Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
In the OP's defense, people held the same belief with WoW's skill consolidation and look how that turned out.
Couldn't have said it better myself. People can say all day long that it was a content drought that brought WoW's declining popularity, but if you look at the sub count graphs, you'll see that subscribers started to drop off LONG before that was an issue, even before Mists of Pandaria was dropped. It was around when Blizzard removed the talent trees, basically slapping everyone who spent hours agonizing over the most efficient spec in the face and laughing at how much time they wasted. I reason that you can have amazing foes all day long with brilliant dungeons, creative enemies and complex mechanics, but what is the point if you can't do anything cool or engaging in that content?

A lot of combos can already be condensed through the use of macros, a point I've made several times before during this thread. We most certainly don't need devs to hold our hand in this regard, skilled and talented though they may be. They are called expansions for a reason, and if your character that you've spent hundreds of hours on, is made lesser not through any triumph of evil, but because the powers that be have declared a play style that you've come to cherish as "too complicated" for people who aren't going to dodge that AoE no matter how simple the game is for them, no amount of shiny baubles is going to fix that feeling of "used to be able to do that cool thing, but now you can't because reasons"

I'm really hoping my fears are unfounded and Yoshi-P is going to pull out some more gaming wisdom. I'm hoping that when he says "reassessment", he's talking about why Skull Sunder and Savage Blade are cross-class skills. Or why Black Mages have access to a cross class skill that increases damage based on dexterity. I'm hoping that he's looking at Cross class skills and realizing that, with a selection of imperative ones, a selection of okay ones, and a selection of ones that simply don't do anything, people are making the same choices 100% of the time.