Passives and the Spellbook

The ability squish that came with 6.0 was pretty wide-sweeping. Some specs lost a very large number of abilities, while some managed to retain most of what they had. The goal of the squish was to cut down on rotational abilities - or to be more accurate, abilities that you would have to save a place for on your hot bars. Getting rid of things like Dark Simulacrum, for example, would not really accomplish their stated goal, because chances are you don't have that hot keyed anyway.

So this is why I'm a little baffled at the way that they have cut down on passive abilities. Previously, most passive abilities, particularly procs, would have their own entry in the spell book. Frost Death Knights had Rime, for example, which is how they would get their free Howling Blasts after an Obliterate (admittedly, it was a little confusing that the buff given by the proc was called "Freezing Fog," even if that does describe roughly what Rime is.) Retribution Paladins had Art of War, which is what caused certain attacks to reset the cool down on Exorcism.

Now, these procs are typically baked into the abilities themselves. Granted, there is some benefit to this - a player can mouse over an ability and get an idea what additional effects could result from its use - but personally, I think it makes figuring out a spec far harder to do. Having the abilities listed, and then the way those abilities interact once you've looked them over, makes a lot more sense to me. When you see those passives, you can immediately take inventory of how many effects you'll have to keep track of.

The other issue is that it makes it harder to notice when an ability changes while leveling up.

I recently started another Monk character (partially just to check out another character model, but also to play through the revamped BFD, RFK and RFD dungeons at the right level) and I have absolutely no idea when I'm going to get the Shuffle passive from Blackout Kick. Previously, at level 40 or something, Brewmaster Monks would get "Brewmaster training," which would have a number of effects, like making Tiger Claw free and Blackout Kick increase your parry and stagger amounts for a few seconds through the buff Shuffle. I know that these effects are still in place, as I've tanked the Headless Horseman on my old Monk, Gaotso. Yet I have no idea how much I will have to level up Icatia before her Kicks start making her tougher to kill.

It would be a relatively minor fix to revert all of this, but I think this is a case of Blizzard just going overboard. Passive effects were far from cluttering action bars. They weren't taking up any space in action bars. And while having a smaller spell book might seem like it would make a class simpler to understand, I think that in this case it's more akin to removing all punctuation and spaces between words.