Anyone NOT that hyped for 'return to class'?

[Doffen]

Not from a balance perspective it isn't.

I'd rather have 12 classes with better balance than 36 with worse balance.

Where the is the logic in this? There are still 36 specs to balance. There will be zero difference in balance and how they do it.

[Schattenlied]

or making my pirate use poisons.

All rogues should definitely have poisons, and all rogues should have gouge too (which only outlaw has right now for some stupid reason, all rogues had poisons and gouge before Legion). Also outlaw is not "pirate", it's outlaw, and the only vaguely pirate ability they even have right now is roll the bones and calling that a pirate ability is a stretch and a half.

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Where the is the logic in this? There are still 36 specs to balance. There will be zero difference in balance and how they do it.

Goes the other way too, there's still 36 specs, so his complaint about "going from 36 classes to 12" is completely nonsensical. There's only 12 classes right now, and there still will be in Shadowlands, except now they will share more baseline abilities.

[Nathasil]

This whole discussion is premature. If you look at the current specs there are two giant losers in the roster: SV Hunter + Sub Rogue. Both of these specs TOGETHER are played less than the third least popular spec, no matter what kind of PvE content you look at.

These two specs do not just underperform - they do not have an identity. Sub was supposed to be great with openers gameplay wise - yet they handed the steroid-garrotte which you could actually build a character around to Assassination, which did not need this mechanic at all. Lorewise Sub is intended to be a "Ninja" - cool - but why dos the spec use daggers, then? Show me a single famous pop-culture Ninja who uses two daggers exclusively.
Long story short: The spec is totally and utterly in the shitter, both from a gameplay/performance PoV AND from a lore/cosmetic PoV. It is just dead. Completely dead. They would need to start at square one with it to turn it into "something".

But what will SL supposedly do to "fix" it? Give it poisons....so it plays even more like Asassination, just worse. This is EXACTLY what Sub does NOT need.

It is the same for SV, just with the added melee vs ranged factor thrown in. A guy who fights with a spear sounds kind of cool. But a guy who fights with a spear, loves nature+wildlife but throws explosives all the time is just a mess. A convoluted mess. There is nothing even remotely enjoyable about this "package". It's like giving an Arms warrior martial-arts and arcane magic. At some point it just stops being interesting and turns into a shit show. SV has passed that point upon birth.

What this game needs is a hard look at the fundamental class mechanic. Seprating specs from classes and creating something new. The same is true for faction by the way. SL does none of that. It is a very conservative expansion in times where the players who are still playing this game would have arguably wanted more radical change.

At least i wanted MUCH more radical change.

[bloodmoth13]

How long did you play WoW? This needs some context, If you haven't played before the era of Cataclysm I can understand you being skeptical of the idea of "Class" as you've never truly known what a class is, but rather a spec with a few doodads shared among the class. Go to classic, that alone will teach you what a CLASS truly is, not a spec. And hopefully Shadowlands will do a good job at returning class identity.

To me, as someone playing 15 years It feels shit to know I've had over 50 abilities and then am restricted to 15 per spec and the other 5 were removed. It felt like my class was butchered, standardized and according to analytics and data alone, was streamlined, not due to player feedback or criticism.

I played before cata and there are some big points to bring up about the 'class' myth.
Any spec defining or gameplay defining talents were always placed deep in the spec branch in order to kill off any true hybridization.
Stormstrike is a great example and it honestly made leveling enhance incredibly boring since you only had earth shock till level 40 when elemental could no longer access your talents and you could get stormstrike. There was no fascinating hybrid spec you could create, you just took a few stat talents while all of the gameplay talents were out of reach.
Moving into specs in cata made introductions to specs MUCH more interesting. As soon as you hit 10 you get a few tools to access the actual gameplay of your specialization as opposed to having to wait till the cut off point where the other branches couldnt dip into your stuff.

also, what were classes before cata werent all too different, honestly, spec and class are just names, if we treat them both as modules with varying gameplay options, modern specs are literally just new classes. Shadow spec is literally a shadow mage, complete with different play styles. Honestly with many 'classes' there was less inter spec deviation than current intra-spec deviation.

hybrids were a lie, i think there was frostfire mages which was literally the only split spec that was really ever viable? otherwise you would have to give up too much to hybridize, early talents in each branch were crap and all of the good talents were deep in the tree, making dipping into each branch worthless.

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To OP, im dreading it. spec identity in legion was one of the best design decisions that blizzard has made, backpeddling to 'class' fantasy is just undoing the progress legion made. I like playing a pure fire mage, or a shadow priest, or a demonology warlock. If they want to bring back a 'frostfire' mage, then do it! THROUGH TALENTS. give 1 or 2 frostfire talents and call it a day.

Personally i want them to go even further with spec identity and REMOVE classes. They are just dated concepts that stifle design space, split all classes up into their components, and allow players to pick 3-4 specs out of the entire list of specs with a few restrictions (share armor class OR magic school OR weapon type) and focus on character fantasy instead. This would be a perfect solution to adding in new specs that dont justify full fledged classes like necromancer, dark ranger or just about any magic archer spec.

[Doffen]

Goes the other way too, there's still 36 specs, so his complaint about "going from 36 classes to 12" is completely nonsensical. There's only 12 classes right now, and there still will be in Shadowlands, except now they will share more baseline abilities.

Allright, gotcha.

[Schattenlied]

But what will SL supposedly do to "fix" it? Give it poisons....so it plays even more like Asassination, just worse. This is EXACTLY what Sub does NOT need.

We don't know what they will do in addition to giving it poisons, so... yeah, like you said, this is premature.

And I disagree, as my main alt is a rogue and I played primarily sub until Legion hit, one thing it needs back is poisons, at least in PvP... From a PvP perspective sub desperately needs a better snare, which Crippling poison covers, and a healing debuff would dramatically improve it's viability, which is currently basically nonexistant... Giving them back poisons will not make it play noticeably more like Assassination, all poisons are is passive effects and the specs currently play almost nothing alike, so giving them poisons will in fact not change how they play at all.

Personally, I think sub was perfect in Cataclysm, was one of the few things that expansion did right.

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spec identity in legion was one of the best design decisions that blizzard has made

I could not possibly disagree with you more, that shit is what killed Legion for me and subsequently killed BFA for me... If they didn't make those changes I would have enjoyed Legion a lot more and I would not completely hate BFA. As far as I'm concerned it was one of the worst decisions they have ever made.

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Why not both?
I really don't get why you need to sacrifice spec identity to build back on class identity.

This, really.


They didn't even actually add any spec identity in Legion, all they did was take away class identity... We had both before, we can have both again (and so far it looks like that's what they are giving us).

[Uoyredrum]

Can't wait for them to go back to focusing on classes and not specs. Going away from that is when the gameplay of the classes really started to go downhill for me (that and pruning).

[TheRevenantHero]

I don't understand why people clamber for "class identity". In Vanilla and now Classic, every class felt exactly the same as everyone else that rolled that class. Because there were cookie cutter builds that worked and everything else didn't work. Spec identity is far better because at least you can feel a bit more unique. A mage feeling like every other mage is terrible. But if I'm a frost mage and someone else is a fire mage, I feel FAR MORE identity with what I'm playing. Because I bring different things to the table than that other spec.

[Artelia]

I’m not. I’ve always identified as a ret before a paladin and that’s how I like to keep it. Prot and Holy are dead specs to me, I don’t play them and I don’t want to. I hope they don’t bring back things like the hybrid tax or other archaic classic wow stuff.

Going from 36 classes to 12 is a downgrade.

Few years back retri could dispell magic and use concentration as quite good aoe. We could ress people with same speed as healers and i don't speak about other "hands" aswell. Add some auras and remove this stupid holy power and then you will feel true power of retri paladin.

They steal so many ..... We were so strong back then.

[asamu]

Sure, you ended up getting 36 "classes" with Legion and it's spec identity, but in return they were extremely shallow compared to what they once were.
I also don't think any of the spec revamps with Legion ended up being even a moderate success outside of Arcane mage, UH DK and Enhance shaman I suppose.

The Enh Sham and UH DK revamps in legion were godawful, so I'm going to have to disagree on that... Arcane mage is awful as well. There's a such thing as a rotation with too much complexity, forcing players to focus on their resource bar the entire fight instead of on what's around them is not fun - that turns things into a game of making your character actually do what you want effectively, rather than the focus being on actually experiencing the things around your character. I get that they want to push more "skill" into PvE, but even in WoTLK, when a lot of specs could play static rotations, you had a lot of variation in DPS numbers for people with the same gear, and they ended up pushing that end too far; when 2 Arcane mages/Spriests in the same gear pull 10k or 30k DPS, that's an issue, and it should never be so "hard" to learn the rotation and execute it that you end up with that much variation in DPS. Players shouldn't need addons just to do their rotation properly.

Enh was an RNG mess until they fiddled around with cds and proc rates, then was still an RNG mess, but not quite as bad.
It's basically a 1 button rotation + buff and resource maintenance, where every ability hits like a wet noodle, but you get a huge number of hits in. I miss having abilities that actually did damage and had set CDs, shocks on a shared CD, chain lightning/lightning bolt, LS being baseline, and the weapon buffs being effectively passive. Totems are less of an issue, but they were a huge part of the class fantasy, and gutting them like they did made no sense.

UH Dks are complaining because most of their damage was pushed into white hits - their abilities suck because too much of their damage was put into the pet.

Shadowpriests got it the worst, and some classes ended up alright with the reworks, like rogues/druids (which were also the least gutted classes; the major change to rogue was outlaw spec being added to the game).

[Monster Hunter]

As I've played since WoW launch, I am DYING to get back to class identity rather than spec identity.

The last two expansions since their whole 'spec identity' shtick has been the worst expansions thus far when it comes to class design and I don't think that's a coincidence.

Spec over class has been the thing since cata and it's a symptom of the new talent tree's that require you to "pick" one of 3 Super defined specs.

I'm not sure how they can really return to class properly with the post cata talent trees. I don't think we are going to get back to the real freedom of choice on how we build out our class that we had back in pre cata, though its a step in a better direction particularly for hybrids

[De Lupe]

Why not both?

Allow each spec to feel unique (Legion and BFA) while also allowing the class as a whole to remain...a class.

You still get the 36 sub-classes that are the specs, but then each of the actual classes are still whole and complete.

Everybody wins.

[Lex Icon]

uh after looking at the suggested changes i'm not. there's only 3 specs i enjoyed in bfa and 2 of them are getting stuff back that i hate having to manage. pets + totems.

i guess tremor totem and cap totem are fine but the healing one and searing? no thanks.

[bloodmoth13]

I could not possibly disagree with you more, that shit is what killed Legion for me and subsequently killed BFA for me... If they didn't make those changes I would have enjoyed Legion a lot more and I would not completely hate BFA. As far as I'm concerned it was one of the worst decisions they have ever made.

what do you actually gain from 'class' identity? IMO spec identity effectively turned 12 classes into 36 classes, each one very unique (though they should have gone further with rogue and made assassin ranged imo)

[Gungnir]

The Enh Sham and UH DK revamps in legion were godawful, so I'm going to have to disagree on that... Arcane mage is awful as well. There's a such thing as a rotation with too much complexity, forcing players to focus on their resource bar the entire fight instead of on what's around them is not fun - that turns things into a game of making your character actually do what you want effectively, rather than the focus being on actually experiencing the things around your character. I get that they want to push more "skill" into PvE, but even in WoTLK, when a lot of specs could play static rotations, you had a lot of variation in DPS numbers for people with the same gear, and they ended up pushing that end too far; when 2 Arcane mages/Spriests in the same gear pull 10k or 30k DPS, that's an issue, and it should never be so "hard" to learn the rotation and execute it that you end up with that much variation in DPS. Players shouldn't need addons just to do their rotation properly.

It's almost like no one in this thread can read a simple post.
Out of all the revamps, those three specs offended me the least, thus they were the only ones moderately successful in my eyes as they were the least shit out of the revamps.
You also don't need addons to do your rotation properly even with complex specs, just spend enough time with them and you'll easily get comfortable with them.

Enh was an RNG mess until they fiddled around with cds and proc rates, then was still an RNG mess, but not quite as bad.
It's basically a 1 button rotation + buff and resource maintenance, where every ability hits like a wet noodle, but you get a huge number of hits in. I miss having abilities that actually did damage and had set CDs, shocks on a shared CD, chain lightning/lightning bolt, LS being baseline, and the weapon buffs being effectively passive. Totems are less of an issue, but they were a huge part of the class fantasy, and gutting them like they did made no sense.

Those things hadn't been a thing since MoP, and you aren't going to get those back.
And it definitely isn't just a "1 button rotation", that's heavily exaggerating shit to try to get your point across.

Secondly, your main complaint seem to just be "REEE THE PROC RATES AND CD'S FELT BAD", that's just the nature of procs and CD's, not something inherently bad.
WotLK Ret in T10 was literally only procs and CD's and people loved that.

UH Dks are complaining because most of their damage was pushed into white hits - their abilities suck because too much of their damage was put into the pet.

As someone who Mythic raided on an UH DK for the first two tiers, I don't think I ever heard anyone complaining about that, and if they did, they weren't especially good at it.

Shadowpriests got it the worst, and some classes ended up alright with the reworks, like rogues/druids (which were also the least gutted classes; the major change to rogue was outlaw spec being added to the game).

Yeah, I'm sure every rogue universally loved that Combat stopped existing and that Subtlety changed into whatever the fuck it became that wasn't even viable for 9/10th's out of the expansion and still isn't.

[Dorthonion1]

To clarify I'm not saying I think specs are good at the moment. I think a couple of new abilities for each spec would be great. And if one ability per class went class wide, or maybe an old scrapped ability. I just don't want them to take it too far.

Also I'm pretty sure sub/assa not having gouge is good for PvP. Apart from destro lock dominance at the moment, the meta for the last couple xpacs has made pseudo interrupts very valuable for melee (that's why they scrapped belf silence). I foresee rogues just tunnelling casters/healers and using gouge every time they miss their kick, which won't be fun. It's only tolerable with outlaw because they suck in PvP so nobody cares about them.

[iosdeveloper]

Kill Shot and Hammer of Wrath are good examples, they should stick to these kind of spells.

[op3l]

I think in terms of mages, the different elementals don't really bring anything special to the class. Back in vanilla, my mage was ice and I rarely used fireball outside of "being able to use it cause it was there" because the talents buffed my ice spells not my fire spells. Only thing I can think of is when blizzard was a channeled spell, Arcane explosion was often far better DPS wise, so mages almost always used that. So for boss fights, it was ice spells, trash, it would be AE spam.

But to bring back some class specific utilities and to make them feel unique is probably more important.

[Doffen]

Kill Shot and Hammer of Wrath are good examples, they should stick to these kind of spells.

Those actually have a use, which would be implemented into the rotation. I am all for that, because that means something, like when they added stuff from artifact weapon in Legion and the use of legendaries, they affect the gameplay. Which is why I think Legion class design was the best it ever was in the game, since they added spells that meant something for your spec. As an Arcane mage you still have iceblock, frost nova etc, something that has a use, effectively. Frostbolt or Fire Blast got almost no use. If they don't implement them into the gameplay properly, it's just useless.

Raise Dead, summon gargoyle for DK, Hunter's mark going back for all specs for hunters, paladin auras etc, that's great because it does something for the spec you are playing, together with those you wrote.

In the end you do play a spec, with class abilities around it. Class Design is just a gimmick, gameplay is all that matters.

I think in terms of mages, the different elementals don't really bring anything special to the class.

Mages are the class that are most defined by their spec, I really share that sentiment.

[Camelboy]

Nah, it's good. Finally going to get rid of those pesky shadow priests.

Playing a priest means you follow the Light! Holy Wrath or Holy Healing, doesn't matter, as long as it's Holy.

Glory to the Light! Banish the Evil!