WoW: War Within Roster Update

My World of Warcraft subscription ran out a bit over a week ago. Not because I am unhappy with the state of the game — despite my ambivalence going in, War Within is shaping up to be the best expansion in years, maybe ever — but simply because I’ve completed my main goals within the current content and would like to take a break and play some other things for a few weeks.

But now seems like a good time to provide another update on what characters I’ve been playing, as seems to have become my habit since coming back to the game following my long post-Legion absence. As is so often the case, what I planned to do and what I actually did ended up being very different.

My original thought was that I wanted to promote my new Dark Iron shaman to “main” for this expansion. Take her through the story first, focus on her when doing endgame content, and so forth. I also planned to play my rogue and my warlock to a lesser degree, and I thought about bringing my various other Elf characters to cap just to have them ready for Midnight if I’m still around then, but I didn’t plan to play them in any meaningful way.

Instead, I made the last minute decision to play through the story with my warlock. I regretted not spending more time on the character in Dragonflight, and it felt right to embark on the Worldsoul Saga with a more storied character.

Following that, I’ve gone full alt-crazy. I don’t yet have as many capped characters as I did by the end of Legion, but I have far more than I’ve had in any other expansion, and I think this is the fastest I’ve gotten this many characters to level cap.

The campaign was enough to get my lock to 80, so I decided to designate a character to cleaning up each zone’s side quests. My shaman took Isle of Dorn, my rogue Ringing Deeps, my new Timerunner paladin Hallowfall, and my mage Azj’Kahet. That wasn’t quite enough to get them capped, but a few delves, dungeons, and world quests easily made up the difference.

Alongside that, I got my demon hunter and monk to 80 mostly by doing Timewalking dungeons, for a total of seven level-capped characters. I’ve been splitting my attention between them evenly enough that I don’t think you could really call any of them a main. My monk, warlock, and demon hunter are currently the three characters with an average item level of 600 or higher, which is almost exactly what you’d expect based on my past history aside from the demon hunter taking Mai’s place.

I think part of the reason I’ve been so indecisive is that I like the current state of most classes, but none of them are quite a perfect match for what I’m looking for.

A real problem with the current class design in World of Warcraft, I think exacerbated by the bloated new talent trees, is that every spec has to juggle these fiddly short cooldown (10-60 seconds) abilities that interrupt the flow of your rotation. This has always been a part of the game for at least some classes, but it’s never been so omnipresent, and I really don’t enjoy it.

Rogue is suffering especially from this. Every rogue spec has these stupid little maintenance buttons you need to juggle, and they rarely if ever have any cool animations or fun interactions with your toolkit. They’re just “press this to not suck” buttons. Shiv, Symbols of Death, Roll the Bones, Between the Eyes, Secret Technique…

Whyyyyy is Between the Eyes a maintenance buff? How is shooting someone in the face a buff on myself? In what world does that make sense?

It’s especially frustrating because a key reason I got into playing a rogue back in the day is because they were a class that was about managing resources, not cooldowns. This is such a betrayal of the class fantasy.

Further salting the wound is that this is hardly the first time rogues have felt this bad to play, and it felt like we’d finally overcome these issues back in Legion. That version of the class was virtually perfect. I don’t understand how Blizzard forgot all those lessons. Making Slice and Dice a passive in 11.0.5 helped, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done before Rogues are fun again.

I tried switching to Assassination in Dragonflight, but now I’ve moved to Subtlety, my usual fallback when Combat/Outlaw has felt bad in the past. Unfortunately the current version of Outlaw is just unbearably clunky, a stark turnaround for what was one of the most fun specs in the game’s history back in Legion.

Once again, if I didn’t have such history with this character, I wouldn’t play her at all. The current state of rogues is dire.

In an attempt to deal with my frustration over all the cooldown juggling — not just for rogues but across the whole game — I downloaded the addon “Doom Cooldown Pulse,” which flashes an ability’s icon on your screen when it comes off cooldown. Despite the community’s insistence that WoW is unplayable without UI addons, I’ve largely avoided them throughout my time with the game, but something had to give.

I only played with it for a week before my sub ran out, so I was still making up my mind, but generally I found the addon to be an improvement, but an imperfect solution. It tracks every cooldown, including skyriding abilities and extra action buttons, which can be a bit obnoxious at times. You can tell it exclude specific abilities, but you have the manually input the name of every ability you want black-listed for every character (or switch it to a whitelist system and manually input every ability you do want tracked… for every character). It’s also an absolute mess if you’re playing a class that has cooldowns for every ability, like paladin, and using the addon really lays bare how much of WoW’s combat design is just about attention taxes rather than any kind of tactical decision-making.

Ironically, despite my antipathy for cooldowns, I’ve found I’ve been enjoying playing my new paladin quite a lot. I can only explain this as a result of the way the cooldowns refresh so fast you can pretty much just cycle through your abilities in a natural flow, coupled with my general love for the aesthetic of paladins in general and Blood Elf paladins in particular.

I believe she’s my most geared character after the top three I mentioned above, and she’s become my go-to for dungeons and raids, where I’ve mostly been healing. It’s been long enough that the hundreds of hours I spent as a holy paladin back in Cataclysm now trigger nostalgia rather than frustration toward the spec.

The current state of holy is pretty good, too. It’s more different from the Cata version than I took it to be at first glance, with a greater emphasis on weaving in damage abilities, but I enjoy the battle cleric feel, and it still has the things that attracted me to holy in the first place: a strong emphasis on instant and fast-casting abilities, the builder and spender mechanic of holy power, and high mana efficiency.

It is a bit weird how Holy Light is just directly worse than Flash of Light now. There are apparently some arcane combinations of procs and talents that make it worth casting, but I just took it off my bars. I can’t be bothered. If Blizzard wants to make my fast heal also my efficient heal, that’s fine by me.

My biggest struggle with this character has been settling on an outfit for her. There’s just some many amazing sets that fit the Blood Knight aesthetic. I also put together a nice simple green and brown set based on my backstory for her, which involves her being a ranger before she was a paladin.

One other factor skewing my choices this time is that delves have become my main endgame activity, and the mobility they require heavily favours melee classes. Considering how much dungeons and raids have tended to punish melee over the years, this seems only fair, but it definitely affects my choices on what to play. My shaman mostly uses Elemental spec, so this helps explain how my monk and demon hunter ended up lapping her despite my initial intentions.

One final surprise I’ll make note of is that I’ve had a lot more fun with my mage than I expected. Initially I didn’t even plan to finish getting him to cap once he finished the Azj’Kahet side quests, and I think he’ll still be a bit of a second-stringer, but this is definitely the most fun I’ve had with the class since he was my original main back in Wrath of the Lich King.

This is mostly down to the Frostfire hero talents, and mainly their aesthetics at that. Like most hero talents, their mechanical impact is minuscule. I just love the flavour of weaving together different elements like that. The visuals and the fantasy of it are so much more appealing than just flinging fire and nothing else. You’re such a powerful mage you literally broke the laws of physics and made something that’s both hot and cold. That’s just badass.

I also appreciate Living Bomb being made a bigger part of the spec again, and making it a passive saves a keybind, which is nice. The massive chain reaction Living Bomb explosions were one of my favourite things about playing Fire in Wrath, and it’s nice to see them again. Now if only it still triggered Hot Streak…

I’m not sure how many more characters I’m going to end up playing. I don’t plan to get every class to cap like I did in Legion, but I’m not sure I’m done yet. Despite failing to click with the class every time I’ve tried in the past, I want to level up my Timerunner hunter to try out the Dark Ranger talents, and I’m tempted to level up one of my death knights at some point.

But for now, it’s time for a break, and my eyes turn to other games…