lack of "meatiness" in modern wow's combat

[Orby]

As a hunter I want the gun shot sounds back, I hate the pea gun sound. After replaying classic when it came out I didn't realise how much I missed it. And I get it can be annoying to some people so why not have an option to turn it off or on?

also I agree with the more 'oomf' spells and abilities feel all the same today, I miss having big spells that do big damage that felt like and looked like they did big damage, now days al the spells feel the same they feel weak with no impact. One of the things I hated as a mage was how fireball and pyroblast feels now.

[Eazy]

I miss the bleed animation rupture once had. for some reason it is gone since I don't know when. the sound is different too.

Same for the Mutilate sound. I really liked that.

[wushootaki]

RIP windfury procs that proc'd an actual tornado out of your hand.

Retail is dog poop

[Orby]

RIP windfury procs that proc'd an actual tornado out of your hand.

Retail is dog poop

Everything is too focused on balance now. I miss the batshit crits and feeling like you took a chunk of someone's health away. Now when you feel like you are charging up for a big hit, that big hit feels like a flick.

[bloodkin]

Wow lost a lot of it's impactfullness with two big changes:

1. New animation, these so not interact much with the target or feel and/or look softer, both sounds and animations so7ld feel bigger or stronger in wow. Guns sounding like pea shooters, no more blood splatters or howling blast sounding and looking more like a cold fart.

2. Enemy reactions, enemies make less sounds and rhe sounds are less distressed, where enemies used to scream in pain from a crit, they now sound like complaining grandma's. Enemies used to buckle over or had impact animations, most of those are gone.

To note, weather effects have been less too, such as the cold breath in Wotlk, clear signs blizz has been cutting corners om detailing and art/animation departments.

[Accendor]

I think it's the issue that modern WoW places a much bigger emphasis on rotations and cooldown windows over singular abilities.

Arguably a good example from (non Classic) times is Chain Lightning.
Was it damn stupid to just spam a single button for AoE during Cata / MoP as Ele?
Yep.
Was it fun?
Yep.

Singular buttons simply don't play that much of a role anymore, hence they don't have the same "oomph" anymore, it's about the sequences they're being used in.

To be fair, an overloaded Chain Lightning is most likely the visually most impactful spell in the whole game.

[Iain]

Auto attacks certainly have a more noticeable impact on classic. Nothing feels better than playing paladin and getting some meaty crits with a reckoning proc.

Right.

Let's start with acknowledging that WoW's combat was never 'meaty'. It's real-time, sure but there's no aiming or connection in the way that a Souls game has.

But, as you say, WoW used to rely on not just auto-attacks but also more 'kinetic' abilities. They were more simple.

Over time WoW's combat became more abstract. More nuanced and complicated, but also less intuitive. Lots of little tricks and interactions, more beautiful effects, but at the same time less ways for the simple monkey brain to fully understand what's playing out in front of its eyes.

[richardhuntr]

The new hunter sound effects (in SL) are terrible. So quiet it doesn't sound like a weapon firing at all.

[Cæli]

classic is the place to be
hopefully they reboot some more expansions seasonally
I'm sad that TBC is ending soon but wotlk is going to be awesome too

[LordVargK]

Just use an addon that makes your crit numbers bigger. Problem solved.

[ellieg]

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to shit on modern wow. I'm just interested in other people's experience.


So I recently got into the Soulsborne games, which have an insane amount of "meatiness" to their combat. Every swing with a weapon feels meaty and impactful. I can't really put my finger on what causes this feeling but it feels amazing and brings a good amount of joy to being in combat.

It's pretty similar for classic wow. Using abilities like whirlwind with sweeping strikes and having them crit feels almost illegal. Even DoTs and heals feel way different in classic wow.

I'm having a hard time pinpointing the reasons for why it feels different. It's almost like modern wow is so smooth it's combat turned from playing paintpall to playing laser tag. The impact and "meat" somehow got lost in the process of making the games combat smoother.


So, is it just me or do you guys feel the same about modern wow's combat?

Have you tried playing arms right now? Colossal smash/ warbreaker into sweeping strike executes feel meaty as hell. Can feel the mobs getting chucked down.

Arcane mage letting out a 4charge 18 harmony stack barrage, then the totm exploding a few seconds later is also huge. Several hundred thousand aoe dmg burst going off within seconds of eachother.

[Djbobo]

Just use an addon that makes your crit numbers bigger. Problem solved.

That's not it. That way your fart looks like it did a ton of damage, yet it's still just a fart and not a tornado.

[marulol]

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to shit on modern wow. I'm just interested in other people's experience.


So I recently got into the Soulsborne games, which have an insane amount of "meatiness" to their combat. Every swing with a weapon feels meaty and impactful. I can't really put my finger on what causes this feeling but it feels amazing and brings a good amount of joy to being in combat.

It's pretty similar for classic wow. Using abilities like whirlwind with sweeping strikes and having them crit feels almost illegal. Even DoTs and heals feel way different in classic wow.

I'm having a hard time pinpointing the reasons for why it feels different. It's almost like modern wow is so smooth it's combat turned from playing paintpall to playing laser tag. The impact and "meat" somehow got lost in the process of making the games combat smoother.


So, is it just me or do you guys feel the same about modern wow's combat?

i've noticed this too. The spell effects look cheap like from some mobile game. I miss the meaty spells and animations

[Murux]

Game designers are LGBTQ+++12 so what do you expect? Toon walk and look like drag queens.. no meanie emotes etc.. THIS COMPANY IS FINISHED.

[doodle90]

Fury rampage feels and sounds "meaty" I think they just need to put some more oomph in animations / sound effects. Windfury could easily be fixed by making doomwinds windfury do more dmg and have a seperate animation/ sound and make doomwinds a talent.

[Nerovar]

Right.

Let's start with acknowledging that WoW's combat was never 'meaty'. It's real-time, sure but there's no aiming or connection in the way that a Souls game has.

But, as you say, WoW used to rely on not just auto-attacks but also more 'kinetic' abilities. They were more simple.

Over time WoW's combat became more abstract. More nuanced and complicated, but also less intuitive. Lots of little tricks and interactions, more beautiful effects, but at the same time less ways for the simple monkey brain to fully understand what's playing out in front of its eyes.

Well, meaty is kind of a subjective term. In the context of classic I think it has a lot to do with the very noticeable causality between your choices and the results you end up seeing on the screen. Getting a big new two-handed weapon might directly result in taking out 30% out of a mob's HP instead of just 20%. Similarly, individual talent choices can have an immediate effect on your gameplay and allow you to approach combat in a different way. This sort of intuitive understanding of how your stats, items, spells etc. come into play and work with the core combat mechanics can give you a sense of physicality that makes combat feel "meaty".

Retail has become so bloated with additional effects and calculations (procs, scaling etc.) that were added to combat over the years that it starts causing network issues in 40v40 bgs. It's hard to feel the impact of your individual actions when there are thousands of strings attached to the outcome of your press of the button.

Classic has a more simplistic and transparent formular which almost feels closer to pen and paper RPG combat systems than it does to more modern versions of WoW.

[wushootaki]

Rotations were also, for the most part, relatively simple up to and including WotLK. WotLK started to change some classes (Paladin and Shaman off top of my head) away from their initial designs with more attention put onto actual rotations rather than seals/totems, but generally the classes seemed to drastically change once they decided to move away from playing an actual class to playing a spec of a class.

Rotations grew more complicated with the addition or more abilities, and as such, there was less weight to certain attacks due to numerous new incoming sources of dmg. Enhance struggles with this a lot, and has for a while. Everything sort of feels like it does the same amount of dmg because you have 25+ dmg sources, so nothing feels impactful.

Whereas, the original conception of Enhancement shaman literally had zero rotation and was about auto-attacking and managing your totems.

[Djbobo]

Judging by the responses here this seems to be an actual problem to quite a few people. How come this isn't discussed more?

For me this takes away a lot of the fun. Is this just a thing people got used to live with?

[Derpules]

For me this takes away a lot of the fun. Is this just a thing people got used to live with?

Performance doesn't require enjoyment, so it might fall by the wayside for some. In destiny2 animations/sounds go a long way for making each gun feel unique, which lends itself to feeling MEATY

[Lolites]

Judging by the responses here this seems to be an actual problem to quite a few people. How come this isn't discussed more?

perhaps the fact its not discused more is a clue to how many people actualy agree/care rather than handful of people here willing to jump on anything that can be "held against" blizzard...