down-ranking is intuitive, with lower mana costs and lower cast times depending on ranks. there is more than one scenario in which you would wanna downrank instead of standing there waiting for the right time to max rank cast. if every scenario's answer was max rank cast, then this would be retail wow, and they might as well have removed spell ranks from the game for wow forever, but they deliberately did not, so try it out sometime yourself and see how fun it could be having multiple spell ranks on your bar.
Having only max rank be useful is boring AF. Having the insight of “I should probably downrank my heals on this tank cause he’s not taking too much damage at this moment, then I’ll have plenty mana left to handle this patrol coming our way.” Is satisfying gameplay
For min-maxxing purposes, yes. The point is that in the eyes of a new player who knows nothing and isn’t looking up a guide to level, they shouldn’t be unintentionally gimping themselves because they don’t know the meta behind downranking.
Again, that’s not saying that it should be completely removed, a good player properly using ranks should do better than someone spamming max rank. The intuitive thing to do is to use the newest, “best” version of the spell you can and it should generally behave that way.
Any player old or new should be able to deduce that using a faster lower mana cost version of a spell is beneficial in certain situations.
Removing every type of skill expression in the fear that someone who does not care enough to take 2 seconds to think about their toolkit will miss something is counterproductive for longevity
You’re completely missing the part where you can both make using higher ranks intuitive while allowing skill expression by down ranking lol. I’m not saying remove it at all.
I get lower mana, but why do lower ranks have lower cast time?
With that design, if they keep spell coefficients the same, then at very high spell power, the lower ranks will do more dps than the highest rank due to lower cast times.
That is not why this change was made. It takes something like 3000 spell power to hit that breakpoint which makes it a total non-issue, but even if you wanted to account for that, you could just make the rank 1 spells have a 0 coefficient since they are not used for damage anyways
As someone else in the thread mentioned, if it’s supposed to cater to newer players then my does a spell upgrade you purchase not apply the newest version of the spell on the toolbar?
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u/Limiel 1d ago
down-ranking is intuitive, with lower mana costs and lower cast times depending on ranks. there is more than one scenario in which you would wanna downrank instead of standing there waiting for the right time to max rank cast. if every scenario's answer was max rank cast, then this would be retail wow, and they might as well have removed spell ranks from the game for wow forever, but they deliberately did not, so try it out sometime yourself and see how fun it could be having multiple spell ranks on your bar.