Why have they stopped giving each class lots of new abilities each expansion?

[glowpipe]

because it would be absolutely impossible. The bloat we would have would require 3 bars just for your core rotation

[Deathknightish]

What are you even talking about? The classes got enough buttons and abilities now, especially after the pre patch for SL.

No idea where this thinking of "more buttons makes it better" comes from, especially when talking about wow. Look at classic wow.. Highly popular, many deem it to be the best version of wow. Lots of abilities that can be used, how many are really needed when fighting raid bosses? Not many.

There needs to be a middle ground to this. They cant ofc remove everything and just have 3-5 buttons to click, but not to much eiter.

Raids and dungeons isn't the only aspect of WoW.
Abilities like eagles eye, or control beast, or whatever they were called are fun flavour skills to goof around with in the sandbox.

[crusadernero]

Raids and dungeons isn't the only aspect of WoW.
Abilities like eagles eye, or control beast, or whatever they were called are fun flavour skills to goof around with in the sandbox.

Indeed, thats why abilities like that are back in Retail. Im a fan of abilities like that, makes the game more fun outside of the norm.

[Stormwolf64]

Oh yeah.

/castsequence plague strike, blood strike, blood strike, scourge strike

was the bomb

Maybe in another life you'll have a taste for quality

[GMZohar1]

If they kept giving us new permanent abilities where would you put them? They would have had to add extra bars into the game by now, how much of the screen would that take up? Borrowed powers is the only answer right now, until they figure out a way to add abilities without it taking up so much space. Not sure why no one understands this.

[Florena]

#1: In order to make WoW console ready they need to cull some abilities
#2: they have been bleeding talent and with a lawyer running the game they have no competent leadership.

I've been hearing this 'making WoW console ready' thing for like two or three expansions now, still hasn't happened.

[MatthiasLehner]

Fresh new abilities are impossible with the ancient engine(it doesn't matter how much they update it)'s limits. Unless there can be complete new mechanics and physics added to the engine, any ability will be a reskin.

[hulkgor]

Fresh new abilities are impossible with the ancient engine(it doesn't matter how much they update it)'s limits. Unless there can be complete new mechanics and physics added to the engine, any ability will be a reskin.

Wait, what?

What you're saying doesn't even make sense. Are you talking about visual animations? Are you talking about actual spell\skill design? New physics? what?

They keep pushing new spells and abilities every expansion, hell, even major patch (see essences at 8.2 or corruptions at 8.4, and it hardly feels like they're limited by the engine. They're only limited by class or spec design, not the engine.

[javierdsv]

Because when WoW gets a mobile release it won't make much sense.

[BrintoSFJ]

If you've ever played FFXIV you would know why ability bloat is bad. Some of their rotations last minutes, multiple minutes of different buttons. WoW's strength is its approachability, that goes away if you have to play a grand piano style rotation.

Also, WoW (as slow as some claim it to be) is faster paced than FFXIV so that even more moves toward a need for a smaller number of buttons.

That game is so fucked up! I played until level 25 and got extremely bored. Not mention the insane amount of time it takes to go from 1-20, the number of abilities gained from 1-20 was just so low and gcd was so high, that the entire experience felt like the game was just trying to torture me. I am never playing that game again.

WoW feels like a much more polished experience and much more fun when it comes to combat. Frankly I would prefer if WoW had even less numbers of abilities to make the combat even more fast paced.

[threads]

If you've ever played FFXIV you would know why ability bloat is bad. Some of their rotations last minutes, multiple minutes of different buttons. WoW's strength is its approachability, that goes away if you have to play a grand piano style rotation.

Also, WoW (as slow as some claim it to be) is faster paced than FFXIV so that even more moves toward a need for a smaller number of buttons.

what are you even talking about? the longest combo in ff14 is 5 gcds on dragoon. what rotation lasts "minutes?"

[Swnem]

Spread shot and auto crossbow: You will never use spreadshot when autocrossbow is available and you can't use AC when you aren't heated up. There is not a single reason on earth why these aren't the same ability that just upgrades when you heat up (they even have the same cone and potency).
Hypercharge and Heatshot: Seeing as how hypercharge is literally the "make heatshot available" button, there is really no reason why these are separate binds either.
Reassemble: Make AA/drill (but let's be honest unless there's downtime it almost always lines up with drill) do big numbers. The button, the experience based on the book of the film.

This is just Mch (which is one of the cleaner jobs), you can find shit like this strewn through all the jobs, even after the shadowbringers cull.

That's what i call dumbing down. The interaction between those buttons matters. It feels good to combo them properly. If you just make everything work in 3-4 buttons like many WoW classes, it become way more mindless/facerolly.

[Cheze]

iunno man, the classes I play (druid, warlock) really seem to be piling up the keybinds

I might actually have to reconfigure my whole keybind setup or get an MMO mouse or something to manage everything you gotta press to play affliction properly

[Apellosine]

I hoped that BfA was an exception, but with Shadowlands, it seems to become a trend not to give classes fun new abilities. In the past, you could count on Blizz giving you like 4-8 new buttons to press that did something awesome per expansion, but all tat has really happened now are that talents they removed in the past are given back.

New abilities are fun. Why have they effectively stopped making them?

Do you want 30 different buttons to be a part of your rotation? Or having 7 different cooldowns? or 8 different niche utility spells?

I would rather they condense them down to what is really needed plus some extras to spice it up instead of just adding 4-8 extra abilities ever expansion.

[Loveliest]

I can agree with that, but the number of abilities is laughably low right now imo. Why not have it at the same level as in WotlK, or Cataclysm? They could also rotate useless abilities out and give something new, not just downright remove without giving something back imo.

Do you play a DH, by any chance? Some classes/specs have loads of buttons, some have very few (like dh and some dps). I can honestly say I have just about as many buttons as I did in Wrath on my paladin tank, if you exclude the extra auras, blessings and a couple seals/judgments. The core rotation actually feels more complex now than the old fixed 969.
And i definetely have more buttons than I did in Cata.

[Cosmic Janitor]

what are you even talking about? the longest combo in ff14 is 5 gcds on dragoon. what rotation lasts "minutes?"

I mean technically stuff like summoner and bard have long(ish) "rotations" if you count going through the various phases as a rotation. That is obviously nonsense, as it's mostly just an animation change. A combo is not the same as a rotation though. A rotation is usually the point where you start repeating the same pattern (with some variance due to encounter and proc design) you've already done. A combo is a fixed sequence of skills/spells/abilities that can happen multiple times in one rotation.

The whole FFXIV argument made earlier is kinda silly to begin with. It's nowhere near as bad as some people claim and some of the worst offenders, like Bard and their meme-status pre SBr gameplay loop that required an A2 sized flowchart, have been fixed already.

[TheLucky1]

The amount of abilities matters a lot less than the impact of abilities.

I personally don't gain much by having a ton of cooldowns between 20-60 seconds when the gameplay will just be pressing them on cooldown.
Just like a piano style priority list doesn't necessarily equal fun.

Just look at classic where you have many abilities but only actively use like 2-3 in pve combat, that's not my way of fun tbh.
The other spectrum would probably be wotlk/cata levels of abilities and keybinds where you often had many abilities basically doing the same just with a bit more/less damage and a different animation.

League of Legends is a good example even though it's an entirely different genre.
It's only 4 abilities you got but those 4 abilities+movement and right clicks make for one of the hardest and intense moment to moment gameplay because of all the different possibilities to use them and all the interactions there are.

For a tab-target style mmo like WoW it can't ever be like that of course but even here i'll stay by more isn't better/more fun.

[Saltysquidoon]

That's what i call dumbing down. The interaction between those buttons matters. It feels good to combo them properly. If you just make everything work in 3-4 buttons like many WoW classes, it become way more mindless/facerolly.

Combo them properly? nani? Combo them with what?

You literally cannot press Heatshot without pressing hypercharge, and pressing hypercharge while heatshot is up would be terrible because you would be clipping your heat and wasting a gcd and like a half.
Spreadhsot and auto crossbow are the same spell, same size, same shape, same potency. The only difference is AC has the heated reduced gcd. AC is an obligate upgrade over SS, ever pressing SS when you can press AC is objectively the wrong play in 100% of circumstances.
Reassemble and drill/AA have a similar issue. Because drill and AA have the same potency pressing reassemble with either effectively has the same result and you only press reassemble with either 100% of the time, pressing it with any other button is objectively a mistake.

You have made the classic problem of associating more buttons with more complexity. If you merged heatshot and hypercharge and AC and SS gameplay would be identical to how it is right now.
Reassemble shows the other side of the coin, an ability that is so one dimensional the right play is the same play 100% of the time it should be redesigned.

[Kehego]

Do you play a DH, by any chance? Some classes/specs have loads of buttons, some have very few (like dh and some dps). I can honestly say I have just about as many buttons as I did in Wrath on my paladin tank, if you exclude the extra auras, blessings and a couple seals/judgments. The core rotation actually feels more complex now than the old fixed 969.
And i definetely have more buttons than I did in Cata.

its like a classic curse.

People want their buttons full of spells they press like once a month, so they have the illusion that they actually have more buttons to press.
There's no class rn with a shorter active dps rotation than they had in wotlk/cata. Half the spells you had, you just never used bc they were highly, highly situational.

member "frost dk tank" where all you did was press howling blast and rune strike? lmfao

[Nnyco]

Because that usually means that certain classes need new abilities because everyone gets new abilities. Then you get crap like frostfire bolt.