I think it's less that, and more how they're trying to tell the story.
Old school WoW was kind of like a hunting safari, it dropped you in the middle of nowhere and said "The game is over that way."
Today WoW is more like a theme park. "Come along, heroes, follow me down this beautiful trail. Oh no, what's that on our left? Why it's the Iron Horde! Boy they sure don't look like someone
I'd want to mess with... wait, oh no, they're readying their siege engines! Watch out heroes, you'd better stop them before they power up!"
Now the problem with a theme park design is that you have to keep you arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. In the case of this game it means that Blizzard has to take a lot of choice away from the player, just out of necessity. They need to tell the player where to go, how to get there, and what to do once they arrive, and that requires simplicity and predictability on the part of the design team.
The upside to this is that they can tell incredible stories, build beautiful rides, and provide an amazing experience in that regard. This is often called a "walled garden," a managed ecosystem, and managed ecosystems need to be small. But let's give credit where credit is due, I don't think
anyone is bitching about how Battle for Azeroth, or Legion, or even WoD have been telling their stories. Confusing? Extremely. Entertaining? Even more so.
The downside is that by taking more control over our characters, giving us prescribed paths to get from A, to B, to C, is that leaves less control and choice for the players. People joke about "fun detected," but there is some modicum of truth in that: Blizzard often solves their problems with a machete when all they needed was a scalpel.
Think of how many specs were re-fantasized to fit the mould of Legion artifacts as an example.
These restrictions have left many specs feeling broken and generic. Doesn't it feel these days like your Prot Warrior is identical to every other Prot Warrior on the server? A Demo Lock is a Demo Lock is a Demo Lock? "Oh, you're a Fire Mage, yeah I know your rotation by heart!" How many classes have combo points now? "Build up five kanoodles then cash them all in on this big awesome spell!" Combo points.
It didn't always used to be this way.
For those who are out of the loop on classic talents, or may have forgotten why they went away, back in the WtoLK days talents reached peak absurdity "+5% to crit, Half of your spirit counts as intellect, 10% chance that your Lazur Blastar will proc Lazur Blastar Supreme!, increases the damage of Lazur Blastar by 5%." stuff like that, but
all in a single talent point. They were flippin' impossible to balance, they were confusing for some players, and the open nature of the trees meant that there were a lot of unpredictable hybrid specs that Blizz had to manage on the fly. It was a problem.
In Cataclysm they sorted
most of those problems out. They simplified talents (got rid of the extra, uninteresting garbage), reworked the trees so a player could only make a hybrid spec once they'd filled out their main tree, had a good mix of boring stats and interesting skills... By and large the player base actually seemed pretty okay with the changes. We'd lost a lot of our hybrid specs, but
core specs really shined.
TL;DR: Old talents were
not as confusing, complicated, or boring as you may have heard. They were predictable and dependable ways of
empowering our character how we saw fit. Want to do a min/maxed cookie cutter build? Hit up Icy Veins. Want to do a fun situational build that would make a theorycrafter throw up in his hat? Play around on the training dummies until you find something you like. (And no, not
everyone used cookie cutter builds. The person who
tells you that everyone used cookie cutter builds is probably one of the players who only used cookie cutter builds themselves.)
When MoP rolled around Blizzard decided to trash the updated classic talent trees in favor of something more streamlined and simple. Blizzard's explanation was that they didn't like players just simming the most powerful talent combinations and picking those, they made the cookie cutter argument. The player base, meanwhile, had been paying attention to Blizzard bitching about how difficult it was balancing talents trees for
years. It was my opinion, and the opinion of many others, that Blizz simplified their talent system for their own benefit, to make things easier on them. Now that would be fine
if the players didn't lose anything in the process, if the replacement system had been an improvement over the older one, something that I'm still not convinced is the case.
In WoD Blizz doubled down on the simplification scheme, culling spells from every class and spec in the game. This was again done in the name of streamlining and simplification, many specs were simplified to the point of not being recognizable. My primary experience is with the Mage, a class I had been playing since Vanilla, Fire Mages lost access to almost all the spells in the Frost and Arcane Trees.
"You've been using Frostbolt as part of your Fire rotation for the last ten years? But that's not part of your character fantasy class fantasy spec fantasy!"
I use this as an example not because what was taken from my spec was any better or worse than any other spec in the game, it's just the spec I know best, that's all.
Everybody lost something,
every class lost something. Don't believe me?
Here are the 6.0.2 patch notes, do a Ctrl+F and search for "removed" without the quotation marks, then scroll to your class. It'll be a fun trip down memory lane, I promise.
Then in Legion specs were further redefined, spells further culled, other spells redesigned, talents rearranged, and Artifacts introduced. Of course I don't need to tell you what happened to Artifacts when Legion ended, or where the player base is now.
It is my
opinion that Blizzard's continued attempts to replace what they've removed is where the game is starting to run into problems. The changes they're making to the game are at such a fundamental level that the repercussions can ripple out to even the newest content. Legion's Artifacts had to take the place of lost talents and missing spells, now Azerite has to take the place of lost talents and missing spells
and Artifacts. The next expansion pack will have to make something to take the place of lost talents, missing spells, Artifacts,
and Azerite. It's a treadmill within a treadmill, and Blizzard has no idea how to get off of it.
How many pieces can be replaced before it's not the same game anymore? Talents, spells, artifacts, azerite, glyphs, everything that we players see as a way of remaking our character in our own image, has been pried up and replaced, only to be pried up and replaced again. This cycle is unsustainable, no matter how hard they may try to sustain it.
