lack of "meatiness" in modern wow's combat

[Jastall]

As a Warrior since vanilla I can't agree. Playing the class again during Classic was a bit of a shock at how boring it was. Charge in retail has your guy shout and do something that looks like a charge with a "bang" sound effect on contact, in Classic you just run fast with the animation at 200% speed so it looks goofy as hell. Gameplay consisting on mostly waiting on auto-attacks as Arms does not feel engaging at all, and a couple lucky crits letting a blood FX out isn't enough to engage me. Whereas Rampage feels meaty all the time, especially when cleaved, albeit I liked the Legion version better since it didn't scale off haste and thus had a 1.5s long animation rather than the sped-up one of today. Recklessness actually letting loose a warcry is great. In general the class feels more like it's fighting rather than swinging a sword at an HP bar.

Anyway, WoW's combat has never been impactful compared to the competition. Doom Eternal feels impactful. Sekiro feels impactful. Vermintide feels impactful. God of War 2018 feels impactful. WoW is middle of the road at the very best of times.

[arkanon]

This was most notable years ago with warriors. I cant remember the ability, but it made this fucking stupid "swish" SFX, and it totally ruined the ability and the overall feel of the class. Feedback is important for sure, and its a combination of visuals and sfx. They got it wrong both times with this ability.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

This was most notable years ago with warriors. I cant remember the ability, but it made this fucking stupid "swish" SFX, and it totally ruined the ability and the overall feel of the class. Feedback is important for sure, and its a combination of visuals and sfx. They got it wrong both times with this ability.

Heroic Strike?

[Arcinatoss]

I don't really mind the changes to the sounds of combat.

However, I DESPISE the sounds that outlaw make whenever they slice things (auto attacks, sinister strike/dispatch)
It just sucks balls, only spec I have to play with ingame sounds muted lmao.

[Djbobo]

This was most notable years ago with warriors. I cant remember the ability, but it made this fucking stupid "swish" SFX, and it totally ruined the ability and the overall feel of the class. Feedback is important for sure, and its a combination of visuals and sfx. They got it wrong both times with this ability.

Raging Blow or Furious Slash?

Edit: or maybe even Whirlwind? They all sound pretty much the same.

[giantspider]

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.

Yeah but in wotlk u have very similar old fashion combat feeling even tho they made game more complex. U feel it when u use mortal strike or if u crit with melee. In modern wow its like meh.
Everything went so bad in legion/wod with new models and animations/sound effects..
Just compare old pumping bladestorm to new shiny one. Old wow was just brutal primitive cartoon like, while modern wow is like dunno anime cartoon or sth.. dont wanna say that forbidden word

[Stickiler]

However, I DESPISE the sounds that outlaw make whenever they slice things (auto attacks, sinister strike/dispatch)
It just sucks balls, only spec I have to play with ingame sounds muted lmao.

I'm the exact opposite, I love the swish and slice effects, then the pistol shot is just *chefs kiss*

[ihate2beapessimist]

I like the coconut comparison.

Retail WoW is like using a powersaw to slice open a coconut, where as Classic is more akin to using primitive tools like machete and hammer.
So it feels more fun to use primitive tools, because you have to work a bit harder to get the result.
Of course you could always just buy coconut water out the grocery store (GDKP, etc) but thats missing the whole point entirely.

[Palapop]

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.

Sadly I agree with the first part. Current devs are designing things to please their own needs.

Forcing IRL politics in game is never a good idea.

Also, did you try to play 25 men raid as melee?
You cant hear or see ANYTHING there.

[wushootaki]

Yeah but in wotlk u have very similar old fashion combat feeling even tho they made game more complex. U feel it when u use mortal strike or if u crit with melee. In modern wow its like meh.
Everything went so bad in legion/wod with new models and animations/sound effects..
Just compare old pumping bladestorm to new shiny one. Old wow was just brutal primitive cartoon like, while modern wow is like dunno anime cartoon or sth.. dont wanna say that forbidden word

I think for some classes, it remains yes --- but I know for certain Paladin and Shaman changed significantly. Paladin lost seals, and Totems became useless with farming out utility to everyone (Windfury becomes a haste totem rather than actual windfury) and shaman now had a rotation of managing maelstrom weapons, rather than just totem twisting.

It falls in line with more abilities = diminished effect. Bladestorm can hit hard because Warrior dmg isn't split among so many abilities. But in retail it is, so bladestorm no longer pumps.

Also, the complexity of class rotations in WotLK is nowhere near to the complexity of rotations that rely on things like legendaries that change your ability interaction, azerite armor, and covenant abilities.

[Goatfish]

As far as "meatiness", it depends on what content you do mostly. If you are raiding, you are only going to feel impactful in the moment as a healer and maybe a tank unless you are smashing some small adds. Same could be said of higher keys where everything has turned into a goddamn damage sponge, and I don't know if there is a way around that without a serious redesign. I have some cool ideas for interesting M+ affixes that drastically change how the dungeon is played but don't require just boosting health and damage numbers to infinity, but I doubt we'll ever see any of them, partially since some of my ideas would make pugging higher keys an absolute nightmare that requires closer to raid level coordination to complete. Maybe I'll consolidate some notes and make a "hope in one hand, shit in the other" thread sometime, but it's too off topic for here.

Honestly we could see a lot more impactful and interesting abilities for player power if PvP was just made its own game. I'm of the mind that PvP is the root cause of a huge number of shitty PvE design decisions. Both sections of the game could be made way better if they weren't linked and we get stuck in this middle ground where no one (at least not people who pay attention) is really happy. A good contract is supposed to be one where both parties are unhappy, but I don't really see the benefits of having them directly tied together.

For reference, I don't use scrolling combat numbers at all, and have most combat sounds turned off. Impactfulness or "meatiness" is not something you can achieve with just numbers or sounds, but by the feel of combat or relational numbers. Dark Souls is a good example of this, where even playing muted and not seeing any combat text combat feels responsive and impactful. I completely disagree with the people in this thread claiming this is the difference. Even 1 more damage feels impactful if it means the difference between 2-shotting something and 1-shotting it.

[EntertainmentNihilist]

I find the notion of ever referring to target-hotkey MMO combat as "meaty" bizarre. It's a very weird, clunky, archaic combat system.

[wombinator04]

It's been going downhill since WoD. #RevertToMoP

[Vakna]

Personally I think it's just a text display issue, the modern WoW combat text is too flowy and weak. There is an addon called ClassicNumbers for retail that changes all the damage displays to what it was like in Classic, including making white dmg pop out properly. Feels much better.

[arkanon]

Raging Blow or Furious Slash?

Edit: or maybe even Whirlwind? They all sound pretty much the same.

Furious slash! thats the bugger. It was the filler, yeah? stacked or something? I honestly dont remember, i just remember it sounded like a rogue ability - a soft "swoosh" kinda sound, and really just looked and felt terrible. Subjective obviously.

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Heroic Strike?

Nah, heroic strike was "ok" for me, never really bothered me. It did feel weird during the times it was a significant percentage of our overall damage, but, overall imo it was fine. Someone else named it - furious slash is the one i hated.

- - - Updated - - -

I find the notion of ever referring to target-hotkey MMO combat as "meaty" bizarre. It's a very weird, clunky, archaic combat system.

Its a combat system - nothing "archaic" about it at all. Most RPG's still use this system, other than ground targeted / aoe spells, and thats the same for wow. Isnt that what people wanted? To keep/return to the "rpg" roots of wow?

- - - Updated - - -

Personally I think it's just a text display issue, the modern WoW combat text is too flowy and weak. There is an addon called ClassicNumbers for retail that changes all the damage displays to what it was like in Classic, including making white dmg pop out properly. Feels much better.

Some abilities really do have or have had terrible SFX or crap visuals though. The damage output of an ability certainly helps - chaos bolt could make an airhorn sound when it landed and it would still feel ok, but it is a combination of things including what you said.

[Polybius]

Lost you at Soulsborne. It’s sound design, but also combat being faster in WoW at endgame. Melee swings are not what they used to be then again fights were ridiculously long comparatively; add to this we have an extended arsenal of new abilities with their own sounds and animations.

I still think the sounds we have now are too soft, or less impactful. Take Lightning Bolt for example.

[trodelphin]

As a Long time player sticking with Classic and hoping to fade out in Wotlk (in 20 years time :P, Alt a holic) i keep trying to go back to Retail because of the beautiful visuals and combat animations, but its just too much like playing Street Fighter now the majority of thinking is gone, yes classic has slow rotations and more cooldowns but im using those cooldowns to move my combo points, spread my serpent shot poison, kick that caster over there who just started a big heal etc whereas retail is just a big flurry of gorgeous spam seemingly waiting for you to get that combo out before the mob dies. :/ beautiful but just shallow

[Saltysquidoon]

Muti on retail seems meaty to me.
Pop-out of stealth, slash someone's throat, mutilate them, jam a dagger in their side so they start haemorrhaging, mutilate them again and then slash them with a poisoned blade.

[Nzx]

Damage batching is one part of this. Another is the change to the actual numbers that appear when you deal damage, being a lot smoother now. Another is that your attacks have less room to breathe - "downtime" doesn't really exist in rotations anymore, so there's not really some big moment every 6/12/18 whatever seconds when you hit your big ability and hope it crits.

I think overall it's a bit like when you watch a movie at 60 fps instead of 24. There's something about a higher framerate that takes away from a bit of the drama, and I believe WoW gets the same impact. I wouldn't necessarily call it objectively "bad", playing Fury in retail feels fantastic and so does Prot Paladin, a lot of casters feel much better than they do in the old game, but it is definitely different.

[shise]

Probably has to do with how most classes are pretty spammy in classic. So when something different happens, it feels more notable.

Whereas retail has a lot more procs and abilities flying around, making each individual ability less impactful.

I don´t think its that.

Modern wow has different sounds, everything is stupidly shiny or with an efffect and damage comes way to fast paced.
In classic, a melee swing might have an effect, but it looks, sounds (therefore, feels) raw. In retail, a melee swing has an overdone magical look, some sort of magical sound too and it goes quick, making the hit feels like whatever, too effortless.