Knifferoo

I don't know how much you know about racials in WoW, but you can find racials on both sides of the spectrum there. They've done a good job with some racials, and a shitty job with others.

Racials that contribute to player power are terrible in my opinion. I don't want to have to play as a troll because their racial makes my class more efficient in combat.

On the other hand, a Goblin gets to summon a personal banker for one minute on a thirty minute cooldown. That's not going to make me more effective in a raid, but the flavor is pretty good for the race in the game, and it's a nice feature to have. Doesn't make me want to roll exclusively Goblins, but if I'm playing a Goblin character it's nice to have access to.

With reservations for how it's going to play out in Dragonflight considering the increased focus on professions, the profession related racials are also pretty good imo. Makes sense for some races to be a bit more efficient with certain professions, like a dwarf being good at blacksmithing for example.

I will say that combat-related racials in WoW are pretty minor, and don't account for a lot of DPS, but them even being there is still a problem, to me. Kind of a shitty feeling to know that you lost 1% dps because you didn't want to play as an ugly ass orc, even though it's only 1%.

Racials that contribute to player power are terrible in my opinion. I don't want to have to play as a troll because their racial makes my class more efficient in combat.

Commenting as a WoW player here, I don't work on the MMO!!!

This is kind of the problem with racials right now. There are many powerful utility racials that become essential for pushing in high M+ specifically; some players will end up race swapping on specific weeks to accomplish (very) difficult PvE content that would otherwise be impossible due to things like Stoneform. This was especially true in S2 of Shadowlands to deal with all the bleeds and poisons from the seasonal affix and from high tyrannical Plaguefall.

The problem with entirely personal utility racials is that they can sometimes be difficult to make feel impactful enough to justify using a keybind to activate them - a good example are the racials from Zandalari Trolls, where they have a slow fall, but that slow fall can't be activated by the space bar while falling like Demon Hunters and Evokers can, so you end up needing a spare bind for it and that mostly means it just doesn't get bound at all.. and passive utility racials are kinda boring.

So I mostly agree with GC here - I think racials can screw up balance pretty easily and passive ones are hard to make feel useful, so best not to bother at all

LeOsQ

Shadowmeld for skipping packs that weren't intended to be skipped (at least not by regular pathing), Stoneform to cleanse bleeds and whatever when those were prevalent, Rocket Jump to not get yeeted off KJ's platform (as a Priest/DK) in Tomb of Sargeras, Every Man For Himself/Will To Survive to 'trinket' CC's in 3v3's, later replaced by Orcs just not being in CC for as long. Trolls having Berserking which made them easily the best raid race for most DPS, and let's not forget Arcane Torrent being giga-bonkers in Mythic + before it got reworked because you could AoE interrupt entire rooms of enemies when the M+ meta was to pull basically the whole dungeon at once. And then the reworked version (AoE dispel) was practically mandatory on Zul in Uldir at the start of BFA not too long after..

And let's not forget that even the fact Humans get more reputation is quite a big deal because it makes the rep grinds (mostly for old stuff) quite a bit shorter in many cases.

Racials sure are a headache. They really should just be practically entirely cosmetic with some flair to them. Otherwise you'll have people that pick what they like and then get bullied (or just feel like they're punished) because it's not the optimal choice. Or you'll have people that pick the 'optimal' choice but aren't happy because they now think their character looks dumb, or just that they would've wanted something else but min-maxing is a bitch.

Rocket Jump to not get yeeted off KJ's platform (as a Priest/DK) in Tomb of Sargeras,

[cries in restoration shaman or disc priest in Sanctum of Domination against Mythic Painsmith]

I'm short in real life!! don't make me reroll to goblin pls :(

GiganticMac

Idk about you but I have my Zandalari glider, and goblin gliders bound on every character, shits way too useful to never use

I simply don't have enough binds. I have 36 binds on my keyboard that are comfortable to use.

GiganticMac

Is that with ctrl and shift modifiers? I use 1-5, tab-t, a-h, and z and x, plus a 12 button mouse which is actually probably the game changer lol. Plus shift, ctrl, and shift+ctrl mods for every key so I just never run out of available binds. The two biggest things I did for making it comfortable to use more binds was rebinding one of the buttons on my mouse to ctrl and then swapping over from using wasd to qwer (a and f for strafe, then holding left and right click for moving) so my fingers rest on 4 main abilities instead of all on movement. I actually realized how much more optimal that was after I played league for the first time haha

Yes, that's with CTRL + Shift mods. I don't use a MMO mouse. I don't use shift+ctrl either - just shift or ctrl with wd for back/forth movement and qe for strafing (useful when healing in raids, since you need the mouse for targeting).

the following are all bound without mods, and with ctrl, and with shift:

asdfzxcvtg

I also have `, f1/f2/f3 bound without mods (they're awkward to use with ctrl/shift). so actually I have 34 binds, not 36.