Spellbook MUST be fixed before live.

#1 - Sept. 3, 2012, 12:37 p.m.

Blizzard,

I really like some of the changes going into MoP.

However, I'm on live right now and was just looking through my Spell Book ..

It's a mess .. a complete mess. This can't stay like this. My suggestions for cleaning it up are as follows:

1. Put tabs on the top of the page .. "Active" .. "Passive"

2. When a tab is clicked on .. two columns: Offensive Spells, Defensive Spells

The point of number 2 is .. with the previous spell book interface, if a class needed say a heal .. they would go to their holy tree .. not to be confused with a heal being in the shadow school. They knew right where to find if .. obviously heals would be in the defensive category so they would be easy to find.

My point is .. something really needs to be done, and before launch.

This is unacceptable.

Thank you.

Ghostcrawler

Game Designer

#30 - Sept. 4, 2012, 6:02 p.m.

I've addressed this a few times, but we didn't think the old spellbooks organized by spec made much sense. It worked okay for classes like mage, where everything was themed to magic school, but really Arcane became the dumping ground for almost everything. For paladins, Consecration was a Holy ability, I think, even though it did damage and was a primary tanking tool. For warriors, Fury tended to have a bunch of shouts because I guess you yell a lot if you're angry. With all of the class changes, I think players would still have trouble finding both old and new spells if they were on spec pages still.

The new spellbook lists all class spells alphabetically, with active ones first and then passive ones. I can appreciate the feedback that some players would rather have an active and a passive tab, or that all spells should be organized in one list without the active and passive separation. I don't think there is a solution here that is right for everyone, so we may add more options or filtering in the future.

I am less enamored of the idea of trying to categorize spells as core, cooldown, defensive or what not, just because so many abilities break the rules and do a few different things. We don't design spells to fall into neat categories so I'm pretty sure they wouldn't just happen to work out that way.