Warcraft 4.0 Holy Priest chakras: blessed complexity?

I'm not playing Warcraft right now. But I had dim sum with a friend who is and he was telling me very excitedly about Chakras in Warcraft 4.0, how they made his Holy Priest really fun to play. I haven't tried it myself, but from what I understand every 30 seconds the Priest can choose a new temporary specialization. You cast Chakra (30 second cooldown), then cast one of four primary Priest spells: Heal, Renew, Prayer of Healing, or Smite. Whichever you cast puts you in a special Chakra state that favours that style of spell. Go into Heal state and the next 30 seconds your heals crit 10% more and you get a new big instant heal spell you can use to be a great tank healer. Renew state? Better HoTs. PoH state? Better group heals.

What he liked about it is it made being a Holy Priest more complicated. Juggling Chakra cooldowns, making sure he chose the right state for the situation. I imagine it makes raid healing more fun, too, since each Holy Priest can switch roles on the fly. Sounds great.

So here's my question: did 4.0 overhaul class mechanics like this for other classes and roles? Has Blizzard moved to more complex abilities for people? One of the best blog posts I ever wrote here was Kitty: the most complicated DPS rotation in the game, it did a good job of characterizing why I really liked the complexity of feral druid DPS at the time. I love the idea that other classes might have gotten similar challenges in the new Warcraft patch.

Comments

[Rafe]

Yes, in fact all classes are moving to a kitty-type approach that is more priority-based than it is rotation-based. It's up to you to keep track of what the most effective use of your resources is for any given situation and use the ability to expend those resources. So it's less about a fixed rotation and more about reacting to the current situation. I think it's a pretty big improvement across the board for DPS. Tanking has undergone similar changes.

Healing has changed a lot, too, mainly to prevent each class from having one spell that they repeatedly spam (which was especially common in 25 man raids). So Druids are no longer Rejuv bots, Shamen Chain Heal bots, etc.

[Bolie Williams IV]

Sheesh... I thought it was complicated enough as it was. I'll just have to get the best gear I can and spam whatever is off cooldown and hope that I can at least do okay. My flirtation with WoW may be short if they make it much more complicated. Is there a simple class for people who enjoy the world and the social aspects but don't want to have to expend a lot of mental energy learning the optimum spell combination for each situation?

[Nelson]

Yeah, you don't want it to be too complicated. For cat DPS if you were just mindlessly spamming stuff you did about 80% DPS, so you could get about a 25% improvement if you played really well. That seems about right to me.

[Chris Hollander]

they've simplified some things (spec design, stats, gear selection etc), which has allowed them to add more actual in-combat complexity, for most classes. the core resource-systems for every class have pretty much been overhauled, with most classes moving to a dual resource system (combopoints+energy, runes+runic power, holy power for paladins, overhauled soul shards for warlocks, eclipse for boomkins, etc.).

[Vakfaroosh]

Flyv as someone who still raids very high end I can tell you this.

It depends on class, gear, and spec now.

As an arcane mage in WoL I ranked in the top 20 damage ever on some fights in ICC. I spam 1 button and manage my mana through cooldowns.

As fire, I am also ranked, but there is rotation, prioritizing spells with cooldowns, waitng on procs.

Fire is fun to play, but Arcane just destroys everything.

Tanking is fun now, rotations, cooldowns. No longer spamming maul and HS every 1.5 seconds with all the other abilities.