So most of you know that SL releases on 27 October.
My two biggest fears are :
- fixing the base of the classes
- the covenant abilities
I hope they can fix this until release, or we get another xpac with a lot of dead speccs…
You know that they won’t fix it, as it’s unfixable with this amount of external systems tucked onto base classes. They make their job much harder for themselves by designing this stuff the way it is.
You have 36 specs in the game, but now you need to multiply this by 4, as there are 4 covenants. Great, now you have 144. And on top of this you have a whole damn talent tree associated with the covenant system, giving further abilies and increasing the number of iterations to absurdly high numbers.
Even Legion was easier to balance, as each spec had their own artifact power traits (designing them with eventually having EVERYTHING unlocked in mind!), and also legendaries - there were lots of them, but each spec had a few to choose from and they worked like glorified tier sets.
Now every spec can be every covenant which in for itself is stupid as hell. I mean, holy priest with Necrolord? Demo warlock with night bae? What the heck, it doesn’t make any sense.
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Don’t judge, warlocks need love too.
Otherwise, some people seem happy with the specs as they play on the ptr.
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Shadowlands is going to be a disaster. It’s beyond fixable at this point and I doubt they even care.
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I wouldn’t call it a disaster, but the 2 concerns that I have are pretty big, because if your characters you like, are not fun to play and not viable, then it’s gonna be fast over for some players.
Your concerns seem a little vague if I’m honest. Got any specifics?
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I see a lot of speccs worrying about their baseline kit / abilities not being fun to play.
I can mostly speak for ret, arms and dps dk a bit.
For example Ret conduits / cov abilities are a mess. And you still can’t change your covenant abilities, which is aweful.
Let’s say they patch / fix one ability for a class that will now be good for you, you have to swap covenants.
Next tier, some other ability gets tuned / sims better etc etc, then you again have to swap 
I know they are working on it, but the pre patch will most likely hit live servers in 4-5 weeks.
I do think the weakest specs right now will catch up abit with upcoming changes however in the pov of a wf gamer or top ranked PvP player there will always be specs that is considered dead however every spec will be totally viable even if there are stronger options.
Covenants abilities just isnt impactful enough to cause balance problems with the specs.
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I dunno how they will do it.
They are introducing so much more to balance now than before, and we can kinda see what happened with the Corruption system, they didn’t manage to keep the balance in check there.
They already gave up on it a while ago, there was an interview on Wowhead with Ion Hazzikostas (which I cannot find now) where he said that the game is in a broken state or something like that. This was 1 or 2 months ago. And they wouldn’t do anything with it until the pre-patch releases.
That had me worried, and then later we saw all the broken stuff about PvP scaling, and the corruption system.
I just feel worried, because I honestly can’t have faith in them managing to balance all this new stuff in Shadowlands.
And I am also worried that it will be too much to manage for the players.
Different covenants with different abilites, different covenant talents, class spec and talents, min maxing gear combined with these things. Some of these things aren’t new, but I am talking about the combination. I just feel it’s too much.
Putting deadline before sorting everything out is an awful decision.
For specifics i’m aware of: Survival hunter talent tree and AoE rotation are still a mess (or rather nonexistant).
Rogues don’t get back Gouge, Deadly Throw and Garrote (abilities that actually allows to make plays and feel good about it) but got Slice and Dice which: Slows our rotation, Puts more Power Budget in auto autoattacks, not fun to maintain (especially with assa multiple dots on top of it) since it takes at least 2 GCDs to start it rolling and it gives 0 choice since in every fight longer then 10 sec it has to be maintained.
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Exactly stuff like this I’m worried about!
Whats there to fix? So far classes work juat fine so wtf?
It isnt you just expect wow to be compettive balanced game instead of rpg.
144 variations, but these are not all independant. So in reality there is much less than 144 full fledged classes.
The issue is more about the accumulation of system rather than covenants abilities…
Check my previous post about clunky classes atm.
Also add WW monk to the list - they scaling problems a still there as well as AI buging damage CDs which now even worse since now we have Xien baseline on top of Storm Earth and Fire. Lots of monks would prefer to not have any summons at all, because each time one of you images facing wrong way during FoF you lose 33% of you damage just because of stupid AI.
Also half of they’r talent tree is just mandatory like Whirling Dragon Punch, Tiger’s Lust and Hit Combo (which should’v be part of their mastery form the very beginning).
You first fix all of the problems than announce the release date else someone for sure will be left behind for 2 more years.
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Viable? Ye sure, somewhere. Its still understandable if a raid doesnt want to carry a sub rogue for instance because thats basically running half a dps less.
Sometimes they don’t fine tune classes until they get a lot of data from when the game has gone live. I’m not saying this will be the case for SL but they have the remaining beta, pre patch and launch until raids to tune things.
The problem is - they do not do any big changes to Specs after expansion started on principal. And right now there is more then one spec that have core design issues. It’s not question of fine tuning its question of specs being playeble and enjoyable to play for the next 2 years.
Numbers are irrelevant and can be tuned - gameplay is not.
That is exactly my concern, thank you for pointing it out like this!