Reducing Button Bloat in the Future?

[Pouponu]

"Recently Ghostcrawler has mentioned that most classes have too many skills, but removing some would risk upsetting players who really like certain skills. Do you have any abilities that are already on the chopping block for when you are ready to address this issue?"

"We have a variety of different abilities that we have talked about, but I am not going to name any. We still have to wait and see if we can actually pull it off. There are certainly a lot of abilities that any given player has that they probably feel obligated to have on their action bar but almost never use. Those are the buttons that we want to try and do away with, especially if a player feels obligated to have a keybind for it. That is where it really starts to get nasty. We will be looking into that, but I can't really commit to if and how much."

-Recent interview with Tom Chilton

So, it seems as if an ability purge might be coming in the future, perhaps even as early as the next expansion. If this does happen, which abilities which you "feel obligated to have on your action bar but almost never use" be fine saying goodbye to, and which would you be sad to see go?

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing something like Icy Touch go, as now with PS applying both diseases for Unholy and Howling Blast being better in every aspect, IT is useless except in those extremely rare cases where CC is of great priority. Perhaps a merge with Chains of Ice would work!

An ability I would be sad to see go, though, would be Dark Simulacrum. This seems like the type of ability Blizzard might target for the ability purge, but I love the (very limited, at least in PVE) circumstances which allow full usage of this ability! It feels great spending 20RP to save a group member's life with a stolen heal, or to deal immense amounts of damage with a single copied spell.

[Jester Joe]

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing something like Icy Touch go, as now with PS applying both diseases for Unholy and Howling Blast being better in every aspect, IT is useless except in those extremely rare cases where CC is of great priority. Perhaps a merge with Chains of Ice would work!

An ability I would be sad to see go, though, would be Dark Simulacrum. This seems like the type of ability Blizzard might target for the ability purge, but I love the (very limited, at least in PVE) circumstances which allow full usage of this ability! It feels great spending 20RP to save a group member's life with a stolen heal, or to deal immense amounts of damage with a single copied spell.

From when I played a DK, I actually fully agree with this. Icy Touch always felt a bit pointless at least for Frost, could of just had Howling Blast replace it completely, and not affected CC'ed targets or something so you don't break it.

And I always loved throwing Zanzil's fire back at him in ZG on my DK with Dark Simulacrum...fun times...fun times...

[Mormolyce]

DKs don't have much of a bloat problem IMO. Probably because they're a new class.

Button bloat has been on their list of things to fix since at least Wrath. They do their best but people get upset when they remove abilities, even if they're mostly useless.

[Azerul]

Last time i used Blood Strike was, umm I don't remember. Overly useless ability. Also with the glyph of icy touch, icy touch is excellent ability for PVP-DKs.

[broodax]

Merging Chains and Icy Touch is a great idea, making Roiling Blood baseline and removing pestilence would be great, Plague Leach (for numerous reasons...) could go.

[Cryopathy]

Here are my thoughts:

-Remove Pestilence, make Roiling Blood baseline. Rework T56 talents accordingly.
-Remove Chains of Ice. Frost Fever now has a baseline snare for 8 secs. after its application, which can be improved to 10 secs. and add the 3 sec. root by taking the Chilblains talent. Howling Blast will still apply Frost Fever, but otherwise diseases can only be applied by Outbreak (see below). Blood Boil does NOT spread this snare unless Chilblains is taken.
-Remove Icy Touch and Plague Strike. Outbreak is now usable at any time. We have a new passive ability that makes it free once every 60 seconds; otherwise it costs a spec-dependent rune(s): U for Unholy/Frost, and U+F for Blood. Glyph of Icy Touch renamed to add the dispel to Outbreak instead. Outbreak does damage equal to Plague Strike from before and has a high threat modifier for Blood.
-Make Horn of Winter just a buff like Prayer of Fortitude, Mark of the Wild, etc. Adjust RP generation and tighten up the rotation so that downtime is minimized and the overall RP gained remains the same as before (perhaps a passive that gives you 10 RP every 20 secs).
-Make Path of Frost baseline, active when you're not in combat and inactive when you're in combat, and don't make it kill you if you fall on to water from up high
-Fewer on-Use trinkets. Looks like this is already happening in 5.4.
-Remove Blood Strike, it's completely useless. I assume most people don't have this on their bars anyway.

There we go! Freed up 6 keybinds: Pestilence, Chains of Ice, Path of Frost, Horn of Winter, Icy Touch and Plague Strike without really sacrificing any utility or anything interesting.

Edit: Oh, one more thing for Blood. Either remove Rune Tap and increase passive self-healing to make up for it, or make Rune Tap a group heal, possibly requiring a glyph, like it was in Cata. Rune Tap is boring and annoying to use, especially without the T15 2-set.


vvv That's a great idea for changing Roiling Blood. I think Blood Boil should still spread diseases without the talent, but changing the talent to make it apply diseases is a great idea.

[Schizoide]

There are all great suggestions.

In addition to many of the above (icy touch+snare from chains in particular), I would remove Outbreak as baseline. I'd put it on the same tier as Unholy Blight replacing the awful Plague Leech, with its cooldown dropped to 45s and given two charges.

Rather than making Roiling Blood baseline, I would change it to apply diseases. Then it would fit in the same tier as Unholy Blight and Outbreak. That tier would allow players to choose between applying diseases single-target at range for free every 45s, or point-blank AE for free every 1m30s, or point-blank AE at will costing 1 blood rune.

And then once we've freed up all those keybinds, I would replace some of them with useful abilities. Some way to AE using Runic Power would be at the tippy-top of that list.

[broodax]

I actually suggested Outbreak w/2 charges as a replacement for Plague Leech on #acherus earlier this week, I think it would be a great balance to the tier, exactly as you describe.