Thread: Very concerned about 4.0 gameplay having no strategy

Going to agree with this one, the meaningful decision-making in combat could get very bland if the it gets simplified to just mostly performing your set rotation with minor divergence from it. It's probably too early to be doom-and-gloom about the issue, but it is a valid concern to make. I'm certainly hoping that the new gauge systems will bring a new way to play that takes skill, planning and understanding to master.

Following up with a quote of mine from another thread.

Originally Posted by ShaneDawn

This is actually somewhat concerning, although not just for Bard. A major factor separating great players from the good ones was often knowing how to line up your buffs and using them to their best effect. You would often want to delay certain cooldowns to get a stronger alignment with others, most likely discuss the cooldown usage with your party members to benefit more from your shared multiplicative damage modifiers. This is especially true for buff-heavy, dot-snipping class like Bard, whose damage is very relative to how well you know your buffs and get the best out of them. A thing that a lot of people seem to disregard is snipping your dots outside openers to get extended effects of Raging Strikes and Internal Release. As you also mentioned, the usage and general party timing for openers and mini-openers that usually happened several times throughout a raid were a key to maximizing the DPS.

Just like CPM, the general know-how is what takes players a long way in increasing their DPS. As it is, you can achieve decent DPS just by knowing your priorities. To achieve good DPS, you also need to know your opener and use your damage modifiers. To achieve great DPS, you also need to be able to use your cooldowns in an efficient manner. If you want to go even beyond that, you need to start effectively syncing the party cooldown usage so that you gain the maximum effect out of the shared modifiers. It is a somewhat more technical system than meets the eye, but adds a big layer of complexity for those wishing to go above and beyond.

It's probably too early to jump to conclusions, but the possible pruning of damage modifiers from classes could serve as a bigger dumb-down to the game (and especially Bard as a class) than removing the cast times ever did. Unless the consistent performance as you mention it will become more difficult to achieve than it currently is. However, since the removal of cast times will be dumbing that part down as well, the ease or difficulty of our consistent rotation is going to be largely dependent on how the song system is going to work out and how the combat changes will reflect in general battle design .