Why are classes being ignored in Shadowlands in favor of new systems?

[Nayami]

It's a massive shame really. SL looks so good aesthetically and has an awesome theme with some nice variations between areas and Torghast looks like it'll be a ton of fun if executed correctly. But for me at least, when there are so many classes/specs with issues that have been ignored since Legion and where there are still so many dead talent rows, it doesn't really matter much because if the classes I play feel like crap then so will the rest of the game.

[Unholyground]

Borrowed systems are there to prop classes more than ever before and unless they have a major philosophical design change towards classes having more power and less dependent on borrowed powers they are here to stay.

[Easyclassictopkeklel]

I love how people are acting like there was any point in the game without cookie-cutter-builds for certain situations and where you had a "full choice" on your talents.
If you expect this to happen to WOW, take my advice and leave the game. It won't happen. At least not in shadowlands. Until they take steps like disconnecting pvp from pve COMPLETELY there is just no way...and even when they balance out talents better, there will always be meta builds which will be used for certain content. That's just what this game of tryhard minmaxing has become and you gotta live with it.

[docterfreeze]

What I mean is SP has slightly more to juggle than all other DPS, and people probably hate it more than most other DPS.

And sorry, you can't tell me DK's having different runes, or rogues having CP attached to target not them didn't make for clunky gameplay. Simpler is better, especially with encounters themselves getting more complex over time.

Guess that's where the subjectiveness comes in. I don't think they were clunky and I think easy to learn, hard to master is better than easy to learn, easy to master.

[Swnem]

I think that the fact that so many of you consider classes and specs more important than content and systems shows how far from the traditional MMORPG genre the WoW crowd has moved.

Not saying your opinion is wrong at all, it's just not what I associate with "the most important aspect" of an MMORPG. Quite a few of us were happy just auto attacking mobs (and each other) to death before WoW was out as long as the content and the "systems" as you call them were good.

You are talking about a different time when just being able to be online with other people in the same game was novel and exciting. We didnt sweat the details cause that in itself was amazing.
That is not the world we are in anymore. Online games are all over the place, it's not new and exciting new tech, so the games need to rise on their merits as a game rather than the tech. A game with good combat is important. Though all aspects count. Systems alone and auto-attacks will not accomplish a good game nowadays.

Stop being stuck in the past. I know it was a beter, more innocent, happy time. But, the world has changed and we must change with it and adapt.

[Sunslayer]

Just watched the latest Enhancement video posted by one of my favorite players and it doesn't sound good.
He states that Enhance is very fun IF and only IF you select a very specific build with no
deviation. He said that if you don't take this exact build you will have tons of downtime and no synergy within the spec. You see, Enhancement has no synergy with itself (aka: garbage base design) and requires specific talents to feel fun and engaging.

This is why the game is in a terrible spot. It's flawed at it's basic design. Talents should enhance gameplay, not complete your spec by filling in gaping holes created by Devs intentionally.

[Dadwen]

Just IMO, they have not had anything since MOP that resembled engaging class design, and if that sucks no matter how good everything else is, it's going to make everything else feel bad also..

[Sluvs]

I do not think classes are broken. But I know that they are stale, at least a little bit for me.

To think the argument: "we not getting any new class because they are fixing the old ones" would be proven wrong so quickly is quite amusing to me.

I said back then and I will say it again: Nothing is getting fixed, we getting a few tweaks, but that is it. We traded a little bit of unprunning for a whole class and I HATE this. In fact, it's my main complain(maybe my only complain so far) with shadowlands. It brings 0 features that will be carried over to the next expansion. It is the definition of a bottled film in the gaming world.

[stormgust]

I know this is kind of a meme now but beta hasn't finished yet and changes could well (hopefully) still come into play

Code-freeze should happen soon - If I'm not mistaken, code-freeze usually happens around three months prior to release. After code freeze, you shouldn't expect any major changes to anything.

Also, given how they promised to get system in faster, and be more proactive on iteration this time round, yet it took them them about three months to even begin adding legendaries and soulbinds, let alone start iterating on more than a handful of specs, is far from reassuring (though for some reason they considered it a "priority" to iterate several times on but one druid convenant ability).

[dewd]

because slapping new systems on the box sounds better than *were still trying to fix classes*

[Bisque]

I remember the legion beta/alpha days when blizz would put a date on when X class would be looked at. Why we are making this change, what is our vision for the class and its spec's etc.... Now, now it is just random, it just browsing wowhead, mmo-champ etc... and hoping "well maybe today they will look at Hunters, Death knights, insert whatever class". And for the most part there seems to be little interaction on the official forum threads, I mean you have pgs and pgs of feed back and not even a peep- sometimes I wonder what is the point of it all.

[Kralljin]

Now, now it is just random, it just browsing wowhead, mmo-champ etc... and hoping "well maybe today they will look at Hunters, Death knights, insert whatever class".

That glorious feeling of waiting for that build that finally changes things.

Then the build flagged for release appears.

[Isaelyn]

I think Wrath may be the expansion that gets the least complaint on that front, and I really believe it's at least partly because it was the xpack where classes were actually designed for the first time in the game's history and half of them didn't have 1-2 button rotations at last. It still had more than its fair share of broken ass stuff like Pallys being hilariously OP in 3.0, Warriors scaling meaning they were shit at first and gods in 3.3, or DKs being an unmanageable design mess due to all 3 specs being dual role ones. .

You and I remember wrath very differently. My experience with wrath was people in game and on the forums complaining constantly about how every class was becoming the same because every class actually had tools to deal with different situations they might find themselves in and they felt it made their own class feel less special. I'm pretty sure it was either wrath or cataclysm that I saw the most class related complaints about.

Anyway this kind of a good segway into my opinion on the class design thing. I think the real issue with class design in an mmo is that from a practical standpoint a class will eventually reach a point where it's design is "finished". You get it functional, relatively viable and fun it has a good talent tree and.... there is no where to go from there.

You could give new abilities or talents, but from that moment on adding more to the class just destroys the system you already created. If you give rotational abilities it disrupts the feedback loop of combat, if you give utility players complain that all classes are becoming homogenized. Then there is the issue of talents? These sound good on paper but anything you add to the talent tree that is fun players want baseline, and anything that isn't fun they want thrown out further disrupting things (Sidenote, this is why I feel no talent should ever give new abilities, each row should be 3 different modifiers to the same baseline ability. ). That isn't even getting into the possibility of redundant abilities.

Then there is the issue of just deciding design for that class is finished. Well now if you start changing other classes to be up to par with the first, the first class starts to feel neglected even if they have objectively the best designed class in the game, and any class that goes too long without changes also suffers the problems of feeling neglected or boring even if they don't actually need any work.

Now I'm not saying we've reached the point where either of these things is true for wow's classes, my point is just I can see how blizzard might think borrowed powers can alleviate one or both of these problems in the event they ever do reach them and there is a good fantasy (in my opinion) to borrowed power even if blizzard misses the mark with it more often that not. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when it comes to class design in a game without a static endpoint you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Anyway, that's just my very subjective opinion on the whole thing.

[Mefistophelis]

And here I was expecting a new expansion to fix the Frost Mage "Spam frostbolt" Casino playstyle... guess not! I don't know what their mental process is behind the current class changes.

[Echeyakee]

Here's what I think what made the shadow priest rework possible, and why many other specs are ignored: unified community and relentless pressure.

Sure, priest community is the only one I payed major attention over the years, but I also had max level chars of every class (although I did not play all specs unfortunately) in both legion and BFA, and I've always gone to the respective communities for info and guidance. And not one is even close to what priests have, especially shadow priests. Yes, there are some outliers like druids, mages and monks that have people in charge that are more interested in pushing their totally not add ridden sites over getting information across, and there are communities that make you feel unwelcomed from the get-go. But even among the rest, including the amazing warlock discord, you will not find one that has as many dedicated and talented people as shadow priest's have.

You need to understand that this rework did not happen randomly. Warcraft Priest discord has been on AB's ass about shadow for almost 5 years. Since the early days of legion alpha and every single patch, tier and expansion after there have been short novel sized feedback posts with the whole community rallying behind them. Feedback posts detailing current issues, potential issues, possible outcomes and an endless stream of suggestions and pleads. On official forums, wowhead, social media and pretty much anywhere people were willing to listen about the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the shadow.

When the class 'changes" were announced, right before SL alpha started, there was a huge shadow community feedback post just hours later. Once the alpha started, an even bigger post was immediately made in the newly created forum branch, backed up by tests on the alpha servers. And they kept coming with more and more evidence, testing and suggestions, with the whole community there, showing their solidarity and interest. And even that only made AB notice shadow. There are plenty of holy priests annoyed that the spec has been stagnant since legion's initial launch, or disc priests made in to resto druids with extra steps. But they did not have the drive that shadow has, so their occasional remarks are simply ignored.

It's similar for the other classes/specs. I took a stroll around all of the discords. Warriors have amazing feedback posts and they get occasional responses. But the rest? At least third of the communities don't even have a link to the feedback threads. Like shamans. They have a generic SL discussion channel and a couple links to the upcoming changes. No spec specific channels, no links to feedback, nothing. And druids? I could not even find a SL discussion channel, much less anything about the sorry state of feral. They seem to be rather peeved by the state of things, but there is no real effort to do anything about it. But at least the resto community is happy to be a dick to newcomers, like they always are.

Yes, shadow is lucky to have people who are willing to lead the charge, donate their time for the betterment of the spec, and get involved. But it seems that is what needed to get a response from AB these days, because they gave up on reaching out to the players.

[ParanoiD84]

Yepp and it will be pretty fucking boring with next to no class changes going into a new expansion and bringing back old abilities won't fix that.

[Kralljin]

Like shamans. They have a generic SL discussion channel and a couple links to the upcoming changes.

Blizzard did a good job on eradicating any person interested in playing Shaman on the high end level over the last 10 years that actually put in some effort to provide feedback and possibly back it up with numbers.

Quite frankly, SP is a perfect example why most people stopped giving a shit.
If it takes no less than two expansions and almost any person saying during the Alpha / Beta of the third expansion that this doesn't work, shows how much effort is needed until Blizzard actually acts on it.

Here's the issue, people on those notorious underdog specs used to give a lot of feedback during previous beta phases - they just stopped because those specs simply did not leave nearly every Beta phase in a finished state, Blizzard conjures then some quick fixes during X.1 / X.2, only to remove those later because they no fit into their overarching philosophy.

At a certain point, most people simply threw the towel because it's idiotic that the community seemingly needs to put so much pressure onto the developer to fix their own game.

[Echeyakee]

Blizzard did a good job on eradicating any person interested in playing Shaman on the high end level over the last 10 years that actually put in some effort to provide feedback and possibly back it up with numbers.

Quite frankly, SP is a perfect example why most people stopped giving a shit.
If it takes no less than two expansions and almost any person saying during the Alpha / Beta of the third expansion that this doesn't work, shows how much effort is needed until Blizzard actually acts on it.

Here's the issue, people on those notorious underdog specs used to give a lot of feedback during previous beta phases - they just stopped because those specs simply did not leave nearly every Beta phase in a finished state, Blizzard conjures then some quick fixes during X.1 / X.2, only to remove those later because they no fit into their overarching philosophy.

At a certain point, most people simply threw the towel because it's idiotic that the community seemingly needs to put so much pressure onto the developer to fix their own game.

To be fair, I don't think AB did not see shadow complaints in legion and BFA, but they chose to not act on them. I think it was sunk costs fallacy. They really wanted to make voidform work in the original state, and have tried almost every possible solution that did not involve scrapping the idea altogether. Same as with StM, an idea that sounds amazing on paper, but has not been picked as a talent once most people did the mage tower. They still have it in, despite it no longer making any sense, after the rework.

[Kuja]

I'm still waiting for that fourth spec for all classes, or something very similar. Maybe a crazy complicated talent tree, so it would be unlikely for a lot of people people to have exact same talent spec.

[Sunslayer]

I feel like, in Shadowlands, classes are being designed by people that have no experience with the class. Take Enhancement for example. Its still designed very poorly. No matter how fun Enhance is, the spec is a prisoner to poor overall, base design. It still has all the major problems it's had for the last 2 expansions. Adding abilities isn't the answer to fixing the deeply rooted issues with Enhance.
Same goes for MM Hunter. Going into Shadowlands, MM still suffers from poor base class design at it's deepest base.
I feel like MM is stuck in Groundhogs day. Every expansion MM is insane in beta because it's damage is over-tuned. Once MM's numbers are balanced it falls by the wayside, again. Shadowlands MM is the same as it was in Legion and BfA with a few minor tweaks. Minor tweaks to MM aren't going to fix what's wrong with this spec.
It feels like Shadowlands has a class design team of 2 people. Changes and fixes are so slow to come that it will be 2025 before everything that needs to be fixed, is fixed.
I'm very disappointed.