Cataclysm - The simplification of WOW?

Cataclysm - the simplification of the game

One thing that defines a good player in a lot of games is decision making. This goes for just about every genre but is even more prevalent in games where you have multiple skills to use for various situations. MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) games such as BLC/D2/DotA/HON etc. have succeeded in this aspect. WoW once felt like this games, a choice to be made on what skill to use in what situation. Over the course of the expanions I'm honestly starting to feel more and more like every decision is a black & white choice with there being one obvious answer in nearly every situation.

Back in the days of Mace Stuns and War Glaives, there was often a choice of what to do, a lack of need to use every GCD on damage, a reason to plan ahead, a game where thinking would nearly always come out ahead of mashing buttons. Fast forward to today and we have a game where every GCD is required to be used on whatever, classes are GCD capped on pure damage rotations and there's very little choices to be made about what skill to use. The difference in playing skill on certain classes between a 2000 rated player and a 2600 rated player is often very very tiny (with awareness/team chemistry being the thing holding them back more), because the game has become over simplified. To put this into context lets look at a few examples of how dumbed down some classes have become.

Warriors -

In S6/7 the damage was fairly balanced, the usage of charge/intercept for interrupting spells was often a good thing and stance dancing to pummel at the right time set the good warriors apart from the bad. Making that decision to cut your rage to interrupt was not something that could just be spammed without thinking, because that would leave you in a situation where your pressure drops and MS could fall off quite easily, overpower also had to be timed to get the maximum effect.

Fast forward to today and there's very little to differentiate high end warriors from the randoms that found a bind for Colossus smash, the most efficient way to currently play warrior is to literally spam every GCD on a damaging ability (because they now have that many abilities that you don't have GCDs spare for well placed PH spam). This was a problem that was added with Cataclysm, along with HS being off the GCD leading to ridiculous amounts of burst. With the recent change to their mobility they now never have a reason to leave battle stance and nearly every charge is better used as a distance closer to do more damage. The playstyle has devolved from a class that could bounce around targets creating pressure with the 50% MS debuff into a tunnelvision fest of damage spam because hey if there's no MS lets just balance everything around ridiculous damage.

DKs -

DKs currently have unrivalled mobility, but a steady string of damage nerfs to all of their core abilities removes the need to think about anything other than just using every GCD possible for NS, because SS is trash and DC has eaten 2 nerfs and NS is just more effective at this point. This creates a nice binary class that can go by the following rule;

in melee range - ns

no melee range (as if this ever happens with DA)- death coil

The amount of interrupts the class has don't really take much brain power to use as most of them can be used pre-emptively without any need to even hit a cast. I'd much rather have the class that was able to put out pressure on multiple targets and drain mana effectively through a lot of spread damage than this tunnel vision wreck of a class.

Mages -

With the ridiculous amounts of interrupts being given out left right & center in Cataclysm mages have been put into a situation where casting stuff is actually detrimental a lot of the time, giving them the choice of Ice Lance or Ice Lance. Not only does this feel retarded to play against, it's not a fun playstyle to play, the days of timing shatters with Water Elemental Novas is sadly long gone for a playstyle that's far more brute force than the mages of the past.

Hybrids

Every hybrid now having an interrupt along with the fact that they all had a decent amount of CC to begin with makes cleave teams far more potent and makes fake casting far less effective. When there was less interrupts/interrupts were on the GCD you would be able to fake cast and then happily free cast, with every class having a stun/interrupt/second interrupt (just in case!) it makes fake casting a game of luck (along with the fact that they've all been given stupidly high damage). Am I the only one that preferred it when hybrids were a support class rather than something that can slot into nearly every comp and make a lot of teams more fustrating to play vs than fun?

These are just some of the many things that've been simplified and ended up detrimental to the progression of the game, balancing a game around 30 specs/classes is certainly not going to end well with the current path of progression being taken. Class doing bad? add an interrupt/stupid damage/some form of unavoidable instant CC etc. (look how many of these have been added to hybrids in the recent patches and how much it's effected the meta-game). Some food for thought, karuki out!