On Complicated Priority Systems

This is a simplified dps priority system for feral druids in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

Feral Charge if you're not in melee range
Keep Tiger's Fury on cooldown (30 s)
Mangle if the 4T11 buff is about to run out (30 s)
Keep the Mangle debuff up on your target (60 s)
Ravage if Stampede is about to run out (10 s)
Keep 3xFaerie Fire up on your target (5 min)
Keep Berserk on cooldown (180 s)
Ferocious Bite to refresh Rip when the boss is below 25%
Keep a 5 combo point Rip up (22 s)
Keep Rake up (15 s)
Shred on Clearcasting
Keep Savage Roar up (duration depends on combo points used)
Ferocious Bite at 5 CP, if there's enough time left on Rip and SR
Ravage if Tiger's Fury is up
Shred to generate combo points and extend Rip by 3s (max 6s).

Is it fun?
Now, I play a feral druid, so I should be qualified to answer that question (and write down the system in the first place). My answer is: It's not too bad.

See, I have been thinking about this topic for a very long time. And the question of whether those systems are fun is a hard question. On the one hand side, I perfectly understand why Blizzard introduced the system. It is about "easy to learn, hard to master". Most ways that you can deviate from the system don't significantly lower your performance.

Generally, I agree with this design guideline. Games need to be accessible, but deep. Easy to learn, hard to master. They need to attract new players without overwhelming them, but must not be boring for the expert. It is the property of all great games. From Soccer to Chess. In some way Blizzard's priority system achieves that.

But at what price?
Back in Molten Core I played an Ice Mage. There was exactly one thing an ice mage did in classic WoW raids: Pushing the 'frostbolt' button. Was it fun? Yes.
That is a definite "Yes". Not a "It's not too bad". I know it was fun, because I did it for many, many months and at no point in time I considered raiding as a whole boring. How is that possible?

Well, the activity itself was boring. Of course. But the activity was embedded in a context. 39 other people did something, a giant enemy was fought. Things could go wrong at any time. Now, you could argue that the fact that I didn't consider raiding boring at that time, was because I had just started and in some way that is true. But on the other hand, I was a 24 years old physics student who had already raided like this for many months. If the activity as a whole was, indeed, that boring, wouldn't you assume that I had been bored by the 10th or 20th raid?

See, if a single player game would make me spam a frostbolt button for hours on end I'd call it trash. But firstly there is a middle ground and secondly, MMORPGs are different. The context is different. Doing something in an epic endavour is different from running alone through a Diablo dungeon spamming one button.

There was Teamspeak going on, whisper channels, healers would discuss whom to heal and if they could afford it, tanks would claim that more aggro is impossible. Someone would have to leave early and needed to be replaced. Someone needed to repair their equipment, some were talking about the numbers they produced on their screens.
There was no boredom.

Has there been complaining on the forums? Sure, some complaining is always going on. Some players certainly asserted that raiding was without challenge and the individual influence and responsibility was too small. But even heroic-difficulty complaining in the Cataclysm age is more dominant than any complaining that raiding was too 'easy' in classic.

After thinking about it for many weeks I tend to say that complicated rotations or priority systems are a mistake in a MMORPG. That is, because the advantage over more simple systems is questionable at best, and there are several disadvantages.

Firstly, these systems are much, much harder to balance. Don't try such a system without an entire group of game designers who do nothing else.

Secondly, players love to actually play their characters as good as they can and also like to see what is happening around them. You could argue that this ability is what makes elite players stand out in Cataclysm. But fact is that all players want to do that and to miss to use the interrupt, because you wanted to follow your complicated priority system isn't fun. Neither is it fun to deviate from your priority system to use an interrupt or move out of the fire. Before entering my latest WoW break, I was really wishing for a 'tank and spank' boss, because I just wanted to see how much dps my character is really capable of. This is also a mistake on the 'damage meter front', of course.

Thirdly, you feel constrained all the time. You would love to make your cat jump over there and wreak havoc, but you cannot. It will lower your dps. It is inefficient. The ghost of inefficiency is another evil that is molesting World of Warcraft, but point is that you feel as if in chains. Spontaneous decision making is disencouraged. Charging and stunning a mob that is attacking a healer? You're already busy with looking out for interrupts and your priority system! Moreover, absolutely nobody would exspect you to do that. There is so little emergent gameplay in Cataclysm raid encounters that the interesting decision whether to do something different never appears in all but world-first raids.

Fourthly, a good casual player knows what to do, he is just unable to do it, because he didn't spent enough time engraving the priority system into his muscle memory. This is not satisfying. This is not fun.

Lastly, in the case of a feral druid I am unable to achive a high performance in short fights or fights with fast changing targets. Most of my damage comes from bleed effects. And these take at least 30 seconds to build up and be useful. While this is a specific concern for feral druids in WoW:Cataclysm, it also shows the problems you can run into by using a complicated priority system. You could argue that the real problem here is the one-dimensional scale of performance measuring (dps) in this case. And I agree that it is a combination of both.

Concluding:
A lot of the fun in MMORPGs comes from the massive size, the social activities and the simulation aspect of the game. Improving gameplay in itself is always good, but if it comes at the cost of the other factors it needs to be reconsidered twice.

To treat the combat system as an isolated activity and try to maximize it's fun is not enough. Maybe it is no coincidence that a big company, that can sustain individual groups of 'balance designers', ran into this trap.
Fun is not an inherent property of an isolated activity. After analysing your MMORPG you must not fail to synthesize it again.

In closing I want to say that I understand that Blizzard innovated (drastically) when they started to implement these systems. And I congratulate them for their courage. In my opinion it didn't turn out the way you could have hoped it would. That's ok. We are still learning how to make great MMORPGs.