I am absolutely BEGGING for an ability squish

#1 - Nov. 25, 2013, 4:17 p.m.

I am begging for an ability squish. This was one of the things I was shocked wasn’t touched up at blizzcon, and also one of the only areas blizzard seems to be behind their competition on. Blizzard seems to want to react quickly when other MMO’s have good ideas (AKA timeless isle going the Guid Wars 2 model) so why are they not following suit with crunching down on piano key tool bars. Even Diablo 3 recognized gameplay is more fun when you can actually bind your abilities to easily clickable buttons/keys.

I came back to wow in 5.4 and went “WTF is all this crap” when I logged on some of my characters. I’ve been playing my druid but the first time I logged on my level 80 that I hadn’t touched since WotLK I immediately logged off, started googling guides, and cracked out the ipad to watch videos on rotations, abilities and what not.

Why do I need all of this!!!!!! As a healer I have buttons for: a normal heal, a HoT, a 3 stack HoT, a half heal half HoT, a heal that heals more based on the HoTs, a cooldown instant heal that requires a specific HoT, an AOE HoT, a HoT I place on the ground, a detonate for that ground HoT, an “Oh Crap” AoE HoT, an ability that makes my HoT’s tick faster. And that’s just for heals……. There’s still all the other crap that needs to be used (damage reduction on self, damage reduction on tank, cooldowns). I’ve got my 4 mouse thumb buttons already mapped to my stuns/interrupts/movement abilities!

Things are just as bad as DPS…… I find that since WotLK I have no idea what’s happening in raids. I’m spending too much time locked into the interface/addons/notifications to manage the but load of abilities I have. Since I’m fixated on what’s going on with my ability bars I need more mods to notify me when something happens that requires me to move. I’ve got to make sure my DoT is up, my AoE DoT is up, my finishing move DoT is up, I’m using tigers fury every 30 seconds, I’ve constantly got save roar up, popping cool downs, trinkets………. I need to be watching bars tick down, I honestly can’t tell you what some of the bosses look like.

Even though I only had a few abilities I needed to use, before Cata I could actually see what’s going on and enjoy the fights and immersion. I had my abilities mapped to my keys/mouse buttons and would watch the boss for phase changes or triggers. Now things are just a mess. I had a buddy watched me play once and he asked what the hell was going on. I told him I was busy watching my bars tick down……..

I ask… why…. Why do we have so many abilities….. what is the point…… Blizzard said at the end of WotLK they wanted healing to feel like it did for shamans and not be spammy…… in WotLK shamans had a direct heal, an AoE heal, a HoT, and a preventative damage shield……. Plus a de-curse…… that was incredibly easy and fun to manage………. But what we have now is easily triple that!

I honestly think that’s why LFR is such a crapshoot some times. The average person isn’t going to start cracking open guides, watching videos on rotations, installing addons and customizing their interface just to have a chance at managing their few dozen abilities.

Lets rein it back in a bit shall we…… please……..

Lore

Community Manager

#89 - Nov. 25, 2013, 8:58 p.m.

We do feel that, at least for some classes, there are a few too many buttons to keep on your action bars. It's an issue we'd ultimately like to solve, but something we have to be very, very careful with.

It's easy to look at your bar, go "LOOKIT ALL DEM BUTTONS", and decide that some of them need to go. In fact, we agree. It's much more difficult -- even dangerous -- to decide exactly which abilities to get rid of. Generally speaking, if you have an ability keybound, it's probably at least fairly important to your class. Getting rid of abilities you don't have bound doesn't really fix anything, so that means that, in most cases, we're talking about cutting the important ones.

That's not to say it can't (or won't) be done, but it does mean it's a fairly large task. Depending on the ability, there could be a lot of rebalancing or restructuring needed to make sure the class is still functional and fun to play. Again, it's something we'd like to do, it's just a very involved process.

Lore

Community Manager

#94 - Nov. 25, 2013, 9:08 p.m.

11/25/2013 01:01 PMPosted by Bomdanil
Again, it's something we'd like to do, it's just a very involved process.

Something you didn't really touch on is how some abilities exist as flavour for the class. The last time this kind of ability trimming occurred, a lot of things we players took for fun and playing about wound up biting the bullet because they were seen as "unnecessary" (i.e. Hunter's Eyes of the Beast).

True, and we want to avoid that. As I mentioned above, removing abilities you don't often use doesn't accomplish much. We often talk about this issue in terms of action bar space, but it's really keybind space that's the problem. One could make an argument that, say, Unending Breath could stand to be cut, but that's not something that's going to free up a keybind for the vast majority of Warlocks.