How did blizzard manage to let class/talent design get so bad?

[Nyel]

I have to agree, Shadowpriest is in my opinion one of the worst specs in BfA (in Legion it was already one of the worse specs). MoP / WoD Shadow Priest was the pinnacle of class design for that spec and I fear it'll never be so good again.

[Darien Stegosaur]

the GCD change (which to this day makes no coherent sense to me)

Everyone who says this is being willfully ignorant, since Blizzard gave their reasoning for the change and it makes perfect sense.

When you encounter a situation where there are two (or more) possible solutions, they want you to choose one or the other. If one or both of the solution spells are off GCD, making any choice is the wrong choice. The correct play is to cast both.

As a personal example, I was literally the world number paladin for self healing on several fights in Legion. You want to know how I accomplished that? I wrote a 130 character macro that automatically cast Light of the Protector on my target if it was friendly, on myself if my target was unfriendly and had no target, and my target's target if the target was unfriendly and his target was friendly, then I added that line to every button in my rotation. Doing the spell on cooldown without checking whether or not it was necessary objective outperformed literally every human in the world.

So many spells being off the GCD was bad. It was very exploitable and forced complex macros to be used.

[Pheraz]

I'm totally fine with all the talents and specs. And I'm playing every class on 120, most of them even with two characters.
Looks very subjective to me what the op says

[Biggles Worth]

A lot of what you say is subjective opinion.

[Nobleshield]

IMHO the biggest issue is that they went too far with balance. Classic's class balance was abysmal and is too far to the left (there's zero reason why all classes can't be viable at all roles; that's the entire point of having specs in the first place. Otherwise you wouldn't have them like EQ and other games at the time did) but over the years they just ignored having classes feel unique (despite them looking unique) and we have what we see today. In retail, my Ret Paladin doesn't really feel much different than my Arms (or even Fury) Warrior, and that's garbage because those classes shouldn't play or feel anything alike.

IMHO I think Wrath and Cata (gameplay wise, not the rest) were the sweet spots. Classes felt unique and brought different things to the table but all of them were viable at any level of content, something that Classic is lacking (I didn't play TBC to know where it fell) despite all the other parts where Classic feels really good. Even Pandaria wasn't that bad but started the decline, and after that class identity started mattering less and less.

[Grimbold21]

I casually play 5 classes/specs:

- Enhancement: the one I play the most, the Lava Lash/Primal Primer spec is probably what I find most interesting about it, even though it can still be largely centered around SS
- Holy Priest: second most played and probably the one I enjoy the most as I think it has more diversity in its play style
- Prot Warr: Not much to say, not too exciting, not too boring
- Resto Shaman: A bit like holy priest, but less. I guess it's the AoE version of it
- Holy Paladin: bland. Ironic, cause I mained holy paladin all the way to the end of TBC and that wasn't complex at all, but still more exciting.

So, yea, I kinda agree, I'd describe current class design outcome as straightforward and bland.

[Sider]

The problem has a name. He is Ion Hazikostas. IMO he has no idea what he is doing and he doesnt seem to listen to players enough. What he thinks is fun, it is only fun to him.

[Dadwen]

Number 1 reason I'm not subbed, class design started going downhill since WOD, and in the shitter ever since, friend dragged me back for a few months in BFA and we made it about 3 or 4 months before both calling it quits.

Even during the end of MOP I kept busy just leveling alts, the classes themselves were fun to play even in repeat content.

[froschhure]

A lot of what you say is subjective opinion.

You definitly dont know the usage of subjective

[reploid]

OP is 100% right and Ive been saying that on the Blizzard forums since beta. Even got banned for it more than once. Even when I unsubbed I wrote about that on the feedback form they sent to my email. Thats imo the worse thing happening to wow right now, that and the mandatory personal loot on old raids i used to farm for transmogs.

[sam86]

It is. For everything you say would be a fix to any one thing there'd be people who would say it was no better, or worse. That's the very definition of subjective.

ehm no...
blizz flat out admit that one of worst f8ck ups in BFA is class design, it is subjective like LFG for example where no side has clear winner, but class design is confirmed already to be the biggest sh8t in bfa
everyone point out that it started in legion, and forget that gutting spells started in WoD
Seriously i never met someone who can't wait to play a rpg game to gain lvl to lose power and abilities, can u name any name anywhere beside wow where the more u lvl the less abilities u have? at least i did see 1 person (so far) who actually like pruning, also i'm willing to bet he just want to be special snowflake for attention since the majority hates it, and if he does like it why the f8ck he plays a RPG game, where its base rule is u gain power and abilities the more u play/lvl, not lose them
and ret is the worst even compare to vanilla days, at least in vanilla it was boring (just right click) but still had its massive utility + insane survive, now u have far higher dps (also to be fair, even an afk hunter has more dps than vanilla paladin...) but ~ 0 utility

So unless u consider ur headcanon is more legitimate than blizz own words, class design is not 'subjective', it is fact as pure sh8t

- - - Updated - - -

Exactly the problem - the sooner they stop, the better.

from following legion beta specially, i question when did they exactly listen even 1 time
everyone who tested legion beta agreed that AP farming was the worst, and sure as f8ck they didn't listen, the entire shaman in bfa were f8cked, best shamans in world told them they are wrong, surprise they didn't listen, only after they left the game did the listen, which was way too late because their wallets got hurt
blizz don't listen, they never did, as gamestop said since cata days, blizz blame their own mistakes on playerbase, if they add murloc as playable race tomorrow, and ppl hate it, they will find that 1 post of someone who requested it, and since wow had millions of players, there is always at least 1 who said whatever they did to defend themselves

[Maylander]

In isolation, I actually think most specs have excellent gameplay at this point. The problem is, BfA doesn't really exist in isolation. Legion came before it, and almost all specs felt better in Legion than they do now.

Simply returning stuff from Legion isn't a good fix either, as it would quickly get boring. Most specs have barely changed for three years. Some more than that. They need to make some fundemental changes, and introduce some new stuff. Back in the days, classes were quite different from expansion to expansion. Yes, it could be frustrating to play a Warlock and go through a total revamp every other patch, but at least it kept things fresh.

I fear Blizzard might have painted themselves into a corner in that regard though, as they now (effectively) have 36 classes instead of 12, making it a much bigger task to revamp the classes. I suspect we're looking at a few revamps, and the rest will have to settle for minor changes, which is simply not enough to get people excited.

[Aphrel]

so play fire? or reroll? not even defending blizzard here but like you're not locked to one spec or one char

i already do play fire. But that doesnt change the fact that frost feels horrible to play.

Putting a rug over something doesnt remove it...

[Bodakane]

But it's not. By far the #1 complaint people in this game have is spec/talent design. I've never met a high-end raider in this game that thinks spec/class design issues have not been plaguing BFA since day 1.

Prove it. Where are you getting this metric that ensures what you're saying isn't subjective?

[Redecle]

It really isn't a global fact, but an opinion.
Cause i'm personally on the exact opposite of that opinion.

BfA class design is currently the best thing in BfA, why i'm still playing, heck personally it's the best era of class design in 15 years.
It's all i've asked since i started in vanilla, it's simple, easy, fun and fluid. Only gripe i really have is with the gcd change, the game is too slow to play, i'd prefer every spec speed operated as Fury does, Fury on steroids, with minimum of 120 actions per minute.

I have and play all classes at max level, and have played all specs at least some time during BfA.
And it is easier for me to list the specs that aren't enjoyable to play at the moment, cause the list is Havoc DH, Arms Warrior (on the defense, i've never liked arms in 15 years with the game), Affliction Warlock and Sub Rogue (on that case it's similar to Arms, only time i actually liked Sub was during Sunwell patch. That's it, 4 specs that don't work for me out of 36. When some of my favorites right now are Outlaw (full old combat build with all passives) Rogue, Fury Warrior, Enhancement Shaman, Marksmanship Hunter, Shadow Priest, Retribution Paladin, Frost and Arcane Mage, Feral Druid. And those are just the absolute best favorites.

Are they all balanced for high end performance. No. That's a balance issue, not game play issue.
But in all this time there hasn't been one moment at least for me, where all classes have had at least one fun spec to play, like it is now, most have more than one.
I hear lot of people bracing MoP class design which again comes to subjective point of opinions, cause personally MoP had the worst class design i've seen, way too complex and complicated, specially things like Feral Druid and Affliction Lock. So the same thing said here can be applied the other way too.
Granted my preference comes from the keywords simple, easy and fluid. Max 12 binds overall per spec, 1-3 max for rotations rest cds, 2-4 binds for priority lists.

[Vargulf the Happy Husky]

this is the fruit that "balancing" provides. should have stopped the bitching after BC when there was at least still some give and take when it came to classes.


any class can do anything in this game now.

[dcc626]

For the love of god, please remove set specs from the game. Your talent choices should determine your spec, not just arbitrarily selecting an option in a menu and *presto* now I'm a Frost DK and I have no memory or recollection of being able to cast a death coil.

I play a class, not a spec. Without doubt the worst part of modern WoW is the class design

nah, its the playerbase in general.

[Nerovar]

The problem basically started in Legion when they had to prune away a lot of the old, tried abilities and mechanics of classes to make room for artifact weapons. The issue is, artifact weapons were never intended to stay. Because of that, they couldn't really incorporate the artifact traits into the specs because that would have then required another complicated prune and a subsequent complete class rework once the artifact weapons were gone.
Artifact traits could never have a real impact on your gameplay because they weren't meant to stay in the first place.
So we ended up with vastly simplified classes - which was especially visible during Legion prepatch (still have horrifying screenshots of my purged, empty action bars) - and Artifacts (and honor talents, I guess) strapped on top which were meant to fill the void that was left behind by all the pruning.

It's a pretty significant design shift if you think about it. They went from a constructive class design philosophy that built and improved on the previous iterations to a 'tabula rasa' type approach that completely purged some of the existing class/spec identities and replaced them with something entirely new.
They've opened pandora's box with this new approach of class design that's reliant on external sources (Artifact Weapons, Azerite Armor) to make it work.
Now they're in a spot where they have to scrap their old system with every expansion only to come up with a new one that will suffer from the same weak points as the one before it.

[Wangming]

I don't think the content in BFA is bad on a fundamental level

And I think it is. One of us is definitely wrong, but at least one of us is also correct.

[Casperite]

what about ret? affli? frost mage? frost dk? mm hunt? sp? how do you feel about these?

Ret and frost mage feel better than ever to me, and SP is my main and dont really think it's bad, can't speak to the others. This entire thread is all subjective opinion though.