After playing Wrath I’m reminded why they pruned abilities

[Zka]

Wrath skill counts are fine. It was MoP that went really overboard, I could not fit my disc priest's pve keybinds on about 30 keys, it was too much.
Running out of comfortably usable keybind combinations was never an issue before and after MoP.

[Aleksej89]

Blizzard did ability pruning in the worst possible way.
Instead of pruning abilities that are the most redundant Blizzard removed anything that was not a core ability.
This turned WoW classes from semi-decent RPG to extremely shallow hack&slash puddle depth.

So they ended up removing a BUNCH of thematic unique fun abilities, mechanics and utilities.
As if blizzards goal was to make WoW playable with a console controller... oh lol they added controller support recently

[Kehego]

Blizzard did ability pruning in the worst possible way.
Instead of pruning abilities that are the most redundant Blizzard removed anything that was not a core ability.
This turned WoW classes from semi-decent RPG to extremely shallow hack&slash puddle depth.

So they ended up removing a BUNCH of thematic unique fun abilities, mechanics and utilities.
As if blizzards goal was to make WoW playable with a console controller... oh lol they added controller support recently

and it still has the best combat of any mmo so who cares other than the people who realllllllly wanna buff spirit fort and shadow prot?

[Aleksej89]

and it still has the best combat of any mmo so who cares other than the people who realllllllly wanna buff spirit fort and shadow prot?

Lets agree to disagree.

[Mendzia]

if you're not using SoR, Melee'ing, and using conc,hw, or exorc as a hpal then you're just bad

I've never said i do not use them.
It is just so insignificant number that can be simply ignored by 90% of the players.

[cozzri]

Blizzard did ability pruning in the worst possible way.
Instead of pruning abilities that are the most redundant Blizzard removed anything that was not a core ability.
This turned WoW classes from semi-decent RPG to extremely shallow hack&slash puddle depth.

So they ended up removing a BUNCH of thematic unique fun abilities, mechanics and utilities.
As if blizzards goal was to make WoW playable with a console controller... oh lol they added controller support recently

Blizzard would be wise to prune abilities in a way that would be fun for players. Frostfire bolt is a good example that comes to mind. Combine two existing abilities and effects into a single skill and then allow glyph customization. Like the pyro theme? Slap the glyph on and bam fire mage.

I feel many abilities can be combined in such a way. Heroic Strike? Slam? No. Heroic Slam!

I say let mages have dual casting to free things up too. Mages can conjure up fireballs indefinitely with left hand as an "auto attack" and your right hand casts other spells. Or have the wand or staff as the focus for magical auto attacks; let the player customize how the spells manifest.

There so many opportunities to change things up in a fun way, to consolidate without losing fun player concepts. They have the tools to make good changes to the game.

I think a deeper combat customization would allow for this.

Hell, let outlaw rogues go full pistol if they want to. All new weapon types. I miss playing a ranged rogue in MoP with deadly throw. Was it ass? Yes. Did it have to be ass? No. Did i have fun playing it in LFR? You better believe it.

The customization needs to be there for the player. Prune abilities is fine, but the cooldowns need to be adjusted for smooth gameplay, and let the player decide what is fun, and not this our game our rules, no deviation BS. Customization is what makes the game fun with player choice. And people can take the crying BS about cookie-cutter builds and shove it. That's the rhetoric Blizzard embraced to talk down on the community and spread it like a cancer, just like the "rose-tinted glasses" idiom they so fondly repeated to the community over and over. The company shit on the players that supported them, and now look? Classic, talents trees are back. Wow. A lot good that did telling people they are wrong for liking something.

The discontent towards the people that supported the game and the backpedaling is everything you need to know about Blizzard.

Rot.

[Enclave]

Boosted an enhance shaman today and it took me over an hour to set up the UI, even though I’m very saavy setting it up now and have leveled a shaman before.

And I’m a little OCD in that I want to put every ability on my bars somewhere, even stuff I know is never getting pressed like Binding Heal on shadow priest. But even if I don’t bind a key to them I know I’ll completely forget about the ability if I don’t occasionally mouse over it.

But looking at just my toons:
Enhance:
—Have to pick (and bind) 20 totems and
——the three options of 4 I can auto-place
—Have to pick the right weapon buff
—Have to pick the right shock
—Have to bind all the heals
—Have to choose and bind all the talents
—Have to bind a half-dozen 3+ minute cooldowns and Shamanistic Rage
—Have to choose glyphs

Shadow (dps isn’t too bad but binding all the heals gets to be a lot)
—3-4 DoTs, Mind Blast, Mind Flay
—The description of shadow form is a page long
—Binding all the heals, flash, greater, renew, shield
—Cure Disease, Dispel Magic, Mass Dispel
—Cooldowns of shadow fiend, dispersion, Hymn of Hope, Symbol of Hope

And my other alt is a pally, and they have even More abilities:
Auras
Hands
Blessings, both manual and greater
Normal DPS abilities
Heals
Raid Cooldowns
Personal Cooldowns

And don’t get me wrong it was/is a lot of fun having all this utility and clever ways to use it is what made classic, classic.

But I can see why the choice was made to prune. New players in 2008-2012ish would have been swamped. And also as the competitive raiding stepped up, each extra ability was another thing to debug and balance.

Dragonflight has same amount of binds as wotlk with new talents

[Lordofbelbol]

It´s also fun to see history repeating itself.

First we had Wrath babies, now we have retail babies.

New gens of gamers coming asking for thigns to be dumbed down, then complain because they got too dumbed down when everything was just... good.

well the fault still lies on some people who exaggerate and retail looks VERY bad while it was okayish for the most part

[Thundering]

well the fault still lies on some people who exaggerate and retail looks VERY bad while it was okayish for the most part

this is not fully true normally in retail you need so much borrowed power too make your class deacent its insane and most of it does not exist when most people try a new the new expansion.

[Bigbazz]

After playing Dragonflight Warrior, I was reminded why I didn't like pruned characters. It's like the class is so dumbed down and while much of the utility is still available in talents, you're talking about a tradeoff for abilities that used to be baseline. Even with all the old baseline abilities talented the class feels barebones compared to playing in WOTLK where you have so many more niche uses.

Feel really underwhelmed with Arms in Dragonflight, playing WOTLK just makes that so much more obvious. The talent tree shouldn't have taken old baseline stuff and then made them a trade off, which is really what is. Classes needed pruning after MOP perhaps, but WOD overdid the pruning and Blizzard have been pruning since, Dragonflight includes a lot of pruning by way of the talent tree.

Edit : Context - My bars/bindings in WOTLK in my Fury build



Heres Fury in Dragonflight Prepatch with the remnants of Shadowlands abilities left on the bars.



And here it is now with what is left, with active abilities in my current Dragonflight build



They have pruned it via the talent trees by providing often more attractive options for those points, particularly for PVE.

[anon5123]

so having 50 keybinds is okay, you just need to get used to them while leveling /s

Yes.

Use your brain, zoomer.

[valax]

Boosted an enhance shaman today and it took me over an hour to set up the UI, even though I’m very saavy setting it up now and have leveled a shaman before.

And I’m a little OCD in that I want to put every ability on my bars somewhere, even stuff I know is never getting pressed like Binding Heal on shadow priest. But even if I don’t bind a key to them I know I’ll completely forget about the ability if I don’t occasionally mouse over it.

But looking at just my toons:
Enhance:
—Have to pick (and bind) 20 totems and
——the three options of 4 I can auto-place
—Have to pick the right weapon buff
—Have to pick the right shock
—Have to bind all the heals
—Have to choose and bind all the talents
—Have to bind a half-dozen 3+ minute cooldowns and Shamanistic Rage
—Have to choose glyphs

Shadow (dps isn’t too bad but binding all the heals gets to be a lot)
—3-4 DoTs, Mind Blast, Mind Flay
—The description of shadow form is a page long
—Binding all the heals, flash, greater, renew, shield
—Cure Disease, Dispel Magic, Mass Dispel
—Cooldowns of shadow fiend, dispersion, Hymn of Hope, Symbol of Hope

And my other alt is a pally, and they have even More abilities:
Auras
Hands
Blessings, both manual and greater
Normal DPS abilities
Heals
Raid Cooldowns
Personal Cooldowns

And don’t get me wrong it was/is a lot of fun having all this utility and clever ways to use it is what made classic, classic.

But I can see why the choice was made to prune. New players in 2008-2012ish would have been swamped. And also as the competitive raiding stepped up, each extra ability was another thing to debug and balance.

maybe you're just bad , enhance is not that complicated or overbloated.

you send wolves , flame shock, bloodlust then drop totems and you stormstrike , lighting bolt or chain at 3+ mw stacks earthshock fire nova and reapply flame shock , rinse and repeat . It's not much and not hard to keep up, It's other classes like warrior , ret , boomie , or dk that are brain dead simple and still pump, the reason you feel it's too bloated is because you slack in the spare gcds where you can refresh your totems/lighting shield or shocks then panic when they all fall off at the same time. If i had to play a class that has nothing to do while waiting for their 1 of 3 abilities to be available again i wouldn't be playing classic.

[sam86]

Blizzard did ability pruning in the worst possible way.
Instead of pruning abilities that are the most redundant Blizzard removed anything that was not a core ability.
This turned WoW classes from semi-decent RPG to extremely shallow hack&slash puddle depth.

So they ended up removing a BUNCH of thematic unique fun abilities, mechanics and utilities.
As if blizzards goal was to make WoW playable with a console controller... oh lol they added controller support recently

if u don't want to use them, don't put them on keybind or on ur bar in first place
half of those abilities were situational that can be ignored (they didn't exist for years in first place...), don't remove my ability so u can enjoy it, u can and will 100% play perfectly fine pve without them
those abilities made massive change in pvp land
Some abilities i still buffled why remove them, like warlock instant cast that increase duration of dots, it does shit dmg, it was drop of dps, but it was amazing perfect 'oh shit' button that u use if u MUST move and still want to keep ur dots, which surprising happens a lot more than u think, this ability was perfect design: sacrifice dmg for movement to use
What we have to replace it? nothing, if u want to move but deal lower dmg, go fuck urself, no more KJ cunning, no more refresh dots, most ur dots need cast and warlock affliction old status of mobility is dead (u can cast agony and corruption instant.. yay -.-)

tldr: never prun, many ppl played in panda without half their buttons, heck even now u still don't use all ur buttons for pve dps, the difference is now u ignore 2 buttons while MoP u ignored 5, and in pvp using all ur 20 buttons was what differentiate average pvp player to top one, heck u can beat ppl outgearing u with ur skill

I've never said i do not use them.
It is just so insignificant number that can be simply ignored by 90% of the players.

exactly

well the fault still lies on some people who exaggerate and retail looks VERY bad while it was okayish for the most part

retail biggest problem for me, is lore...
what made me stop play wow in general was wow story, if it goes Zooval was behind all way i just got fed ty unistall
retail current state of lore is disgusting, DF i have NO idea at all about it and find it weird that it is ignored since biggest problem of SL was shit story, i'm worried that DF isn't improvement and i'll just go find sh8t

The reason Classic is so popular is because its simpler than retail, not the other way around...To say the class is ''dumbed down'' now is just silliness when you consider that to play fury war correctly in classic wrath is to just auto attack and occasionally hit one or two buttons lol

https://ibb.co/FhMcs7D

u probably one of those dps who make dps that use all utilities seems aliens
we had a combo in our guild back then of a mage who does more dmg than any mage of same gear, we had a warlock that did so much dmg that was impossible (he even deals dmg higher than sims, hi slenissh), neither were only one of their class, but for some reason they know how to dps, and i doubt it was by right click 1 or 2 abilities

[sam86]

What I linked was literally from the #1 parse warrior on Patchwerk so I daresay he knows what he is doing lmao.

https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/rep...-done&source=5

so this chart is supposed to show me if he used his Command shout to save a priest from dying or not? would it show a spell reflect in a oh sh8t moment (also in pve i can't remember a situation to use it as dps warrior)?
That's what i talk about, this chart won't show me a healthstone consumed or not for example, if anything it shows that i was right about how pve dps don't use all buttons?

[ArenaDk]

It feels like instead of button count it should be compared what the active use time of each button is.

If you have 100 button in woltk but only use 3 constantly, thats not more impressive then having 10 button in retail but having to use 9 of them.

[Thundering]

The reason Classic is so popular is because its simpler than retail, not the other way around...To say the class is ''dumbed down'' now is just silliness when you consider that to play fury war correctly in classic wrath is to just auto attack and occasionally hit one or two buttons lol

https://ibb.co/FhMcs7D

The raids and mechanics are not really simplier the only thing that really stands out in retail as very hard is mythic raiding and mythic+ etc keys and most people never do that on a really high level when it is very hard.
Wotlk has set a new standard on super easy though.

So it boils down that simplier in this case is u you have less abilities and choices.

[Askyl]

And this is what made the game fun / makes the game fun for a lot of people. It still had huge RPG aspects and not just being a button smashing action adventure type of game.

[fooleymignon]

My friend, If you feel this way about wotlk then I have some very bad news for you about retail.

Have you even logged into retail ? LOL

[Tojara]

Retail isn't that bad, it just removes a lot of redundancies. Most people who have tons of binds on WoTLK compared to live are those that play classes where you swap stances, forms or have really archaic mechanics like totems available. Engineering is popular and if you want you can literally devote several binds to those abilities alone, but it's effectively something that you don't use at all. Playing a druid on retail, most of the abilities will auto swap you to those forms if you throw that bind on your action bars, where this isn't the case in WoTLK.

I still don't think anything was really lost from WoTLK up until DF either though. There are loads of abilities you use, or barely use in WoTLK because other abilities just flat out compete them. It was also a design point where you still had most of the abilities from other specs in your kit, but you would rarely, if ever use them. For functionality and ease of swapping specs you would allocate room for these abilities on your bar, but realistically speaking.. why do you need obliterate on your bar as an unholy DK it WoTLK, or death coil on your bar as a frost DK (I realize it's the only RP spending range ability).

FF14 arguably does this aspect worse because they mostly just add and rarely take away abilities. Which means you have a job with tons of abilities which are usually just a flat improvement over the one they added to the class a few expansions ago. It would be like getting an ability like killing spree in WoW that always does say 5000 damage on a 2 min CD that in this world is off the GCD, only in the next expansion to get an ability called bigger killing spree that does 5100 damage on a 2 min CD that is also off the GCD.

WoW did end up bringing back thematic abilities to the game (some anyway), and most of those just aren't bound because they're useless. You can bring up loads of classes past and present, and I can assure you most people can point on redundant abilities on your bars that you would never lose. The only thing WoW really lost is they stream lined form/stance changes and require you to be a certain spec to use all of those core abilities. They still let you use some, but you literally have to be talented into say arcane mage to get all of the core abilities.

[Segus1992]

You play Shaman without having Lesser Healing Wave bound anywhere? How to do you heal yourself in a pinch in a raid/dungeon scenario? You wait for your healers to save you or..? What about your instant-cast Ghost Wolf form to give you +40% movement speed when you need to move during a bossfight?

Eh? Ghost Wolf doesn't work indoors. Still obviously isn't 50 keybinds though.