't see it. They are like stuck with BoS for life and has downtime. No matter how much changes they do, relying on BoS forever as the most source of damage in a talent is just poorly designed.

[Alkizon]

A lot of stuff they are talking there i had said it here, i choose some of my posts about it on this thread:

I understand, I just emphasize priority of what allows system to function correctly, over the fact that "I like something".

--- it was Cata conversation ---
Well, impressions are relative/individual, but from mechanics point of view - this was the worst option of "old system". For example, MoP was the best option of "new system" but! new one is worse than old in coherence with RPG component of this game. Ie, I can say that I liked MoP classes design, but I continue to argue that in general it's bad system for this particular game. Is that more clear? Mastery was crap in way they implemented it, but reforging was good. Glyphs was added during WotLK, in fact, they were additional "talent" options and could be easily realized inside talent trees, but they found a good place for a new profession, which isn't bad in itself.

- I could like smoking, but this still doesn't mean that it's healthy for my organism.

I may like system, but this doesn't mean that it's correct/better. Just as for current game design, todays class system design is appropriate (*shudders&frowns* it's disgusting to associate this filth with word "design" in general, but let's say this way), but here already conflict is much more global and flawed is entire game design, because it was created in attempt to divide indivisible (аnd the first steps were laid exactly by Cataclysm with its "separation into specs"/LFR/CRZ/phasing attempts). Most evident and obvious present ex.

The team wants to see more class representation in Mythic + and the MDI and will consider this when adding affixes in the future.

- it was needless to take into consideration such $hitty additions during class design in MoP (as well as in previous expansions), so... but exactly Cataclysm was transition from old global design to new one, and it fully concerns class design too - it wasn't old and it wasn't new, it was transitional hybrid that had no independent future, because it had disadvantages of both systems together.

Have you noticed that you continue to discuss specs instead of discussing classes?

Don't think that I'm trying to attack you or your opinion, just pointing that discussion direction becomes somewhat confused with this approach: just only everything was bad, and then it turns out already that in a certain sense was good. You need to act definitely and confidently in current situation à la guerre comme à la guerre

you don't play a class only, you play a class and a spec

Don't you notice problem here? Maybe things should be different? May be better to return to class and specific build discussions?.. which doesn't try to influence classes design (limit) and balance (adjust to content) and leaves choose of particular role type to you and your "items' set".

[Shakana]

I understand, I just emphasize priority of what allows system to function correctly, over the fact that "I like something".

Have you noticed that you continue to discuss specs instead of discussing classes?

Don't think that I'm trying to attack you or your opinion, just pointing that discussion direction becomes somewhat confused with this approach: then everything is bad, then it turns out already and in a certain sense is good. You need to act definitely and confidently in current situation à la guerre comme à la guerre

It's fine don't worry about me, i'm used to take criticism. But as for the me talking about specs, it's because classes has specs, you don't play a class only, you play a class and a spec. And not all specs are balanced, they make a spec be so bad, that you need to change to the spec that is good at the moment. That is another issue to talk about. For you to play a class you will always need to select a spec, they are tangled either you like it or not. So obviously i will talk about specs when i talk about classes and vice versa.

[Beefkow]

About a good 100% of what I do in WOW involves class design.

For the first time since 2004, i've never been so demoralized and depressed about an expansion. I guess it's just a coincidence that I lost interest in wow.

We lost so much stuff coming from legion to BFA it's not even funny.

We feel pruned, weak, and just flat out slower.

[Pakheth]

I play a BM/MM hunter since Legion/BFA and I'm having fun so far. Don't see why people are that upset.

Which means you never played it before and therefore has nothing to compare it to like we who has played previous expansions can. Ignorance is bliss.
My hunter has been my main since Vanilla. Hunter at the moment is nothing like it used to be. It's slow and clunky and feels off. Also the class fantasy Blizz added to BM in Legion clashes with the class fantasy me and a lot of others had since Vanilla.