"well, the class design is really easy to play. There are buttons that you press to do damage, you wait until cooldowns are up... rinse, repeat."

Neither one of you have ever played ANY other class in WoW besides your current one, have you.

Protip: NONE of the classes in WoW are difficult to play. The quote above describes how you can play ANY class in the game, and still be better than 70% of the game population.

This.

There's not a whole hell of a lot of skill involved with watching for procs either. Buff pops up, you hit the button.

Lock and Load? Hit Explosive shot.

Sudden Death? Hit execute.

Missile barrage? Hit arcane missiles.

None of this is exactly rocket science. Nowhere do you see a tooltip that says "Does increased damage if the target is facing away from you, has two separate bleed effects on them, is frozen or stunned but not snared, and you are not under any enrage effects."

"You hit the button and damage happens" describes every damage-dealing ability in the game. Skill comes in knowing what the OTHER person is about to do in pvP and how to counter it, and knowing what the mob is going to do in pvE, and how to counter that. That's why fights like Patchwerk are interesting benchmarks, but are referred to as "gear checks" and not "skill checks."

@Pope Jamal - I play an AffLock and did Top DPS in many fights pre 3.1. I know complexity. I also have an Elemental Shaman. So I know simplicity.

@ Pope and Heilig. Sorry, but this just isn't true. Some dps classes, such as afflic locks and feral druids in particular, have very complicated 'rotations'. For instance, in Heilig's post he says "sudden death is up, hit execute". This is actually wrong. An arms warrior doing that isn't going to ge the most out of his dps, as he's going to be losing mortal strikes if it's on cd while he's hitting execute. Chuck in overpower and TfB, bashes when nothing else is up, letting rend fall off but keeping close to 100% uptime and it all becomes a bit less of a faceroll. It seems more like you haven't played the other classes, or at least not to their full potential.

"@ Pope and Heilig. Sorry, but this just isn't true. "

Boy is that statement on the money. Ever try a feral Druid? Mangle feeds abilities like Rip and Shred... a glyphed Shred can extend Rip... the relatively new finishing move (forget the name) enhances them all... but you need to keep Rip (the other big finishing move) up as much as possible.

All of them have durations that need to link up for maximum effect.

Then you need to keep movement in mind. Shred requires being behind the target (which you should be anyway) but high movement fights add a special thrill to that.


Warlocks, Shaman, Warriors, and sometimes even Hunters go through very similar "if this-then that" rotations and talent selections. While Paladins are pretty much dictated by cooldowns only.

I will admit, several years ago Pallys were a bit more complex... which is partly why so few were any good back then. But they have been gloriously oversimplified.

Well, none of the cookie cutter build of any class can be very engaging to play. But having a short duration procs do make some classes more interesting, since you have to be more careful with using some cooldowns.
I guess in the realm of PvE, you can only have so much interactivity. But PvP should be a lot different. Most classes have to worry quite a bit about their cooldowns. However, with Ret Pally, it's all about running in (since they don't even have a distance closer like charge on cooldown) and spamming damage buttons. At least the Prot guys get get to play around with the idea of saving their teammates' butts. So yeah, I think Ret could use a bit of an overhaul.