I don't really like "modern" class gameplay.

[FAILoZOFF]

I'm sorry but returning to gameplay that would be effectively "press these buttons in this order and keep a single debuff up" would be unbelievably boring.

Classic WoW exists if this is the gameplay you are seeking.

Thing is that modern gameplay isnt all that far from that model, its just that theres a sht load of clutter all over the place in both buff/debuffs and visual one, just take a look...
https://youtu.be/TGaDZXYiPx0?si=gYgu-qgs1k3KN6Sx

[ro9ue]

I have such a hard time with this one.

I rerolled from DH to DK this expac and I'm really loving Blood & Unholy. Unholy is supposedly one of the hardest specs in the game - I say supposedly because I don't personally have the experience to judge this, as I haven't played enough classes, I'm not saying that people are exaggerating the difficulty - and it is a tough rotation for me. There's so much to keep track of.

And I freaking love it.

On the other hand, I really enjoy difficult gameplay and Unholy is probably too difficult for the average player. In the past, there was a kind of acceptance that there were going to be classes with more difficult rotations and classes with simpler rotations, and there was a tradeoff. The more difficult rotations could do higher damage, if done well, but the easier rotations were easier to master, and so hit the higher range of potential damage more easily.
While I'm OK with this, conceptually, unfortunately it leads to people flocking to the classes where it's easier to max out your potential damage. If we say the theoretical top damage for the most difficult classes is around 100, but the avg player typically averages closer to 70, because of the difficulty of the rotation. And then you have a spec with a significantly simpler rotation who's theoretical maximum is 90 and the avg player typical parses around 80, you'll see people swapping to the easier class because it does more damage in reality.

I think for me the ideal scenario would be that through talent choices you should be able to pick any spec and add more complexity WITH greater reward. So if you pick the passives, you wouldn't be able to match a perfectly played more complex build. There should be a reward for that.

[Glorious Leader]

Vanilla was not ever once the peak of wow, but good for you if you'd like to believe that

Also less than 1% ever even saw the last raid in vanilla, so inclusive!!

Mostly it was so low as a result of the hoops you had to go through including leveling which they have all but eliminated. We took the biggest scrubs with us to MC myself included because all i did was stay in one place and spam frostbolt.

[Dakara]

As always, it's a divisive topic, especially as the game ages and more original players leave changing the demographics away from the old School EQ gamers to the more modern E-Sport crowd.

Personally, I prefer the slower pace. TBC-Cata was peak WOW for me. If I want fast paced action i've got a multitude of better options in my Steam library that I can just hop in and enjoy.

I raided quite consistently up to the end of Cata when I started to get that "I'm to old for this" feeling in WOD. Tried to get back into things in Legion but just ended up playing every class Solo... raided again in BFA + SL which broke me, quit for DF, and back playing "Solo" in TWW. Not strictly solo as I've formed a small guild with RL friends but 90% of the time we do our own thing.

When you step away from the more competitive (and often toxic, especially PUGs) side of WOW, you can take sub-optimal talents, reduce your button bloat, macro a few abilities together, don't stress about your UI and just play the game as an RPG.

Each to their own, but the fast paced M+ E-Sport scene with 30+ Keybinds, Weakaura Packs, Kick rotations etc etc is just not my thing in this genre of game.

[exochaft]

I agree with you, but you are about to get flamed for this opinion. I think the sweet spot was around BC and LK. These are the factors I'd identify, and all of them have exceptions:

• Kits felt tight without feeling like a mini game.
• Kits seemed highly reflective of the class fantasy.
• Clever use of abilities could actually prove useful and create clutch plays.
• Every ability felt meaningful. You could tell when something hit or when something saved you.
• Tons of utility abilities outside of the normal rotation, many of which had very specific scenarios to use them in.
• Classes were allowed to shine in in individual fights without it being considered a balance problem.

I think a generalization is embracing the RPG without worrying too much about the balance when it comes to classes and skills, which was definitely more prevalent in in BC/WotLK and to a certain extent in other expansions (such as MoP, some crazy yet very fun class mechanics during that xpac). Having a bunch of niche or flavor abilities was part of the RPG aspect, along with having those clutch moments where a skilled player could turn the tide in niche scenarios. Was one of the reasons why I mained druid since vanilla: in the right hands, you could do some crazy stuff and make clutch plays if you knew your class and had the skill to do it.

However, such a system can't really exist in the current WoW, as the game is way too tightly tuned and geared towards competitive/seasonal content. Saw someone say how few people made it to the last raids even in vanilla, but classic has shown pretty definitively that the content wasn't really that hard at all (aside from a few bugs/issues that were never intended). Where things really started getting nuts was towards the end of WotLK when Blizz started designing and balancing the raids around combat addons, which started amping up the difficulty to 11. When you tune your content tightly, you HAVE to tightly balance the classes else you have riots on your hands. This also has the effect that Blizz is way less inclined to experiment in unique ways that may not be proven because a class literally not being viable (as opposed to the 'viable' that usually gets thrown around) for content cannot occur. Add on that in a world of tight tuning, it takes exponentially more time and effort to balance across a large and complex set of skills (whether they're rotational, utility, niche, flavor, etc.), which leads Blizz to just prune and homogenize when possible.

While the tuning/difficulty of content is a large factor (probably the largest) as to why classes and their skills get pruned/homogenized/etc., it's not the only reason. Quite a few systems feed into each other, perpetuating the cycle of needed to do things a certain way. For example, the gearing system and how many different ilvls exist within a single major patch: not only does the acquisition methods alone (in terms of time and scaling) force a need to balance classes a certain way, but also the proliferation of ilvls and justifying their existence feeds directly back into the difficulty of content alongside acquisition.

There's way more aspects to this that would take pages upon pages to discuss, but basically the starting point to moving classes back towards having more flavor/niche/utility/etc. abilities is to nerf the top end difficulty of content. While it would depend on various factors, the current heroic difficult should probably be the max difficulty in the game to make that happen, or at least have heroic difficulty content be where the highest ilvl gear each patch drops to appease all crowds. The game is in one of those weird situations where the current player base has been conditioned over the years to expect something, even if it may be harmful to their experience... and frankly Blizz itself would need more of a staff shake-up for this to even be on the table as there's negative chances of change in this direction right now.

[Illuminance]

Two things that come to mind:

The first is the D3-ification of WoW. There was a lot of cross-pollination between the teams within Blizzard leading to features from WoW making their way into D3 and vice-versa. In WoW, we ended up with infinite renewable content (mythic+) and randomized stats on gears as some of the most obvious examples. I think this philosophy affected class and gameplay design, too. Classes are now all highly mobile, fights are largely AoE-fests, careful pulling/strategizing has gone out the window, and rotations involve much higher actions per minute than they did in the past. WoW plays more like an ARPG now than ever and is a major departure from its original game design. By necessity, classes need to be fast-paced and have all the tools at their disposal, with the utility largely being sidelined in favor of brute force for much of the content.

The second is the pacing of the game. When BC came out, the developers held panels explaining that they wanted content to be completable "on your lunch break" which shaped how they designed 5 man content, in contrast with 2-3 hour slogs like BRD or long full Strath clears that preceded it. Fast forward to now, and that philosophy has been taken to the extreme. I think they borrowed some ideas from lobby games like MOBAs with how they are trying to make everything a frenetic drop-in-drop-out experience. It also seems to cater to the TikTok generation, where the content needs to be so hyper-stimulating that it will hold their attention for the short periods of time they're willing to play a particular game.

Anyway, I agree that the new style feels paradoxically anemic. I press a button, it does practically nothing, so I press 10 buttons that average out into doing something.

[LordVargK]

Classes are now all highly mobile,

They really are not. The peak of mobility was MoP and it's been downhill from there. Pretty much every (caster) class lost mobility talents and instant speed spells.

fights are largely AoE-fests,

You mean trash fights in dungeons? Outside of maybe the first weeks of an expansion this has always been the case. The only time I remember where Dungeons were not tank and spank was Cata. I've heard about TBC, but outside of that? No, trash was always AoE fiesta. Bosses were and are not.

careful pulling/strategizing has gone out the window,

People are literally planning their dungeon routes. Planning cooldowns for certain groups and targeted enemies. Using every cc possible to maximize throughput. One wrong pull can (and on high keys will) brick your key. Yes, a long time ago you used long lasting CC to disable 3 out of 5 mobs in a trash pack and then used single target abilites to kill them one by one. Which was really a soft form of waiting for lust each pull. And brings me back to my previous point: That was only necessary for a few weeks when nobody had any gear.

and rotations involve much higher actions per minute than they did in the past.

No. GCD has not changed, nor did cast times significantly decrease (compared to WotLK and after). You use different abilities, but not more. Many classes even use less, since in BfA (or was is SL?) Blizzard made the controversial decision to put many abilites back on the GCD. Take warriors for example, that historically had heroic strike off gcd. They don't anymore. Same with many other classes.

WoW plays more like an ARPG now than ever and is a major departure from its original game design. By necessity, classes need to be fast-paced and have all the tools at their disposal, with the utility largely being sidelined in favor of brute force for much of the content.

That's such a nonsense statement. Without utility you can't be successful in any difficult content anymore. High end raiding and m+ is planned around utility more than damage. Nobody cares about your dmg if you miss an interrupt or a stun and thus wipe the group. Your complaint about AoE-fests is literally enabled through utility. You can't pull and kill 4 mob groups at once if you have no utility, even if you have the best damage dealers in the world. Also the "all tools at you disposal"-argument is old. In MoP the major complaint was homogenization. That was the high point for you to complain about this. Now Blizzard backtracked on this.

The second is the pacing of the game. When BC came out, the developers held panels explaining that they wanted content to be completable "on your lunch break" which shaped how they designed 5 man content, in contrast with 2-3 hour slogs like BRD or long full Strath clears that preceded it. Fast forward to now, and that philosophy has been taken to the extreme. I think they borrowed some ideas from lobby games like MOBAs with how they are trying to make everything a frenetic drop-in-drop-out experience. It also seems to cater to the TikTok generation, where the content needs to be so hyper-stimulating that it will hold their attention for the short periods of time they're willing to play a particular game.

I doubt the tiktok generation plays wow. Nevertheless, did you play Cata? Or late WotLK, really. THAT was a lobby simulator. Wait in Dala/OG/SW for a dungeon invite, get loot, wait again. Or just raid log. Today you have so much more content you could do. A m+ dungeon today lasts way longer than any dungeon past TBC.

Anyway, I agree that the new style feels paradoxically anemic. I press a button, it does practically nothing, so I press 10 buttons that average out into doing something.

And you complain about WoW feeling like an ARPG... Which is exactly what you apparently want, since ARPGs reduce button bloat into often just one or two actually damaging abilities. Also, if you want to press impactful buttons: Play arcane mage. Or elemental shaman. The first has actually impactful abilities, the latter has abilities that feel very impactful. Both have a reduced number of actual abilites, but with vastly different requirements of player skill.

[meroes]

I call it the Guild Wars-ing of Warcraft where “Warriors” got their own heals and everyone has baseline mobility. But it’s also Diablofication because of the absolute spammy nature.

It’s too bad most people didn’t like the slower paced combat, but I get it. WotLK was like crack to most. And it’s been getting more spammy and more samey since.

Maybe WoW isn’t for you anymore.

[Illuminance]

I've heard about TBC.

You have an awful lot to say on the topic despite admitting your perspective starts with the modernization of WoW.

[Shadowferal]

Classes are now all highly mobile, fights are largely AoE-fests, careful pulling/strategizing has gone out the window, and rotations involve much higher actions per minute than they did in the past.

That does indeed seem very much Diablo.

[LordVargK]

You have an awful lot to say on the topic despite admitting your perspective starts with the modernization of WoW.

If you call WoW from 15 years ago "modernized" they I don't know what to tell you. What are you even discussing here? It seems like you are 15 years late now.

[NineSpine]

I think a generalization is embracing the RPG without worrying too much about the balance when it comes to classes and skills, which was definitely more prevalent in in BC/WotLK and to a certain extent in other expansions (such as MoP, some crazy yet very fun class mechanics during that xpac). Having a bunch of niche or flavor abilities was part of the RPG aspect, along with having those clutch moments where a skilled player could turn the tide in niche scenarios. Was one of the reasons why I mained druid since vanilla: in the right hands, you could do some crazy stuff and make clutch plays if you knew your class and had the skill to do it.

However, such a system can't really exist in the current WoW, as the game is way too tightly tuned and geared towards competitive/seasonal content. Saw someone say how few people made it to the last raids even in vanilla, but classic has shown pretty definitively that the content wasn't really that hard at all (aside from a few bugs/issues that were never intended). Where things really started getting nuts was towards the end of WotLK when Blizz started designing and balancing the raids around combat addons, which started amping up the difficulty to 11. When you tune your content tightly, you HAVE to tightly balance the classes else you have riots on your hands. This also has the effect that Blizz is way less inclined to experiment in unique ways that may not be proven because a class literally not being viable (as opposed to the 'viable' that usually gets thrown around) for content cannot occur. Add on that in a world of tight tuning, it takes exponentially more time and effort to balance across a large and complex set of skills (whether they're rotational, utility, niche, flavor, etc.), which leads Blizz to just prune and homogenize when possible.

While the tuning/difficulty of content is a large factor (probably the largest) as to why classes and their skills get pruned/homogenized/etc., it's not the only reason. Quite a few systems feed into each other, perpetuating the cycle of needed to do things a certain way. For example, the gearing system and how many different ilvls exist within a single major patch: not only does the acquisition methods alone (in terms of time and scaling) force a need to balance classes a certain way, but also the proliferation of ilvls and justifying their existence feeds directly back into the difficulty of content alongside acquisition.

There's way more aspects to this that would take pages upon pages to discuss, but basically the starting point to moving classes back towards having more flavor/niche/utility/etc. abilities is to nerf the top end difficulty of content. While it would depend on various factors, the current heroic difficult should probably be the max difficulty in the game to make that happen, or at least have heroic difficulty content be where the highest ilvl gear each patch drops to appease all crowds. The game is in one of those weird situations where the current player base has been conditioned over the years to expect something, even if it may be harmful to their experience... and frankly Blizz itself would need more of a staff shake-up for this to even be on the table as there's negative chances of change in this direction right now.

I mostly agree. I don't think that they need to nerf the high end content though. They just need to let go of the idea that classes need to be balanced for that content. If the world first ends up stacking 15 rogues and using a trick with a consumable, who cares? Being at the cutting edge might require working around the game, and that's fine.

[Mojo03]

Two things that come to mind:

The first is the D3-ification of WoW. There was a lot of cross-pollination between the teams within Blizzard leading to features from WoW making their way into D3 and vice-versa. In WoW, we ended up with infinite renewable content (mythic+) and randomized stats on gears as some of the most obvious examples. I think this philosophy affected class and gameplay design, too. Classes are now all highly mobile, fights are largely AoE-fests, careful pulling/strategizing has gone out the window, and rotations involve much higher actions per minute than they did in the past. WoW plays more like an ARPG now than ever and is a major departure from its original game design. By necessity, classes need to be fast-paced and have all the tools at their disposal, with the utility largely being sidelined in favor of brute force for much of the content.

The second is the pacing of the game. When BC came out, the developers held panels explaining that they wanted content to be completable "on your lunch break" which shaped how they designed 5 man content, in contrast with 2-3 hour slogs like BRD or long full Strath clears that preceded it. Fast forward to now, and that philosophy has been taken to the extreme. I think they borrowed some ideas from lobby games like MOBAs with how they are trying to make everything a frenetic drop-in-drop-out experience. It also seems to cater to the TikTok generation, where the content needs to be so hyper-stimulating that it will hold their attention for the short periods of time they're willing to play a particular game.

Anyway, I agree that the new style feels paradoxically anemic. I press a button, it does practically nothing, so I press 10 buttons that average out into doing something.

Yup, you said it well

I personally prefer it to the last few expansions iterations, but would still like to see them tone down the APM, procs, and make the spells feel more impactful then add content with more strategy and intention that supports that playstyle (ala BC/early cata heroics)

[Thirtyrock]

If you call WoW from 15 years ago "modernized" they I don't know what to tell you. What are you even discussing here? It seems like you are 15 years late now.

We should all be able to agree that what we're playing now, in retail, is modern. When that process began /shrug, definitely after TBC. But we've had so many major overhauls over the years, that you could argue that Wrath, Cata, Mop, DF and probably a few of the others as major overhauls. Which of those was the one that flipped us from old-school to modern is going to be entirely subjective. Blizzard, early on in the classic development, suggested they wouldn't rerelease Cata because they didnt view it as a "classic" expansion. Cata was also the first major overhaul of talents. I'd say Cata was the beginning of the road to modernization. But there was ability bloat, followed by pruning, followed by bloat, followed by pruning, followed by the current bloat (i might have missed some, but the general trend is valid).

I say Cata is the start of modernization, because of the talent overhaul and Blizzard's statements during Classic development.

[Illuminance]

If you call WoW from 15 years ago "modernized" they I don't know what to tell you. What are you even discussing here? It seems like you are 15 years late now.

Look back through the thread where people are using Vanilla, BC, and Wrath as comparisons. There's a reason for that. Certain major transitions, including class design, happened during that period of time. You won't understand what those transitions even looked like if you didn't play 2004-2008 - but I would recommend starting up a character in classic WoW to get an idea of just how fundamentally different the game was.

What happened after that period (Wrath->MoP in 2012) basically cemented the class gameplay we have today in 2024, including homogenization (still exists), "bring the player not the class" (still exists), mobility (which you claim was removed, yet my warlock -- the caster originally designed around being immobile but tanky -- has gateway, circle, and near infinite 70% run speed on demand), spammy rotations (mentioned several times in this thread), etc.

[Jastall]

I mostly agree. I don't think that they need to nerf the high end content though. They just need to let go of the idea that classes need to be balanced for that content. If the world first ends up stacking 15 rogues and using a trick with a consumable, who cares? Being at the cutting edge might require working around the game, and that's fine.

Because that sort of thing bleeds down to the rest of the playerbase. If Rogues are ridiculously broken enough in raids that having all of your DPS be just them is viable, then you can bet your ass players lower down the totem pole will copy that to greater or lesser extents and it'll have various social consequences. In a social game, this sort of thing matters and the community works overtime to make them matter. All the flavorful class design in the world doesn't mean shit if the tuning is bad and your flavor does a third the DPS of another class that is also faster and tankier than you.

Having specs become less spammy doesn't require breaking the fundamentals of gameplay and ignoring balance going forward. It just means Blizzard has to take the issue into account when tuning and designing specs so that their identity is fulfilled. Fury being spammy is fine, that's our entire fantasy. Chaos Bolt being easy to spam but doing mid damage isn't fine, the fantasy of Destruction should be of building up towards the big spell doing a big number.

[SinR]

I enjoy SoD on my HPally.

Flash of Light.
Flash of Light.
Flash of Light.
Collect loot.

SoD on a Frost Mage sounds like fun too
Frostbolt
Frostbot
Frostbolt

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Damage/healing comes from sooo many different sources that nothing really feels that powerful.

The fundamental issue is you have too many people each hacking away at and blasting the same mob, and the mob does not immediately die, which is immersion breaking. It does not matter whether or not someone was wearing a full suite of plate armor in the medieval period; if a mob of 25 people surround him and start bashing him, he will die within seconds. It gets worse when the main gameplay loop is about 25 raiders whacking on a boss for 5+ minutes, and there are a dozen bosses per raid. It could be excused when you did a one off giant monster boss like Ragnaros, but now every day you feel inept doing 4% of the damage towards a boss for 5 minutes and the boss doesn't look like some inhuman monstrosity, but just another mortal like you. Even 5 people wailing on a scaled up human boss for 2 minutesin a dungeon feels stupid. This RPG design scales up poorly, and even in singleplayer RPGs it rarely was just 4-5 party members wailing on one mob for a while; it is usually a multi-target scenario where you have multiple people engaging multiple different monsters. And for RPGs featuring many player characters at once, looking the SRPG genre for inspiration should seem obvious, where you again need to have multiple different party members engaging multiple different enemies at different locations simultaneously, and objectives that need to be accomplished like preventing the princess from being kidnapped and carried away out of the level, or a technician who has to be escorted to a machine while he does his work, and so on. But WoW rarely does that, and opts for just having 25 guys wail on one damage sponge boss, and occasionally spawns an add that has to be bursted down within a few seconds before everyone goes back to wailing on the boss for 3 more minutes.

[LordVargK]

Look back through the thread where people are using Vanilla, BC, and Wrath as comparisons. There's a reason for that. Certain major transitions, including class design, happened during that period of time. You won't understand what those transitions even looked like if you didn't play 2004-2008 - but I would recommend starting up a character in classic WoW to get an idea of just how fundamentally different the game was.

What happened after that period (Wrath->MoP in 2012) basically cemented the class gameplay we have today in 2024, including homogenization (still exists), "bring the player not the class" (still exists), mobility (which you claim was removed, yet my warlock -- the caster originally designed around being immobile but tanky -- has gateway, circle, and near infinite 70% run speed on demand), spammy rotations (mentioned several times in this thread), etc.

I agree that WotLK was different than TBC or Vanilla, but still: Why is this discussed in 2024? From a thread in 2024 I assume the current expansion or at least one of the last couple of years is discussed, not something from 15 years ago.
And I will go so far to assume that OP doesn't have an issue with Wrath.

Also, regarding WL: My comparison in terms of mobility was MoP, where moving while casting was a thing. And even more: As Demo WL your main spell in Meta form was an instant. And you had fel flame, as well as more instant DoTs (which now only Affliction uses).

[Nzx]

Which does not mean going from 50 buttons to 5 buttons. No one is asking for WoW to become a mobile game. But there's plenty of space that can be saved before we go down that far.

This is the happy medium. Pruning from here is what took us to the last "dark ages" this forum liked to complain about when you didn't have a button for stupid shit like "Detect Traps".

There are plenty of classes right now that aren't "DDR" like someone else is whinging about - WW Monk for example is about five rotational buttons in total, you never press the same one twice in a row, there's expected downtime in the rotation, and there are no dots to keep track of. Unfortunately that ruins the entire argument and so no one here will acknowledge it, lest it ruin the circlejerk about how WoW's never been worse than it currently is and that x point in history was objectively better in every way.