You don't need AoE abilities or cooldowns?

Being forced into that decision is incredibly poor design.

And therein lies the problem. You shouldn't need more than that.

The question is whether it's fun to have all those abilities even if you know what they do specifically, especially considering how little flavor most of them really have to distinguish them from each other. A lot of abilities have great animations to set them apart, but I'm too busy staring at my actionbar to notice.

This really doesn't have anything to do with the number of options or being on rails. THose are just totally different topics.

I already do that. My complaint isn't that I *can't* hit the buttons; it's that it isn't fun to keep track of this many abilities. In order to effectively use them all, I have to constantly stare at my bars due to the sheer number of cooldowns and procs.

I don't think that's a realistic solution. In reality, if I do that, I may be personally having more fun to a certain extent, but I will easily be outperformed in the extreme by someone tunnelvisioning this bars.

I think it's a balancing act. For example, I always played a Demo Lock, which is an extremely hotkey intensive class, and I loved it. However, this is just ridiculously over the top, because it isn't just a lot of situational abilities; it's a lot of core abilities that are clearly built to be part of your regular combat.

Trust me, I've looked really hard at the abilities I have to figure out if any can go, and while I could certainly remove a few, this problem is AFTER I did that.

Like many people, I was extremely bored with WoW and decided to come play this game instead. One of my chief problems was that WoW seemed to just make rotations more complex every expansion, as opposed to introducing interesting new mechanics. Many of the specs became an irritating logistical nightmare, and began to feel more like a flight simulator than a game. So, I came here hoping for something different... ...and it's worse. Every class I have played is insanely overburdened with a pile of abilities that are really purposeless except to introduce complexity for complexity's sake. For example, numerous classes have abilities that are just stronger versions of existing abilities except on a cooldown. That's not a fun or interesting mechanic. With the exception of the brilliant cover system, the majority of each class' core combat mechanics revolve around a series of flavor-less cooldowns and procs. I've seen some people suggest a Rift-like macro system to solve this problem, but that seems like a lazy solution. A system that allows you to effectively ignore many of your abilities is awkward when you can simply solve the problem by getting rid of the offending abilities. None of this is a complaint about difficulty. I don't think it's terribly difficult to keep track of all these cooldowns and procs... but that doesn't mean it's fun. Staring at my action bars isn't fun, but that's what I find myself doing the higher my level. I've got this beautiful game in front of me, and I'm staring at icons. Unfortunately, I don't know if I can justify continuing my subscription if this isn't fixed very soon, which is a shame, because I love everything else about this game.

Can anyone tell me if performance is any better than it was in the weekend betas?