Unpruning was a lie + talent system unpruning

[Osmeric]

no i understand why they pruned and i also understand that it was a failure

Why do you think they pruned?

[Hellobolis]

ill be honest as prot warrior i thought it was a big slap in the face.

bunch of dps abilities you will never/extremly situationally use, 1 or 2 okay things.

and then the real slapper: "double time is now available for all specs". what a clever way to announce a straight up nerf. (while also complicating baseline charge use at the same with with making intervene a seperate spell again, something everybody will just macro)

arms/fury get emergency tanking back that's cool though.

[docterfreeze]

I'd say this unpruning was mostly successful. There were some classes that got it better than others, like the reverse of WoD. Warriors are the clear winners this expac. Hopefully this becomes a regular part of each new expansion; we're still missing important abilities.

Fireball and frostbolt for all specs should've been fire blast and cone of cold for all specs, they're much more useful. Just take MoP abilities and copy/paste. There were no useless buttons in MoP.

[Hellobolis]

Warriors are the clear winners this expac.

ironically i have a feeling spell reflect becoming baseline will just mean they will reduce the amount of reflectable mechanics, which has been at a alltime high recently.

[Lazuli]

That's your first problem. From the very start they said it was skills that didn't impact rotation much and gave a decent list like Kings/Mark, Eyes, etc. It was pretty evident from the start that it would be low impact things and if we got back anything impactful then they figured it was worth it to.

Then what is the point?

Why do you think they pruned?

They did it to dumb the game down, bake everything into borrowed power and increase longevity of the game. They couldn't add abilities anymore, so instead of doubling down on things like glyphs and slight alterations to existing abilities they felt they had to remove everything and not just fluff abilities but iconic CDs that should be baseline.

Pruning was a hard reset on the game, but isn't even what made classes unfun, its the redesigns that legion did and class fantasy bs. FF14 nailed pruning and kept really interesting and fun rotations, WoW failed horrendously and made everything into 3 button rotation with essentially the same resource building spending mechanics. Prune is not inherently a bad thing, because in some cases we did have ridiculous amount of buttons, Blizz just had no idea how to do it right and keep shit interesting.

If they had pruned slightly but kept classes mostly the same, it would be met much better and be a more positive outcome. I think people mostly want their old playstyles and rotational abilities back, and no amount of unprune is going to fix that because Blizz wants us to have 3 button rotations. Those are the facts. Its like op said, he wants alter time / deep freeze, an actual USEFUL and important CD which was awesome to use. Who gives a fuck about fireball/blast as frost mage.. no amount of fluff unprune is going to give what players want unless devs go back to the old much superior class design, but god forbid we press more than a few boring buttons.

Its like, why should my combat rogue not have killing spree as baseline.. really, 1 extra cd is too much? That crap makes no sense to me at all. Most talent abilities should be baseline, on every class. That would make them so much more fun. Blizz just banks on the players that only care about numbers and don't give a shit about mechanics and actually enjoying the class itself, unfortunately seems to work with this playerbase so they get away with borefest design. And its probably much easier on the devs because they don't want to put in the same amount of effort into classes anymore.

[Harbour]

Obviously it was a lie and PR bullshit. I called that out back in Blizzcon 2019.

"We want to return to class focus" - they said, presenting the covenant abilities clearly bad for certain specs of one class.

"We want to unprune the abilties" - they said, throwing at us trash abilties, that deserved to be dropped because the had no place in current gameplay, while the actual reason was they were too laxy to create some new baseline abilities for classes.

"We want to bring back RPG choices" - they said, justifying the Covenants lock, while the clear intent was to force people to level more than one character of the same class to do different content.

"We want to bring meaningful choice, so you would have to be good in one situation, while bad in another" - they said, justifying the Covenants lock, while the clear intent was to force people to level more than one character of the same class to do different content.

Scary thing is - there are many people who fell for that and stood behind this bullshit.
They forget that for the decade the Blizzard philosophy and intent were to make classes be good in all situations and RPG succesfully died with Vanilla, and class focus turned into spec focus in Legion, and since then didnt change at all, even in SL. In SL its spec focus, especially given how Covenants are good for one spec and bad for another.

[Osmeric]

They did it to dumb the game down,

So close...

Ask yourself, why would they do that? The simplest and laziest things to do would have been make no changes. So why did they change things?

I suggest it's because of a problem the game has had from day 1: the wide disparity in skill and give-a-damn across the player population. The devs want to make content that challenges the better players, but that means they basic mechanics of playing the characters can't be too challenging, or else the difference in performance between the best and the average (never mind worst) players is too large.

Personally, I think they should have just given up on hard end game content.

[Lazuli]

So close...

Ask yourself, why would they do that? The simplest and laziest things to do would have been make no changes. So why did they change things?

I suggest it's because of a problem the game has had from day 1: the wide disparity in skill and give-a-damn across the player population. The devs want to make content that challenges the better players, but that means they basic mechanics of playing the characters can't be too challenging, or else the difference in performance between the best and the average (never mind worst) players is too large.

Personally, I think they should have just given up on hard end game content.

It was a problem for who, exactly? I don't remember mass QQ posts about ability bloat at any point in the games history. I'm sure you could find a few on the wayback machine, but lets be honest, no one really gave a shit and it would have been much better to leave abilities and class design as they were. MoP/WoD was the last time classes were actually fun by themselves.

[Craaazyyy]

Why do you think they pruned?

to dumb the game down and attract new non existent casual audience to the game.. that backfired miserably. All it did is alienate the existing, at the time, playerbase

though the dumbing down has been going for a long time, but pruning together with other awful class design decisions is what made the game lose insane amount of players

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It was a problem for who, exactly? I don't remember mass QQ posts about ability bloat at any point in the games history. I'm sure you could find a few on the wayback machine, but lets be honest, no one really gave a shit and it would have been much better to leave abilities and class design as they were. MoP/WoD was the last time classes were actually fun by themselves.

yeah, until it happened i never really saw people bringing it up outside of some rare occasions..

in fact like i can't imagine someone saying something like: "man i can't wait to have fewer abilities". Like no one has ever said that

[Osmeric]

It was a problem for who, exactly? I don't remember mass QQ posts about ability bloat at any point in the games history. I'm sure you could find a few on the wayback machine, but lets be honest, no one really gave a shit and it would have been much better to leave abilities and class design as they were. MoP/WoD was the last time classes were actually fun by themselves.

It was a problem for them because they've lost 90+% of the people who have ever played the game. And these players are overwhelmingly not anywhere close to the caliber of mythic raiders.

QQ on forums has never been representative of the average player. Listening to that QQ in Wrath is, I think, part of what led them to make their disastrous turn to more difficult content in Cataclysm.

[Aleksej89]

Pruning abilities in an RPG is always a mistake.
Fix and rework abilities if they are not working well - but never remove abilities from an RPG.

Class fantasy and situational/niche abilities are literally what makes the entire theme of a class.

In D&D druids/rangers have a lot of abilities that affect only beasts/nature and were rather situational but added such great flavor and identity to them.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I never asked for unpruning, because I know that many buttons don't do shit for gameplay.

Hopefully they will listen to people with a clue rather than the latest buzzphrase the sheep latch onto with every expansion.

This Expansions buzzphrase is "borrowed power".

[Amariw]

You are trying to talk for everyone, I for one love that there are only 2-4 abilities to use in a rotation now. Hell some of the most fun I have had in the game to date was back in BC with the 1 botton Maco BM hunter DPS where you literally spammed 1 button. I love Frost DK's having basically 5 abilities you use every minute, I miss Blood DK dps where you had 3 abilities. I don't want overcomplicated elaborate rotations like in FF14 or GW2 to do optimal damage I like simplicity when I play video games I don't want to have to work for run I do that 12 hours a day at work.

Then where's the challenge? it's fine if you can do world quests with a subpar, super silly rotation, but its not fun if thats all there ever is. Trivial world quests and the easy outdoors exist for players who like simplicity, but blizz games used to be "easy to learn, hard to master", and the hard to master part feels gone in modern wow classes.

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No shit, You'd think that Blizzard would change the game to be more like Classic to WotLK, but no. They are going back to the shitty MoP-WoD model that fucked up the game.

It's no wonder that people are saying that wow is dying.

You played MoP? here's mop demonology warlock rotation
http://www.mop-veins.tk/demonology-w...owns-abilities

Compare that to today's rotation (basically felhunters on cd, hand of guldan every 3 shards, implosion on aoe and demon commander on cd coordinated with lots of imp. Its not total trash, but compare that to the above).

Wotlk/cata demo was even worse then today really, basically sbolt spam, soulfire when you had proccs, and metamorph every 3 mins. It was pretty shit.

MoP prolly had the best, most complex and skill-rewarding (rather then just "click this button after this button in a certain order") rotation in WoW, at least for the classes i played. WoD had pruning but it was still miles ahead of legion for anything but healing speccs.

[Vutar]

It's almost like most of the spells they've removed in the past have been worthless and you guys have been asking for something stupid

Did you not read anything he wrote or just lack reading comprehension?


There are plenty of worthwhile abilities they could return. Blizzard however chose to return stupid stuff that no one will ever use.

[Gardoc]

I never asked for unpruning, because I know that many buttons don't do shit for gameplay.

Hopefully they will listen to people with a clue rather than the latest buzzphrase the sheep latch onto with every expansion.

This Expansions buzzphrase is "borrowed power".

I never asked for pruning, because I know that many buttons are actually useful in PVP.

Hopefully they will listen to people who mastered their class in PVP rather then PVE heroes that only know their rotation and everything else is useless for them.

PROTIP: If spell triggers you so much, just don't bind it. Leave it in the spellbook and stop asking for removal of spells other people find useful/interesting.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I never asked for pruning, because I know that many buttons are actually useful in PVP.

Hopefully they will listen to people who mastered their class in PVP rather then PVE heroes that only know their rotation and everything else is useless for them.

PROTIP: If spell triggers you so much, just don't bind it. Leave it in the spellbook and stop asking for removal of spells other people find useful/interesting.

Way to miss the mark, MR Triggered PvP "hero".

I never asked for pruning neither. I want engaging class mechanics that won’t let me maximize performance whilst being bored to death.

Not that someone like you would get the difference. MaNY bUTTOnS mEAN SKiLl!

[Ludvig]

It's not the pruning that was the problem, it was the diablo-fied gameplay that came during Legion, taking away synergies between abilities and fun combat mechanics to make room for crappy builder-spender resource gameplay that belongs in hack-n-slash type games and not WoW.

[Soon-TM]

Yup, no shit. I've been saying this since they announced the "unpruning". It doesn't matter if Frost mages get back fireball, they aren't going to use it. The specs have moved on far too much into synergy territory that some unbuffed off spec ability isn't going to do anything. There are a couple of useful utility spells they brought back, but that's it. And honestly if I dove into it, you'd probably find out that they sacrificed spec specific utility to bring those in, or just renamed it.

I had always assumed (incorrectly, as we can see) that the "unpruning" wasn't meant to be just a copy/paste of a couple of lines of code, but it would also entail ways to make the player WANT to use the unpruned spells, even if not too often. For example, "Burning Ice": your Frost spell critical strikes deal X% additional crit damage if the target was recently hit with a Fire spell. Or "Keen Mind": your Arcane spells have a chance to half the cast time of your next non-Arcane spell, causing it to daze the target for X seconds (Fire) or to apply an undispellable chill during Y seconds (Frost).

Instead, we got the laziest possible version.

[GreenJesus]

Perfect example is retribution paladins got auras back.. but guess what? We lost 2 passives and they got put on the aura bar you have to choose between. Fucking hilarious.

[Armourboy]

I had always assumed (incorrectly, as we can see) that the "unpruning" wasn't meant to be just a copy/paste of a couple of lines of code, but it would also entail ways to make the player WANT to use the unpruned spells, even if not too often. For example, "Burning Ice": your Frost spell critical strikes deal X% additional crit damage if the target was recently hit with a Fire spell. Or "Keen Mind": your Arcane spells have a chance to half the cast time of your next non-Arcane spell, causing it to daze the target for X seconds (Fire) or to apply an undispellable chill during Y seconds (Frost).

Instead, we got the laziest possible version.

Part of me thinks that was probably the original intention. Problem is that like with the last couple of expansions they end up needing to spend way too much time redesigning all of these systems so classes get pushed to the back burner. They may hit one or two specs that are really bad, but for the most part they just try to adjust the systems.

One thing they definitely didn't do was focus on classes like so many thought they would coming out of Blizzcon

I think what most people want is a good flowing rotation but with lots of situational things to use. The depth should be what is coming from those abilities, but they still aren't there.

Maybe I'm wrong though, maybe people just want mind numbing gameplay where they just have a small rotation and an extra button or two to hit.