The State of the Game-and Ideas to Fix it II

The first post of the thread has capped out, so I'm creating a second one to keep the discussion going. Again, I urge you to keep it civil, intelligent, and most importantly constructive.

I highly recommend reading through the first thread

The first post is here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/17259176739?page=1#1

Lore's post is here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/17259176739?page=12#236

And I'd just like to direct people to one more post, made by Novoz: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/17259176739?page=14#275

05/02/2015 08:30 PMPosted by Soxo

I.Table of Contents/Introduction
II. TL;DR - I realize most people probably will only read this, but the rest goes into more detail
III. The Good
IV. The Not So Good
V. General Issues
VI. Balance
VII. Mechanical Combat Design Issues

i. Damage
ii. Healing
iii. CC & CC Breaks
iv. Defensives
v. Casting
vi. Interrupts
vii. Mana & Dampening
viii. Mobility

VII. Pruning Gone Wrong
VIII. Class by Class Breakdown
IX. What can Blizzard do?
X. What can we do?

I. Intro:
The impending sense that the game is dying is far from new; in WotLK people cried “bring back TBC!” in Cata people cried “bring back WotLK” and so on and so forth… But as someone who has played since TBC it's fairly clear this game is not what it used to be (in good and bad ways alike). Spend five seconds on the Twitch front page and WoW is so far down I wonder how many people even play (stream) this game anymore. Many of the top WoW streamers have either started playing much less, or quit altogether. Though we should not exclusively use the opinions of top streamers as a litmus test for the game as a whole, it is important to appropriately weigh the experiences of people who have played this game at a very high level, for a very long time. We should certainly not base our personal experiences of the game on who streams or doesn’t, but my experience has been largely the same. My once extremely active friends list has dwindled down to a couple of players who are rarely even online, some only logging on to do garrison chores.

Despite these feelings, what GCDTV has been able to do has been an extremely good sign. Not only is it a venue for high level players to play and for anyone interest to watch, but it shows there is still hope for the game, and most importantly, what this community can do if a few people step up.

Quoting Babbi

I !@#$ing love this game, well at least I used to. The main question is: WHAT HAS CHANGED?

And that’s what I’d like to figure out. Inspired by numerous posts on these forums and Arenajunkies, I’d like to start an intelligent and calm discussion and try and figure out where this game has improved, where things have gone south, and what we (the community) and blizzard can hopefully do to address them. I’ve compiled praise, complaints, and suggestions from many, and though I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, I’ll include as many as I can because it is important to have a discussion on this topic. This will make observations on the game as a whole, but mostly focusing on PVP.

II. TL;DR Version:
There have been many improvements to streamline the game as a whole, but they have come at the cost of “MMORPGness” and immersion.

PVP Problems

Though the game is more balanced (meaning nearly every spec has a top tier comp), people seem to be having less fun.

Burst damage is too high, sustained damage is too low, and burst/sustained healing is too high in comparison.

That results in a meta that somehow both feels slow, and too fast. (Because people’s health spikes up and down significantly under CDs, yet nothing happens when CDs are down.)

Dumb/unskilled CC still exists. CC breaks should have their model changed from reactive to proactive (used before CC hits, instead of breaking it after it lands).

Too many defensive cooldowns perpetuates the current problems in the meta & encourage training targets.

Too many spells (damage and healing) that provide significant burst are instant casts.

The number of interrupts in the game requires that there are many instant casts. (Add something like an interrupt DR so the game can be shifted back to casting.)

Mana is no longer an integral part of arena, which forces dampening (bad mechanic) to end games. (Make healer mana relevant again, no longer need artificial fix.)

Pruning abilities resulted in unfun mechanics at the core of many classes. (Rather than pruning damage rotations and niche abilities, mobility, passives, defensive cooldowns and CC breaks should have been removed/merged.)

There is a difference between mechanics and tuning. Look at both and address bad mechanics as well as tuning.

There are many tools the game has to make changes for the PVP community that only affect PVP.

We as a community need to be more positive and helpful (in dealing both with ourselves and Blizzard).