What is the Ability Squish, and How Does it Affect You?

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

It has many names: ‘ability squish’, ‘button bloat’, ‘nerf to fun’. Blizzard is using Warlords of Draenor to clean up our action bars, by cutting some rarely-used or niche abilities – an attempt to make playing the game a little less confusing for new players. A Frost Death Knight doesn’t need a taunt, a Marksmanship Hunter doesn’t need Arcane Shot and two-thirds of Mages don’t need Arcane Explosion – or so goes the theory.

Here is Blizzard’s reasoning behind the change, courtesy of Bashiok, which is largely identical in sentiment to what is said in the patch notes.

After 10 years of adding more and more abilities, there’s a point when we need to take a critical look at all that we have wrought. We can’t just constantly add more and more and more abilities to the game forever and expect it to hold up under the weight of itself. Our intent as a company is always to design simple systems with lots of fun gameplay depth. Easy to learn difficult to master is our motto. Having tons of abilities does not necessarily make a game deep or fun, just complex. We’ve posted these exact points many times. If you disagree with Blizzard’s core design principles, or any specific changes being made, we’d be happy to hear specific feedback, but saying a game is going to be bad because there are less class abilities is not particularly helpful, or even accurate.

We’ve seen some of this in earlier expansions. I play a Mage, which those of you who follow me on Twitter likely already know. In Cataclysm, we lost minor self-buffs like Frost/Fire Ward, Mana Shield and Amplify/Dampen Magic. In Mists, Flame Orb was dropped. These are spells that really didn’t have much, if any, interaction with certain specs (Flame Orb was high damage for Fire but did nothing else beyond that). Other classes have also had their abilities pruned over the years. WoD, however, marks the first time that Blizzard has said ‘We are focusing on removing unused abilities.’

This is not ok

The idea behind the change is to clear up our action bars, getting rid of those spells that you have keybound but are only used in niche situations. Mages’ AoE spells are made spec-specific; Warriors lose Shattering Throw, unless glyphed (Glyph of Shattering Throw), and its functionality has changed so it’s no longer a DPS increase. Symbiosis has been removed for Druids. These are just a few examples of abilities that have been removed or made unique to certain specialisations. Some spells have also been merged, under the heading ‘Ability Consolidation’. Druids, for example, saw Pounce merged with Rake and Ravage added to Shred.

Does this dumb the game down? It might seem like it – fewer abilities to press means less complexity. But then, look at what we’re gaining in Warlords, where abilities will have a lot more synergy. We’ll check out Mages again, as an example.

Currently, the level 75 talent row is the bomb tier; Living Bomb for single-target, Nether Tempest for 3-4 targets and Frost Bomb for AoE. Pretty simple. In WoD, those abilities are being rolled into a single talent and gain new spec interaction: LB can be spread with Inferno Blast once again (which is already being used to do some pretty crazy stuff); Nether Tempest scales in damage based on Arcane Charge; Frost Bomb does nothing by itself, but activates when the target is hit with a Fingers of Frost–Ice Lance. Already, these abilities have become much more involved. Unstable Magic, on the same tier, is a fairly boring passive, but Supernova/Blast Wave/Ice Nova are interesting as they not only replace a staple defensive spell – Frost Nova – but actually turn it into a damaging ability: potentially a big change to the way you’ll play solo, if nothing else.

While watching your LB timers, Arcane Charges or stacks of FoF, you’ll also be releasing procs at high stacks of Incanter’s Flow, or lining them up to hurl at Prismatic Crystal. A new level 100 talent, Thermal Void, has even opened up a whole new style of play where it is possible to keep the Icy Veins cooldown active 100% of the time (although this is expected to be changed).

Here is a comparison between my level 90 main action bars on live:

And on beta:

Note that I took every active talent I could aside from the level 90 tier (Mirror Image, Rune of Power, Incanter’s Flow), but I included a macro in the space that it would occupy. Greater Invisibility is hidden, as it is on the live realms. Healthstone is also missing, so mentally fill a space in. I’ve put Amplify Magic in place of my potions button.

Immediately, we can see that I’ve gained three free slots – more if I were to take more passives or abilities that replace existing spells, like Evanesce. My hidden bars and OPie rings have also been cut down: no more Armour spells (three slots), Mana Gem, Evocate or now-spec-locked AoE abilities.

From my time in the beta, the loss of these buttons is almost completely unnoticeable; they are exactly what Blizzard had in mind for the ability squish. There was a small adjustment period when I mourned the loss of Fire Blast/Arcane Explosion for Frost to finish off a low-health enemy, but then Ice Lance’s base damage was buffed to make up for it.

A straw poll of other BlizzPro writers and guildies has shown that most don’t feel that they’ve lost any buttons or complexity. In fact, with the seal-twisting Empowered Seals level 100 talent, Ret Pallies are looking more complex than live. Most people admitted that there was, as I found, a period of adjustment getting used to not having certain spells, like Slice and Dice for Assassination Rogues and Raise Dead for Blood and Frost DKs.

The one dissenter (there’s always one) was my guildy Kazal, who plays a Balance Druid but is rerolling to Prot Warrior in WoD. He said, “I was shocked that I could fit all of my [Warrior’s] abilities onto one bar – minus a couple, literally”. I copied my own Prot Warrior to the beta to check this out. Our characters are different, of course – I have Engineering and two on-use trinkets, which takes up five spaces, and haven’t played him since I began using OPie, so a lot of abilities that I could remove are actually on action bars. Regardless, here are my live bars (the top two are normally hidden):

And here they are on beta:

Again, you can see that there are several free spaces: Recklessness, Cleave and Piercing Howl (that talent row is now entirely passive) for starters. This situation was a little more concerning than my Mage, as I use those abilties fairly often. However, they don’t add much to the spec and there are other ways to accomplish the same result. I didn’t manage to fit all of my abilities onto a single bar, but certainly my core rotational ones would do.

Rallying Cry has also vanished from Prot Warriors, and Kazal highlighted the change to raid cooldowns – these are mostly being allocated to non-tanks as part of Blizzard’s new design philosophy, where cooldowns are being spread more evenly among the playerbase; Prot loses Rallying Cry, for instance, but Mages gain Amplify Magic. This is simply bringing parity to various classes, so it doesn’t all revolve around Shaman and Warlocks!

You might be concerned about the game becoming too easy as we go into WoD , but there’s no need to be. The sky is not falling. You’ll have fewer buttons to press, but when you press them is becoming much more important.