As much fun as Patch 9.0 in WoW is, there is one thing that bothers me. Some abilities hit too few targets and that is annoying.
It has been just under a week since Patch 9.0 of World of Warcraft went live. This is the pre-patch for the upcoming expansion Shadowlands, which primarily brought new character customizations, the level squish, and the improved leveling phase. Along with this, there were also major revisions of almost all classes that feel well-rounded.
What many players find really annoying is the new limitation of some abilities that can now only hit a limited number of targets.
What has changed? Some abilities that previously hit all targets in the vicinity can now only hit a limited number of enemies. Many abilities are now restricted to 5 or 8 targets, such as Whirlwind or the Paladin’s Divine Storm. Other abilities simply deal less damage when hitting more targets – this is especially the case for tanks.
This change bothers many. There was strong criticism of this months ago.
This is what players say: The topic is being discussed wildly in the community. Almost every day there are several posts in the WoW subreddit or the official forums criticizing this change. For example, LsmLsmLsm writes in a post with over 3,000 upvotes:
I wanted to try my Paladin, do a few “Mythic+” dungeons, jump into a group, and go the usual way. But what happens when I use Divine Storm? Half of the enemies are completely immune to my spell, even though they are right in the animation.
I wanted to do some low-level raids with my Warrior. So I run through, 20 mobs are chasing me. I use Whirlwind, the animation hits everyone, but how many die? Damn 5.
Why? The game just feels slower because of that.
The user mackpack even compares this to the controversial changes to the global cooldown from Patch 8.0, which caused a lot of trouble back then.
This is the same as the GCD changes in 8.0.
Instead of designing the cooldowns so that it’s not optimal to use them all at the same time, Blizzard introduced the global cooldown, making it still optimal to use them all at once, but it just feels worse.
Instead of designing the dungeons so that Giga-Pulls are not optimal, they placed a cap on AoE abilities, making Giga-Pulls just feel worse. (…)
And the worst thing is: Neither Giga-Pulls nor the stacking of powerful cooldowns were the real problems.
What do you think? Do you think the cap on some abilities is good? Or should everything be hit and deal less damage instead?
