Roguelike series will look at all tree classes -Hunters, DKs and Warriors- one at a time and try to explain what these classes should expect from the expansion pack.
The way DPS works in WoW, is that for physical classes, there's their auto-attacks, and special attacks. For spellcasters, there's only special attacks, unless you count wands, which no one does since Vanilla (And briefly in TBC). For all DPS classes, there's a cooldown model for special attacks. Notably:
- Energy - For Rogues, Druids & Deathknights: You have a predefined set amount of power you can use. Your special attacks have organic cooldowns, meaning, you have to wait for your power to fill up.
- Mana - For Spellcasters: You have a predefined set amount of mana you can use. However, since Blizzard thinks it's fun for DPS Spellcasters to go OOM, the only limiting factors are GCD for Instants and spellcast times for everything else.
- Mana - For Hunters & Enhancement Shamans: You have a predefined set amount of mana you can use. Again, it's completely irrelevant. Your limiting factors are cast timers (Steady Shot pre soft-haste cap), GCD (Soft-haste capped Steady Shot) and artificial cooldowns.
- Rage - For Warriors: The more autoattack damage you deal, the more rage you get.
You see a problem here? I certainly do.
There just has to be a way for people to not spam a certain ability every single GCD, to make them unique and interesting to use.
For Rogues & DKs, even though their most devastating abilities do not have cooldowns, they can't spam them at every single second. Rogues' Sinister Strike costs 40 Energy, and each second they gain 10 Energy so they can only use it every 4 seconds.
For spellcasters, GCD for instants and spellcast timers everything else works to that fashion. A Mage's Frost bolt spam might give him the most damage, but he can only cast it as every X seconds only.
Now for Hunters and Shamans, both Mana users acting like Rogues, they have instant attacks all around, but they also have mana. For them now to go OOM, their mana has to be large and keep refreshing. But what then they can just spam their abilities non-stop. What's the fix? Cooldown model, on spells like Arcane Blast, Storm Strike, etc.
For Warriors, it's even worse. Playing a DPS Warrior is a rollercoaster of an ordeal, dealing next to nothing at early levels of gear due how pathetic white damage is, and becoming the single best DPSer in ICC. Furthermore, to compensate it, their numbers are always crunched with introduction of new gear, to "normalize" their DPS with the rest of DPS classes.
Blizzard has finally, after five years of trying to make status quo work, giving up, and utilized the Rogue model for these classes.
Stick around to hear how these changes will effect your gameplay.
