What is the actual impact of returning old niche abilities?

[FAILoZOFF]

A lot of people seem to be praising Blizzard for a massive directional change on class development.

Well, that's a little too early to say much about it really. From what little info they gave, calling it a "massive directional change"doesn't really match what was said, I'd be careful calling it even "minor" tbh. Most of the abilities they presented change about nothing gameplay wise. Nothing.
Besides, I won't believe until I see it.

In its current implementation, it makes no sense at all. They should massively revert all specs to at least a pre-Legion (preferrably pre-Cata) state for this "unpruning" to be something more than a couple of old skills being added back in a vacuum.

This really.

PS: Considering how big of an issue class design became in Legion/BfA for a LOT of people, its more than worrying that they didn't have much/anything too say about their plans regarding this topic. Like... adding a few almost meaningless abilities and calling it a day just won't do,

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They showed a few sample abilities. Of course they are not just going to add flavor ablities like eyes of the beast, totems and aura's.

"of course"

[Blackrunner01]

A lot of people seem to be praising Blizzard for a massive directional change on class development.

All we've seen at Blizzcon is that they're re adding a bunch of pruned abilities to classes.

Abilities that were pruned for a reason because 99% of the time you never had a reason to use them.

In addition, they're giving some cross-spec abilities back as base line.

Lets look at mages for example. Let's say Frost mages get access to Fireball again. What reason does a frost mage have to actually cast a fireball? Their talents and masteries don't impact fireball at all. It would just be a straight dps loss. As a result, it is still never going to get used and may as well continue to be spec locked.

Blizzard would have to completely redesign masteries, stats, and talents in order to promote the use of abilities that don't currently benefit from your stats or specs. Yet, they've made no indication of doing so at Blizzcon. Not examples, not even (from what I recall) a statement saying they're reworking this stuff.

So what gives? What is so special about returning old abilities that still won't see use with out other major changes?

Huge.

From what we've seen so far classes will get back the following abilities which I would consider High Impact:

Mage: Frost Bolt (Fire/Arcane)
Priest: Flash Heal (SP) and Shadow Word: Death going Baseline.
Shaman: Frost Shock
Druid: Ursol's Vortex (All excluding Restoration) and Cyclone
Rogue: Shiv and Poisons (All Assumed)
Death Knight: Anti-Magic Zone(All), Death Coil (Frost/Blood), Summon Gargoyle (UH)
Warlock: Demonic Circle
Paladin: Hammer of Fucking Wrath
Warrior: Shattering Throw
Hunter: Kill Shot

The executes alone are going to me a major game changer in both PVE and PVP. Blizzard will have to design bosses around all groups having massively increased dmg on bosses entering the sub 20% region. Shadow Priests are going to dominate melee in PVP unless Shadow Mend is removed. They will need to do massive changes to the talent trees in both PVP and PVE, and I for one am looking forward to using AMZ in almost every single encounter on my DK.

This will have a MAJOR effect on the game and if you can't see that then frankly, you should keep lurking.

[JamesMartigo]

My question isn't what is Blizzard's motivation, the question is why are PLAYERS happy about it, when there seems to be no reason at all to care about it?

They could just add 10 "abilities" to every class that literally do nothing or don't do it as good as an other ability does, and it would essentially be the same thing as what they're doing now.

No reason to care? I care a lot about getting Challenging Shout back on my Protection Warrior. How can you not see the value of an aoe taunt for a tank?

[exochaft]

All I want to know is whether or not my chaos bolts will ignore pally and priest shields again. If so I'll sub for a year

If anything, I want them to cut down on all the immunities as it's becoming ridiculous to the point where Blizz has to design raid mechanics to ignore immunities so the fights won't be trivialized. But I digress...

I think this issue has several parts that work in tandem. One part is the pruned abilities, another is the abilities that got shifted to PvP-only that used to be core abilities. While there are other factors, I'll just focus on these two factors. When it comes to pruned abilities, some seemed useless and/or trivial while others actually had power associated with them. When it comes to PvP-only abilities that used to be standard, most had some strength behind them, as well. Throwing pruned abilities and PvP-only abilities back to the base class would certainly have a balancing issue, but that's only in the frame of reference that is BfA character balance. Whatever gets added back in Shadowlands will go through the balancing process to take care of potential issues.

Now, if we want to go back to the mage example where Frost mages have access to Fireball, it may seem pointless most of the time... but again, it's frame of reference issue, as in BfA it'd be pointless from a power balance perspective in most cases (an exception being spell lockouts in PvP or something along those lines, allowing mages to continue casting or juke a spell class). If we jump ahead to Shadowlands, Blizz has the chance to make pruned abilities shine more. Easiest implementation would be legendaries. For example, you could have a mage legendary where casting one school of spell increases the damage of another school, like casting Fireball increases your Frost damage by X% for 10 seconds. Another example is adding a system that augments or transforms abilities, where you could turn Fireball into a Frostfire spell.

Blizz has the potential to not only bring back some flavor to classes, but also expand on these flavor abilities to make them shine.

[Arikara]

A few flavor abilities don't matter greatly

What does matter is whether or not they are returning the GCD abilities they ruined in BFA, unfucking Revenge, and returning Focused Rage

[sam86]

u don't pvp much do u?
in fact i see they didn't add enough spells yet, pruning cost exactly zero effort, we talk about spells that at the least minimum stayed for 2 years, already tested and proven to work with no bugs, they just add to the pile of monthly balance numbers
shatter throw is very good for pvp, eye of beast has many use in pve, even in pvp (specially rbg) hunter on def put pet at the only entrance to roof in wsg, totally safe with zero risk
fireball used to have longer range than frostbolt, so even fireball has its own use in pve to pull dangerous mobs
If it was in my hand, i'd return abilities to include every ability and talent from wrath at least, if not MoP, then also add a new talent tier because we are now in 2nd exp with no new talent tier, remove the idea of 'pvp talents only' and make them on for both pve and pvp
in other words i won't remove anything that was ever given to a class, and will add 'new' abilities that classes didn't have, by new i mean the pvp-only ones that legion annoyingly started
also f8ck warmode system, pvp servers back

[Ludvig]

Abilities that were pruned for a reason because 99% of the time you never had a reason to use them.

It's not even close to 99%. Kill shot isn't useless. Auras, totems, curses and poisons are useful almost all of the time. I hope they add back more than what they confirmed at blizzcon (which I assume they will).

I could talk about these talents/spells and how they were useful aswell, for example powershot for hunters was fun and had use in pvp (and did good dmg in pve), glaive throw did good damage, ammo munitions was a cool flavorful ability. There's also aspects, silencing shot, scatter into trap (without DR), using hunters mark to prevent magic dispels etc. This is all for hunters, too, only one class of which there are many of course.


You don't need to minimalize classes/specs to separate them from others. You only end up with hollow fragments of classes, like in bfa and even in legion.

And yes, blizzard will need to make sure it all fits, but all they need to do is look at previous iterations of the given class. Not exactly difficult or time-consuming.

[sam86]

Eye of the beast baby, biggest impact on the game since it was removed.

if u don't like it u can remove it from ur bar
i never understood team 'no fly' with team 'prun more' (also team pruning is very small), if u don't like by all means do not use it, no one is forcing u to, u can play entire Mop with no flying, i have a friend who played wod and raided but never got flying, and another friend who played legion and didn't get flying, guess what? the game works 100% fine for them and nothing happened
If u really don't want to fly, don't, let everyone else enjoy flying, if u don't want to use eye of beast, don't, let us have hunters track the wsg corridor to secure team roof while ur - hopefully opposite faction - hunter doesn't use his to defend his team

it's mostly useless in many cases like you said.

why is that a bad thing? give me an ability i can use in specific situation, instead of nothing at all, no one force u to use, but i'll be damn sure i'll use mine whenever i can, no matter how rare that 'can' will be

[Eapoe]

Impact on my Hunter?
Well, I’ll get Hunter’s Mark, which just means another GCD ability I have to apply every time I switch targets. Otherwise it’s just apply before pull and forget about it. Ooh, so exciting!
Killshot? I’m kind of happy about getting an execute back, but seeing as how I enjoy playing SV from time to time I’m worried it will be forgotten and make SV even more of a dead spec. Honestly, why can’t Blizzard do anything to make this spec as appealing as other melee? The lack of damage and utility compared to others is extremely poorly implemented.
Eyes of the Beast? Verdict is out on this. On one hand, it’s just a “toy” ability. Borderline useless and a time waster. On the other, if pets are strong enough to survive running thru packs on m+, with a coordinated group (heals not hitting the pet to pull aggro), it has the chance to be even stronger than Shadowmeld as you can easily pull packs away and have your group skip it and all the only CD is from rezzing your pet and the non CD of the ability itself. So, it could actually have some nice uses for things like m+ and even the tower (depending on its design).

[sam86]

It's not even close to 99%. Kill shot isn't useless. Auras, totems, curses and poisons are useful almost all of the time.

as a paladin it doesn't feel right without auras (or seals)
but aura specially is the most important passive for paladin, we have devotion aura since 2001, why remove it? i loved that pally had aura for many fights, devotion, ret, even flame and shadow ones...
I never mained shaman, in fact shaman was always low priority for me, but my friend who used to main shaman couldn't play one in legion with the remove of totems, and literally left game because of it, yes during Legion which is considered a good exp, he just found shaman class identity raped, also blizz really hate shamans, that they made sure best shaman players in world leave the game in early bfa...

[Andonais]

The game feeling more like an actual rpg and not just a hand held theme park

[sam86]

No reason to care? I care a lot about getting Challenging Shout back on my Protection Warrior. How can you not see the value of an aoe taunt for a tank?

they removed it -.- ? sorry i don't play prot warrior, but of all prunned abilities, how the f8ck exactly did they see that ability as 1) not class or spec ability and 2) not useful?
how the F8CK did they see an aoe taunt NOT useful !?
pls tell me u trolling and that ability still exist in-game, no way they are that f8cking brain dead retarded stupid, and i don't even play warrior (i'm pally main)

[Craaazyyy]

do you know that pve isnt the only thing in the game? you know that rotation isnt the only thing that matters?

fireball isn't useless because when you're kicked on frost you have to cast something, it also might have a higher cast range etc.

every single ability that was shown was being used all the time

you said 99% of the time removed abilities weren't used, which is so far from the truth.. some easy warlock examples are soulburn, soulswap, felflame, lifetap, warlock armors and curses, drain mana, howl, shadowflame, hellfire, searing pain etc.

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they removed it -.- ? sorry i don't play prot warrior, but of all prunned abilities, how the f8ck exactly did they see that ability as 1) not class or spec ability and 2) not useful?
how the F8CK did they see an aoe taunt NOT useful !?
pls tell me u trolling and that ability still exist in-game, no way they are that f8cking brain dead retarded stupid, and i don't even play warrior (i'm pally main)

they removed it in mop LOL

[exochaft]

they removed it -.- ? sorry i don't play prot warrior, but of all prunned abilities, how the f8ck exactly did they see that ability as 1) not class or spec ability and 2) not useful?
how the F8CK did they see an aoe taunt NOT useful !?
pls tell me u trolling and that ability still exist in-game, no way they are that f8cking brain dead retarded stupid, and i don't even play warrior (i'm pally main)

They removed it from bear tanks, as well. Meanwhile, monk tanks can spam taunt on a statue to AoE taunt...

I don't remember the exact reasoning behind the removal of AoE taunts (if there was one provided at all), but I know several abilities were removed/changed because they overlapped with class identity. Tanking classes have experienced this balancing reason quite a bit, such as Frenzied Regen not scaling with damage taken because it's too much like BDK's Death Strike and they need flavor (ironically enough, FR was changed back to a HoT, which Blizz had previously said was unresponsive and bad design, go figure). AoE taunts may have fallen into this, but I find it odd (but not unprecedented) that Blizz removes an ability that was baseline for a class back in vanilla because it was some other class's "flavor" and/or style, even if it was a class that was added in later expansions.

[Revamp Man]

"hey guys I got the debuffs that locks me out of the school of my next cast.... fireball"

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Why shouldn't classes have flavor abilities that have 0 effect on output?

[sam86]

they removed it in mop LOL

i don't know what to say seriously for that
i don't play warrior protection and even i facepalm for that, my warrior is rarely played, and if he even tanks it is some crappy 5 men lfg, never serious play, so i never noticed it got removed
there is ZERO reason to remove it, zero, no reason to even think about the idea to remove it
I hated when they removed paladin other taunt (his first taunt add, the one that taunt 3 enemies, but from a friendly target, basically u taunt ppl who attack ur friend, max 3) but i admit it was slightly annoying to use (which nothing a good macro doesn't solve)
But they removed a retarded taunt system, and left the good one (even if it was single target, and introduced later, and nerfed its dmg...), the warrior aoe one, why ?

[Aleksej89]

RPG is about character depth and class fantasy.
Its hard to have either of those when your class has barely 10 buttons to press, all of which are basic shallow and boring.

Situational, utility and niche spells and tools allow players to interact with various mechanics and combat situations, in addition to the usual boring DPS rotation.
Also all those spells contribute to the overall class theme and depth, allowing you to actually be different from other classes and contribute in unique ways.


For example in Neverwinter Nights (rpg from 2002) the wizard class had over 200 different/unique spells at its disposal... even more with metamagic and legendary feats.
My favorite class design was back in MOP when classes were full with abilities - yes some were a bit messy but it was the most fun i had with classes since vanilla.

[Gratlim]

I wanted Metamorphosis but got Ritual of Doom--

More seriously, i am happy to see curses back.

[Soon-TM]

Blizz has the potential to not only bring back some flavor to classes, but also expand on these flavor abilities to make them shine.

I wholeheartedly agree, but the question is, will they?

[Krille]

Y'all do realize they will still do the usual balancing/fixing talents thing right? Getting some abilities back isnt their way to say, we're done here. They have, for instance, officially said that sub rogue is getting a rework.

The one thing they said that people hooked onto was the comment about "not doing reworks like in Legion". Which doesnt exclude fixing talent trees with dead options for a lot of classes. Hell, giving back some of these abilities baseline means there are holes in the trees that needs new talents.