What ability would you rather not say goodbye to?

By Anne Stickney
Game Designer Celestalon had an interesting question posed to Twitter earlier today — what ability are you afraid Blizzard will get rid of, in its quest to defeat button bloat? Obviously each class is incredibly different and the answers are colored by personal opinion, but it's still a question worth asking. I think what struck me as odd was that I couldn't really come up with any kind of reasonable answer. As a rogue, there are very few abilities I can safely say I love — Burst of Speed, Shadowstep, Fan of Knives — but those are all situational abilities that I don't use with every raid encounter.

As for the rest of the rogue toolkit, I'm decidedly ambivalent about the whole thing. The rotation for an Assassination rogue isn't what I'd call particularly complex, it's simply a matter of watching timers to make sure you're performing the right moves at the right moment. Mutilate, Rupture, Envenom — they're all abilities I use regularly. There's nothing really remarkable about them. I like that Envenom refreshes Slice and Dice, but that's not really liking an ability so much as liking a side effect of using that ability.

Which is really kind of weird, when you think about it.

However, most of the abilities in the rogue toolkit that I could safely say I'm fond of aren't even things that are on my normal keybinds. I don't use them in every boss fight, but they're ridiculously fun when I do get to use them. Do I want to see those go away? No, definitely not — actually, I'd like to use them more. But players worrying that these fun abilities might not make the cut don't have to worry, as a follow up tweet from Celestalon clarifies.



The fun stuff we like, but don't necessarily use all the time isn't really up for consideration. Button bloat is more about the abilities we use all the time, and cutting down on how many buttons we absolutely have to press every time we're running around killing bosses — not the stuff we use as a utility, but also because it's really fun. When I play my priest, Mind Vision is incredibly handy when I'm trying to locate a nearby friend but I'm not sure exactly where they're hiding at in the Shrine of Two Moons. When I play my shaman, Far Sight is handy not for its intended purpose, whatever that may be, but for taking some really cool screenshots.

From Celestalon's tweets, it seems the abilities they're really concerned with whittling down are the ones that appear as Core Abilities in your spellbook tab — abilities that you use every encounter. As a rogue, I can't say there are any abilities in my regular rotation I'd really be sad to see go away, but then again, rogues aren't exactly the most complex class WoW has to offer. So for the sake of delving into all the classes, including the ones I don't play — are there any abilities you'd rather not see disappear? Do you think your class suffers from button bloat? What would you take out of your rotation mix, if you had the option to do it? And which abilities would you really like to stick around?

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