How Many Abilities Should We Be Using?

World of Warcraft is coming up on its tenth anniversary. Every two years, the game has had an expansion. While some expansions have brought new classes, the existing ones have also gone through many big changes. Hunters use an entirely different resource system than they originally did. Paladins have a secondary resource that is absolutely key to their gameplay that wasn't there originally. Warlocks now have three unique secondary resources, one for each spec.

While not all classes have gotten this kind of revamp or redesign, one of the exciting prospects of each expansion is the addition of new abilities - through talents to baseline. Iconic abilities like Bladestorm, or Feral Spirit, or Mind Sear, were all later additions to the game.

It's always exciting to get new toys. The problem is that after five of these two-year game cycles, our spell books are crowded. Sometimes, Blizzard has been forced to give us weird, niche abilities, like Dark Simulacrum, or they've had to throw us another cool down to stack up, like Shadow Blades.

And for anyone who has played a Hunter during Mists, it's pretty clear that we have a bit of a button bloat issue. No, it's not only Hunter, but I think of theirs being the most extreme case.

The thing is: how many abilities should we be using?

In the default Blizzard UI, you can create several action bars. Your default bar has space for twelve abilities, and you can put an equally large bar above that, along with another twelve spaces to its right, and then two long columns on the right side of your screen. Because I'm very fussy, but hate having to program add ons (with the exception of Power Auras/Weak Auras, because they are so damn useful,) I go with the default UI. It's relatively easy to key bind these various bars. I have my main bar simply use the numbers as well as "-" and "=," which is the default, and then the spaces above it are simply the same numbers, but modified by Shift.

Twenty four buttons is a pretty decent array of abilities, I think, and for the most part that covers the key binds that I need to play a class reasonably well.

Now, it's certainly a matter of opinion, and this isn't a "right" answer, but I think 24 is a pretty good cap on what people should be expected to keep hot keyed. If you are using more than that in typical situations, there's probably a bloat problem.

Right now, we're witnessing a big ability pruning going on in the Warlords of Draenor Alpha. For the most part, I'm happy with the choices they've been making, but at the same time, I wonder if they're going a bit overboard.

For example: Blood Death Knights. First off, for all DKs, Blood Boil and Pestilence are being merged into one ability. That's fine, actually, given that Roiling Blood is such an attractive Talent (though not for Frost.) Rune Strike is going away, with Blood just using Death Coil like the old Blood DPS used to. Given that we don't get Expertise or Hit and a tank spec is going to effectively be able to hit anything all the time, the major appeal of Rune Strike is largely gone, so really this is a buff. But then Heart Strike is going away.

Now admittedly, Heart Strike is hardly the most cherished Blood DK ability. It's pretty much a relic from the days of Blood DPS, when we would use Death Strike or Obliterate (which used to consume diseases if you didn't pick up a talent... it was complicated) to generate Death Runes and then spend those on lots and lots of Heart Strikes (Blood DPS played a bit like Unholy does now - of course, back then, Scourge Strike was a two-rune attack, so Unholy used to play more like 2H Frost.) Heart Strike has a bit of a cleave effect, but given that Blood Boil refreshes diseases and does pretty good damage (and it's Shadow, so it bypasses armor,) in a lot of cases Heart Strike would just be passed by in favor of guaranteed full AoE and disease-proliferation.

But it does raise an interesting question: with this change, Blood will essentially have the same rotation for AoE as it does for single targets. This was the case with Retribution and Protection Paladins during Wrath, and Blizzard came down pretty hard on that. Admittedly, it's less of an issue for a tank, because tanks need to generate AoE threat in pretty much every scenario except when there's literally a single enemy.

Beyond that, however, I think the big cause for uproar is the removal of Weapon Imbues for Shaman. One of the iconic things about a Shaman is that they have swirly things on their weapons even when they're low level and wouldn't bother getting true weapon enchantments. Now, Enhancement will retain the Imbues' effects, but one wonders if they'll keep the weapon swirl. Meanwhile, Elemental and Restoration are just getting the bonuses for those buffs rolled in to their abilities. But Shamans have swirly weapon things! My hope is that there will at least be a minor glyph that allows you to keep those effects. Likewise, while Elemental and Enhancement keep their Lightning Shields (for now,) Resto is losing Water Shield. Again, I hope there's some glyph or something that retains this visual. It's bad enough that we don't get our little forest of totems anymore (yes, I know there's a glyph for that,) but this seems unduly harsh.

The other reason why I cry foul on these changes (even if I do kind of hate having to remind myself to imbue my weapons on my Shaman, and make sure the right one is on the right weapon) is that the point of the ability pruning is to take abilities off the action bars. I'm all for getting rid of annoying and superfluous abilities that clog up that 24-button space, but some of the things they are getting rid of are on the other, unbound bars, or just left in the spell book. These are the kind of abilities I'm fine having tons of. Indeed, I think it can add a lot of flavor to the class when you get these abilities that don't do much in combat, but reinforce that you have certain powers. Yes, Sentry Totem was pretty silly, and almost redundant with Far Sight, but if we're not going to key-bind it, why worry about throwing it in the spell book?

Likewise, I'm noticing that a lot of passive abilities are getting merged into the spells they affect. For example, the Art of War causes a Ret Paladin's melee swings to sometimes reset the cool down on Exorcism. Yet they're getting rid of that and just merging it into the spell. I actually think this is harmful, as it's far easier for me to look at a spec that I don't know and look through the passives to figure out key mechanical things like procs. I might have a hard time figuring out when exactly I should use Soul Fire as a Demo Lock unless I could see Molten Core.

Just shortening the spell book for the sake of shortening it is not something that I would advocate. The key here is core rotational abilities. I'd love for them to, say, get rid of the Glaive Toss tier for Hunters (does anyone take the other abilities?) so that I can focus on my core abilities. But I don't think you needed to get rid of Eyes of the Beast (can't remember when that happened,) since, worst case scenario, that ability is just going to sit in my spell book until I remember that I can play around with it.