>>314842124>>314838920Class design is also an issue. Consider an encounter like Felmyst: Like
>>314839910 mentioned, players have already seen and mastered Onyxia/Felmyst/Thorim Gauntlet/Skadi/whatever and dealing with such a mechanic is already in their muscle memory so to speak and won't need any further training. But think about the skeletons that spawn from beams at the beginning of air phase: in TBC only paladins could realistically hold the AoE threat on them all to begin with (in addition to having by far the highest damage reduction in such a scenario) but they lacked catch like the rest of the tank classes. In neo-WoW all tanks can just walk next to the mob, press their AoE threat ability and have mobs glued to them forever, but when Felmyst was relevant, you could imagine it as a bit of a group effort similar to Anub'Arak burrow phase with healers having aggro on skeletons having to run over consecration and that sort of thing.
Felmyst isn't special (just the first encounter that came to my mind), but this kind of mechanic was involved while post-WotLK tank mechanics would render it trivial. Same with all the personal cooldown skills, mobility skills and such like: In order to push the players to the point where skills like minimizing movement (which, I'd argue, account for far greater differences in player performance than mere rotation), you have to have bosses spamming abilities like crazy. Consider an ability like Blistering Cold on Sindragosa. DKs had 5 seconds of time to react and press Antimagic shell, which is trivial (while, if we supposed it took 4 seconds to run out of range, you have to have 1s reactions). Having AMS made P1 phase tank and spank, pretty much. This kind of arms race has affected retail for all classes. I suppose a really tightly tuned encounter that DEMANDS perfect usage of these abilities would increase skill requirements, but generally speaking a lot of mechanics are there just to compensate for more powerful classes.