I’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that I think World of Warcraft is in a very good state right now, possibly the best it’s ever been. For most of its history, it’s struggled to balance the needs of raiders and casual players, but with open world and solo content now getting the same love as raids, that issue has finally been put to bed.
Nothing’s perfect, though. While The War Within has been a great expansion in most ways, the current state of class design is quite poor, and with the “raid or die” issue resolved, I’d say it now rises to being World of Warcraft‘s biggest flaw.
If I had to describe the current state of WoW‘s class design in a single word, it would be “bloated.” The return of traditional talent trees plus baselining a number of the borrowed power abilities from the last few expansions have left most classes overwhelmed by excess buttons, procs, and resource flooding.
There’s been a lot of chatter around the upcoming rotation assist functionality intended to replace the need for certain essential add-ons, and while I largely view this as a positive addition, I also agree with those who have pointed out that it’s a band-aid on a larger issue. There’s simply too much to keep track of in current rotations.
For illustrative purposes, I looked at Wowhead’s current recommended rotations for Retribution Paladin, Beast Mastery Hunter, and Frost Death Knight. Those three were picked because they’re widely regarded as some of the simplest specs in the game.
Frost uses eight buttons for both its single target and AoE rotations. Retribution uses 10 buttons for single target and nine for AoE. Beast Mastery uses five for single target and eight for AoE.
Of those, only BM’s single target is at what I’d consider a reasonable number, and keep in mind those numbers don’t take into account other possible talent builds that could add even more complexity, nor do they include interrupts, self-heals, mobility, consumables, trinkets, or any other utility skills. It’s just your bare minimum baseline rotation.
Personally, I find about four or five buttons is the upper limit of what’s comfortable for a core rotation in this game. Others might have differing ideals, but I don’t think it should be too controversial to say that when your core rotation requires double digits’ worth of buttons, things have gotten out of hand.
It’s not like these intricate rotations require interesting decision-making, either. Everyone’s mathed out the optimal usage of abilities. Having this many buttons is mostly just an attention tax.
This is really exemplified by the fact that so much of the current bloat comes in the form of “press this to not suck” buttons that don’t do anything interesting but are still necessary for optimal DPS. Shiv, for example. Shiv is an Assassination rogue ability that does negligible damage and has a very dull animation; all it does is make the target take increased damage from your poisons. Since Assassination gets most of its damage from poisons, it’s very important, but it’s also very boring.
Button bloat makes the classes feel much more similar to each other, too. Nowadays everyone is juggling fiddly short cooldown abilities, and between that and the resource flooding that’s become commonplace, there’s little distinction between resource-limited and cooldown-limited specs. We need to get back to each class’s rotation having its own unique feel.
It’s not just active abilities that are a problem, either. The current state of WoW is also suffering from bloat of passive effects, which is not a problem I’ve ever seen in a game before.
When the devs built the new talent trees in Dragonflight, they clearly wanted to avoid too many boring “+1% haste” talents, and that’s admirable, but it meant most specs are now juggling an absurd number of random procs. Often these introduce additional complexity to rotations by creating conditions on how and when to optimally use your active abilities, but even when they’re fully passive, they dilute your damage by spreading it too thin.
This is the other big consequence of the bloat: Pressing buttons doesn’t feel good anymore. Your damage and healing are spread so thin between so many different buttons and effects that it’s very rare to have any “wow” moments. I just want to hit a button and have it do a bunch of damage.
So what can be done? In the short term, the best option is probably to add more choice nodes to the talent tree with passive options. Unfortunately, this is probably going to mean a lot of boring “X ability does Y more damage” talents, but that seems like the lesser evil at this point.
Retribution paladin does a decent job of this right now. The optimized rotation I described above is still quite bloated, but Ret has an unusual number of ways to modify its rotation with talent choices, and you can get simpler if you’re not too concerned about performance. With casual content more robust and rewarding than ever, there’s much less pressure to optimize these days; let’s embrace the potential to sacrifice a little performance for a lot more fun.
It would also help if our many and sundry procs were more predictable, and tied to specific button presses. For example, Windwalker monk’s Teachings of the Monastery adds additional free uses of Blackout Kick, but only when you actually use Blackout Kick. It’s the kind of feel-good big-damage moment that most classes are lacking these days.
Longer term, though, I think the entire talent system needs to rebuilt from the ground up if we’re to truly fix these problems. Yes, again, and that is its own problem.
No MMORPG is ever fully static (maintenance mode games notwithstanding), but no other game constantly reboots its own class design like WoW does. I can go back to Guild Wars 2 right now, and my Thief will mostly play the same way she did when the game launched. In WoW, I can’t always count on my classes playing the same even from patch to patch. This is not normal.
And I’m fully aware of the irony of complaining about constant revamps even as I’m asking for another revamp. But the line does need to be drawn somewhere. I’d prefer it not be here, but someday WoW needs to stop tinkering and establish a stable baseline for how classes play.
It hasn’t yet. In a recent dev presentation paraphrased by Wowhead, the developers fully admit that the current talent system is unsustainable and will need to be replaced at some point, but that they feel that’s OK, and I gotta say that triggered no small amount of internal screaming from yours truly. Even as someone who doesn’t like the current talent system, I’d say the fact that it is effectively just another borrowed power system playing out over a longer timeline is… concerning.
This has to stop at some point. Yes, you do need to keep giving people new toys to keep the game interesting, but you can’t just keep putting more blocks on top of the Jenga tower until it collapses time and again. MMOs need a balance of change and stability, and the latter is something WoW‘s class design has never achieved.
To really solve these problems, Blizzard is going to have to overcome its aversion to horizontal progression. You can still add new abilities, but they need to be optional replacements for the existing ones. Again, I think Guild Wars 2 has down a good job of this with its elite specs and new weapon options. I can still play my Thief the way she always did if I want, or I can make her a shadow mage or a staff fighter. That’s how you keep a game fresh without making it collapse under its own weight.
But that would require a very big philosophical change from Blizzard, and it won’t happen any time soon, I fear. In the meantime, I’ll hope for some streamlined rotation options through the current talent tree and pray that the next total talent reboot works out better. We now know it’s coming.
Everyone has opinions, and The Soapbox is how we indulge ours. Join the Massively OP writers as we take turns atop our very own soapbox to deliver unfettered editorials a bit outside our normal purviews (and not necessarily shared across the staff). Think we’re spot on — or out of our minds? Let us know in the comments!
