The Days Before

Pre-patch time has always been fun.

No, seriously.  You always end up feeling so powerful, because the changes to abilities invariably give you a buff.  After all, now you're on a leveling profile -- there's no need to tune anything at 90 anymore since we'll all be 91 soon enough.

Plus there's events, all kinds of free gear, the chance to get comfortable with the new rotation.  Usually by this point there's an XP squish, so it's a great time to level some alts.  Which is basically what I'm doing.  My paladin was at 88, the XP squish put him at one away from 89, and at that point it just seemed logical to get him to 90.  Heck, doing Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor candy buckets got him almost all the way there, and I got a spectral kitty out of the deal.

Trouble is, paladin is boring.  And while I deeply appreciate the return of Holy Shield at 100, that's not enough.  Druid kinda suffers from the same issue.

The real trouble with druids is they're not enough of any one thing.  See, times were, if you were playing a Feral there was enough hybrid in you to make you distinct from being a rogue.  Sure, rogues got a lot of fun little extras, but as a druid you had bird form, you could be a bear, you had decent heals, and you were essentially a rogue in combat.

But then they rolled up so many abilities into being spec-only, and they gutted bear form to the point of worthlessness.  So now a druid really is just a rogue, only without the out-of-combat flavor abilities that make a rogue worth playing.  For someone like me, for whom the focus of the game isn't necessarily fighting, not having a suite of let's call them "bling" abilities renders a character super boring.  Paladins have kind of the same problem.  Either way, point is, I'm not super into the druid even with the promise of catman (mancat?) at 100.

But I've been having fun with my hunter, oh yes.

I still have the Kill Shot muscle memory.  It's weird, not having an execute, especially when both the other specs do.  It's like it was removed for the sake of "making the specs feel different, but it seems dumb to remove it from just one spec when really it's only thematically appropriate for Marksman.

I digress.  The hunter is still fun.  Fun enough that I'm seriously considering "maining" him for Warlords.  Part of that is just because I enjoy the character so much.  Part of it is that I'm really liking pet classes these days.  Heck, I'll probably be using my free 90 on my warlock, though whether I'll spend much time playing him is admittedly another matter.

(Being able to queue as a tank would make me much more likely to level him, hint hint.)

I really think Blizzard missed an opportunity to make each hunter spec feel unique and flavorful with the changes they made, which amount to "what they were before, but with fewer buttons."  In fact, in general, I think they missed the mark with most of the class changes.  To be brutally honest, none of the classes I played really felt like they needed to lose abilities.  We didn't need to lose profession buffs.  We didn't need to lose reforging.  I liked reforging.  Hit and Expertise were dumb no-brainer stats, and while I don't miss them, I never really minded them either.

See, it all comes down to knobs, and how many you have.  Fundamentally, the mechanic behind WoW combat is a dice roll.  Everything else is a knob that Blizzard adjusts to set the challenge level.  Hit and Expertise are balanced against Dodge and Parry.  Take away Hit and Expertise but leave Dodge and Parry and now suddenly everyone is effectively doing less damage.  And that's fine, but Blizzard then has to give the mobs less health, or have players do more damage, to keep the difficulty roughly where it was.  (I'm simplifying.  Tremendously.)  The point is, keep them in, take them out, it's irrelevant because the encounters will be just as hard either way.  All that's been done is a knob's been removed.

Did WoW have too many knobs before?  Maybe, but I personally wouldn't have complained.  Heck, in general it felt just about right -- I almost always had a button to push in combat, but I didn't feel overwhelmed.  Digression.  Whether or not it had too many knobs before, removing knobs for the sake of removing knobs really just leads us right back to that dice roller, where there are no knobs at all and the outcome is as close to random as computers can generate.

Maybe this isn't making a lot of sense.  My point is that I don't think the game needed to be de-complexified in any significant way.  It was fine the way it was, and the bits that were broken weren't fixed by taking some of our toys away.  This is the first expansion, I think, that we're all really losing something, where what they're giving doesn't balance what they're taking.

I want a button to push every GCD, or nearly.  I want the ability to carefully balance my stats and prioritize what I want to prioritize, without having to keep six sets of gear.  I want someone to be able to tell what hunter or rogue spec I am by the way I look and the things that I do, like every other class in the game.  I want cooldowns and new and interesting abilities.  I want ways to prove my skill.  I want knobs.

This is the first expansion that we won't be getting a single new ability while we level.  (Not counting the level 100 talents, many of which are passive or replace an existing ability.)  That just don't seem right.