World of Warcraft Rotations are Dumb

 lolsorandom
anyway

 Especially with modern WoW, doing a proper DPS rotation is like playing a piano. Problem: no matter how great the song, if you only play one song, the piano is going to be boring. Having a 'rotation' that you rotate through is a fundamental error. 

 (Don't look at me like that. There's a good reason.)

 Consider another Blizzard property (that I like even less): imagine playing Starcraft, but you do the exact same timing attack in every game. If it doesn't work you build the same attack again until you lose. 

 First, how long would it take for you to get horribly bored of this? Unless you're 100% C and 0% O....  I notice this is basically factory-peasant behaviour. Do your eight hours of mind-numbingly repetitive labour, because that's what you were told to do. 

 Zeroth, you can't. The maps differ. You can't always engage at the front of their base or any other predictable location. You can't control how their army engages with yours and have to improvise the micro.  

 Lots of casuals want to simplify the rotations, lmao. One "respected" guy, apparently unironically, suggested one button is fine. Um...how do you not get horribly bored spamming one button in every fight? Maybe healers would be less uncommon if you couldn't play 98% of fights playing whack-a-mole with a mana-efficiency macro bound to a single button. Just take gambits from FF12, ffs.

 What it needs is the Starcraft-like varying microclimate. You shouldn't have a rotation, what you should have is various tools which you can use to respond to varying conditions. 

 

They obviously sorta thought of this with the original death knight. You have blood runes which could, by default, be spent on either single-target or aoe damage, frost runes which could be spent on a DoT or a CC, and unholy runes which could be spent on an AOE or a DoT. 

 It was clearly supposed to be like having three mini-classes, but you had to worry about unwisely depleting a class - accidentally using all your frost runes on damage and not having the CC available, for example. Supposed to hold a blood rune in reserve for an emergency rune tap, but maybe sometimes you would really want the extra damage.

 Sounds like a fun class, right? Have to read the room and respond. Get a feel for when to show restraint and when to go all out.

 Then they did everything in their power to avoid players ever having to face depletion. Especially death runes, letting you spend all your runes as a single type. They actively sprinted away from balancing the competing opportunities. Blood strike doesn't actually do, like, damage. Holding it in reserve is almost costless. In the unlikely event you ever want the frost CC, you can cast it up front rather than having to worry about holding anything in reserve. By contrast the DoTs were completely mandatory. As in, they may as well have cast automatically because there were exactly 0% of cases where you wouldn't want to cast them.

 Not unrelated, wtf is a blood strike. Do...do enemies normally not bleed when I hit them with a giant sword? "A strike, but bloody," doesn't exactly cut it. The graphic is absurdly lame - it's a red swish. 

 Originally originally you could alter the ratio of runes and thus push the tension higher. WoW players were way too whiny and weak to handle that level of responsibility, though...  P.S. You get the audience you deserve. 

 

 The other major problem leads into the solution. Cooldown-based gameplay means you play by staring at the ability bar. Again: not gamelike, joblike. Much the same way quest markers make questing about staring at the map and not travelling through the game world. 

 I saw a thing about how vanilla cooldowns were often seriously long. This is lindy. If an ability needs a cooldown you'll see again in the same fight, it's too strong. "But I want mortal strike to hit real hard," yes, that seems good, but a cooldown makes you stare at the bar. No good.

 Games like WoW should instead play like fighting games. Instead of quarter-circle crouch light punch, it should be a sequence of abilities which perform your combo. Less twitch, since you don't have to physically perform a specific motion, more strategy. The game becomes about picking the right combo for your situation. (And less monotonic fights, e.g. using DQ-style randomness so the situation fluctuates.)  

 Secondly, if absolutely necessary, it should be normal for cooldowns to have at least two charges. This way you don't instantly lose DPS for failing to hit the CD the instant it refreshes. Instead it simply carries on cooling down. 

 You do have to do something: if you try to limit e.g. mortal strike with a proper rage cost, the warrior will run out of rage and have nothing to do. "Time to watch the game play itself."

 WoW's threat model is also bad, but if you insist on keeping it, threat should become stickier over time, meaning late in the boss the mages can nuke the hell out of the boss in a way they couldn't earlier. E.g. it's 20% over threat when the fight is fresh but the tank progressively debuffs the boss making it 22, 26, 32, 40...
 They would run out of mana if they go full burst, the way a warrior can run out of rage, but instead of sitting a mindlessly wanding, they have shit to do. They can spam cheap spells (combos). Maybe have a bit of tetris, where parts of the spell combos are getting generated randomly, and you have to match the ideal combo for maximum effect. Light puzzle element.
 Given no restrictions I would go full magicka. Mages have to cast spell components manually, and also they have to remember the spell combos. No "hit pyroblast" and then it just blasts pyrogenetically. 

 Speaking of death knights, imagine death knight + tetris. A rune refreshes every 3 seconds, as normal, but it's a random rune. The death knight has to figure out how to best use it in combination with whatever runes he has in stock.
 Runic power should have a cheap spender, for spamming while waiting for better combos, and an expensive spender which can be saved for critical moments. Make the big spender a combo too. Split it in two: a preparer which gives you a stacking buff, and a huge blast which can spend hundreds worth of runic power in buffs all at once. Ideally named 'death coil.' 

 Instead of having an 11-long list of opening abilities, spend that complexity on multiple options. For comparison, Dragonflight warrior play is comical. Insanely complicated, and yet also immensely rigid. Gotta play that one song.

 

 P.P.S. Runic power should regenerate to 100 out of combat, not decay to 0. Also, death and decay should be a) a lot stronger, b) cost runic power and c) cost 100 runic power. It's called death and decay, not disgruntle and dismay.
 WoW designers are so incompetent holy fuck. And apparently every other studio is even worse...

 P.P.P.S. I'd really like to practice running a wolf pack in WoW classic. Meet every Sunday after church to push five druids or whatever through the game. None in tanking spec, natch... MMORPGs are particularly useful for this sort of training.