What choice is there if one option is clearly better than others? Same as if
i.e. NONE. So why does it exist again? To create illusion of choice? To lull gullible lemmings into belief that they are offered something, while that something does not really exist? This is an insult to me and my elitist ego! 
And don’t these guys have something better to do, like balancing base classes/specs?
‘my case’?
What would that be? 
There’s no case. 
I’m just being friendly, is all. 
I’m not taunting. YOU addressed ME.
Remember?
YOU seem to know soooo much about ME.
Remember?
Oh that’s where you’re dead wrong.
I am very open to discussion. With people who react in a normal way.
But not with people who call me autist, or mentally challenged, or a troll or whatever else horrible garbage has been slung my way in this very thread.
Can’t. It’s mine.
Here’s a guide:
Heh I’ve seen some guides but can’t afford it…well I could but I’m saving up irl gold.
Easier to steal it from humans.
Hand over the goods or I’ll send you to Goldshire’s basement !
/sends in pet
/watches with a grin
Dear God you’re not even using the cowboy hat !! Blasphemy !
Doesn’t fit her; it clips away her hair.
If I was playing a male character, I’d probably wear it.
So it gives up or it does get the hose after all! 
Neh. No basements for Tahra.
My pet took care of it.
/wipes the blood from Dodger’s snout.
I think you forgot the part where I’m protected by Murkidan, enhanced with pet biscuit, and DH pepe dropping fel poop on your unprotected head.
That’s why the cowboy hat is handy.
No match for my 2 pets, my mechanical parrot AND my monkey with safari hat (not to mention proccing extra pets).
I LOVE BEING A BEASTMASTER! MUHAHAHAHHAHAHA
/raises hands to the sky
/eyes the demonhunter
… Don’t make me use the squirrel bag.
No joke I tried getting into the hunter class but the Tmog options are so bad it made me sad and I went for another class.
Also I’m in Argent Dawn, I can invite you for a scary show in Goldshire (outside of the inn it’s rather safe). I always go there for laughs before logging out.
Can’t promise you won’t end up in the basement without your explorer outfit though…
I acknowledge this, with pain in my heart.
Hunters should have had leather armor. 
It’s one of the reasons I went for this set; finally something that doesn’t look ‘weird’ for a HUNTER.
Errr, I mean… ‘No thank you’.
I think I already did a bit higher up in the thread but it boils down to blizz is trying very hard to mix its player pools and because everyone is showered with loot without much effort they feel entitled. Then they get declined for not having curve/keystone master/something else relevant and they come cry on the forums.
The ones calling min-maxers evil just have no idea what proper dungeon/raid/arena preparation is OR how much weight it carries both before and during the fight. They can’t comprehend that the +60 secondary stat on your rings shows that even though your gear is on the entry level for the content you’re signing up for, you’re actually trying to not be as useful as a sack of potatoes.
Better in what situation ? The best soulbind configuration for one scenario is not the same for other scenarios. It also depends on your gameplay and your skill relative to that gameplay.
If you inspect the best players in their respective disciplines (you could do that during the awc every game for example), you see that there is variance between two players of the same class (you find differences in their choice of azerite traits, trinkets, essences, talents, corruptions, etc). So the “best option” is not always set in stone and depends on many parameters.
Because the more complex the scenario is, the less clear your best load-out configuration is. Some of it is personal preference, even at the highest ends. When you watch the best pvpers, sometimes their choice is not the same even when playing the same comp and facing the same comp, because they’re not sure what actually is the best option since it is so complex, when you have to account for your opponents behaviour, etc.
Load-out options are not meant to be a meaningful identity choice (you are not defined by what you do in the moment). The gameplay element here is making the right decision relative to the encounter you’re about to partake in.
Sometimes the choice is clear cut because the scenario is simple enough. In that case there is just a “decision matrix” to apply and you don’t have a choice, which is not good gameplay and is the reason why developers did not want to merely expand that decision matrix.
Glad we agree that for the most part load-out options are not meaningful, lock you down by giving you the illusion of choice, homogenize your playstyle and are not a good gameplay element. And yet ripcord players want exactly that for the covenants. 
The way you improve load-out options is by adding more complexity to the load-out configuration, more complexity to the scenarios and more flavor to the abilities/perks (so your choice has more to do with your playstyle/personal preference).
Part of the fun is figuring out for yourself what the best option is, given your personal constraints. It probably is the thing I enjoy the most in the game. Experimenting with the alternatives before making your mind, being sub-optimal until you are not, is a great path of progression and is good gameplay.
It is part of the gameplay to let players make the wrong choice. Not everybody reads a guide before playing their character. This would also make it difficult to differentiate between novice and experienced players. Would you feel good if you had the same build as a noob ?
I would also argue you should not be a meta-slave even if you are performance minded. First, some guides are of poor quality, they don’t even get the stats priority right sometimes. They don’t nuance their pick so you might think an option is good in every situation when it is not. You have to consider your skill and your own playstyle. It’s no use to follow an advice you can’t pull off or just doesn’t match how you play.
The person writing the guide is not as much of an authority as you would think in that sense. Some people figure things out at the end of an expansion just because there were no top-end players that pushed the boundries of that specific class, so the notion that there is no room for a better option is false.
Secondly, you could do your own theory crafting and figure out things that are not referenced in guides. Especially if you go off-meta, you may get away with things nobody cared to discover. Have the audacity to set the trend for yourself. Even if you naturally converge to a more conventional build, figuring it out by yourself is a great experience. You should 'live off the grid", meta-slaves are missing out on a lot of fun.
I’ve addressed this in my first post, “balance” or “equality” is not the unequivocal good you think it is.
You do make some fair points. I’d definitely back you up on
Corruptions were a great example of this - not everyone was performing better with 12% more stat because they were wasting time running from/dying to a thing from beyond. Performance is based on decision making both before and during an encounter. Being locked into what is essentially your loadout for a week in terms of conduits and 2 weeks in terms of covenants doesn’t really allow for that experimentation though… And some of us want performance AND cosmetics. For me personally being a fairy DK in the middle of a bunch of furries, makes me disassociate rather than identify with my character.
However as far as balance and equality go - balance is great, equality isn’t. Balance done properly still allows you to have moments to shine whereas equality the way I interpret it at least means everyone does more or less the exact same thing, they have more or less the same DRs, movement abilities, heals and so on. In this situation balance would mean that while you still have shortcomings in some areas, you make up for them in others. Bad in AoE? - Beast in ST, low mobility? - shorter casts/more instant casts, best possible throughput? - highest skill requirement. Tying the tuning knobs to borrowed power gains that affect everyone means that if there is a core issue with the class/spec it won’t be addressed because it works fine with X covenant, soulbind and conduits and it was low key tuned around people going there or that someone will suffer because someone else, who wasn’t even their class was dealing too much damage.
A large part of the reason people are complaining about things like current fire mage and DH, is that the skill requirement doesn’t match the throughput. Part of the root cause is fundamental design issues, part of it is corruption and things like the Mechagon bracers and I dare say a decent part is people not having been in a group with equally skilled and geared players of different classes and last but not least a definite part of it is the content - if the content is mostly ST, the AoE/cleave specs will underperform. On that front its Blizz’s job to make sure the discrepancies aren’t enormous be it through class tuning/design or encounter tuning/design.
I believe both conduits and covenants are based on reset, meaning you can have covenant A for part 1 of week 1, covenant B for part 2 of week 1 and part 1 of week 2, and covenant A for part 2 of week 2, the parts being divided by the moment you change the covenant/conduit (so you could do it right before a progress boss for example…).
Loadout is the term used by Ion in reference to what you can change at any moment before an encounter. So conduits and covenants are not part of it, however we’re not set on conduits. Covenants were supposed to be closer to a class/race choice in terms of persistance/character defining feature.
I agree with that kind of “balance”. However when people mention balance, they usually mean comparing two covenants in the same situation. In Preach’s video he even compares three soulbinds of the same covenant hitting a target dummy, which makes no sense to me since it is a loadout option, therefore not part of the persistent choice discussion.
If covenants have a distinct power profile (their rating in single target, aoe, burst, sustainability, utility), for example one being marginally better than others in a specific situation, I will be happy with that.
Covenants and conduits are where a lot of the difference comes from. The soulbinds are a mess in and of themselves. The first problem is that their respective levels unlock on different weeks so you’re basically guaranteed to just go for the one that has the most unlocks on the raid release when you’re pushing. Then you come to “well my soulbind isn’t particularly useful but I need to get this mediocre or completely useless trait so that I can go on my 3x offensive conduit path because my utility and defensive conduits aren’t that needed/useful”, whereas multiple other classes/specs don’t need to make that sacrifice and reap additional benefits.
Preach did admit that the methodology is flawed and anyone with common sense can see that it is. However, it shows that the gap between the wrong and the right borrowed power grows from 5% to 15-20% from start of expansion to before the first raid tier gear. Within those % is also the difference between right Venthyr, right Night Fae, right Necrolord and right Kyrian and I’d argue that this difference will only grow once it hits the raid since you’ll add consumables, bloodlust and things like a DH for casters or a Monk for melee that also scale with %. Then you come to the fact that your covenant of choice may be good for the raid but your covenant causes a significant decrease in your throughput when brought into m+. The content can’t be tuned around not having made the correct choices because if that is the case then people will smash through it at about the same rate a normal or heroic raid group will smash through LFR. They can’t tune it toward having made the correct choices either since they don’t want to exclude people from participating due to an aesthetics choice they’ve made. And finally they can’t only tune mythic towards having only made the correct choices because the gap between HC and mythic will be enormous.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying that if you build your character poorly you should still have decent performance - I’m just saying it should stop at talents + gear + skill. The rest just sets up for a complete mess and balance nightmare where some people get nerfs/buffs they don’t need or can’t afford to have if their class/spec is already either excelling or bottom of the barrel for the majority of the content.
I’m perfectly fine with character defining features as long as they actually stick. Covenants won’t and if the past has shown us anything, the restriction won’t stick either. So far its just an inconvenience that will go away in 9.1/2/3 and players will just ask “why did we have to deal with this again?”. I agree with having “permanent choices” but if you want to start having those, start by removing things like faction change, race change, character transfer and so on or only make them available and free only after realm merges. The game has gone of for so long that the only permanence in your choice is your class. Remove the sharding and make your choice have an impact on the world around you by having an impact on the people around you - one of the few things that mostly sticks after an expansion.
Said the PvP Rogue for whom Necrolords cov i.e. Bone Spike is the all-solving hammer for every occassion. For some reason I’m not surprised.
It’s actually that they are VERY sure their setup is the best possible one for a given situation, or at least one that gives them decent chance of victory, otherwise they wouldn’t use it. They do this thing to win, not to lose. Details may vary but victory is the goal and everything they do is slaved to this purpose. Everything goes if it works, and if it doesn’t work, out with it. Might be “takes-all-comers”, might be tailored vs something specific, those guys are actually some of the most boring players in WoW because in the long run - and the amount of plays in rated PvP is VERY long run in math terms - they have to rely on what actually WORKS and not on what “feels” or “looks” like working. Because anything that doesn’t really work instantly gets them punished HARD when the opponent, who didn’t make that silly mistake, gets the upper hand. Gladiators might have their preferences, but they have to be based on rock-solid mechanically powered crunch, otherwise they lose and keep losing, and people don’t get gladiator titles for being punchbags in PvP.
See the Rogue part. Dude, I get that you’re selling Covenants, but I’m not buying. For you strangely enough “the right decision relative to the encounter” is “Maldraxxus, Maldraxxus, Maldraxxus or Maldraxxus”. AKA the non-choice. Or illusion of one. Sure you can be suboptimal and benched. Or, looking by your char activity, all other factors being equal you can be thoroughly owned by other Rogues who didn’t make that silly mistake and went for stronger Cov instead of one that was “feeling” or “looking” good.
And the author of these words, undoubtedly out of humility, “forgot” to mention this is exactly his own situation and it looks like they’re trying to distract everyone else from this fact.
“Ripcord players” want DIVISION OF PLAYER POWER AND RPG CHOICES. Don’t know how it works in Alliance, in BFA war campaign Horde chars get to choose if they help Saurfang or Sylvanas. Some cosmetic rewards. COSMETIC. NOTHING THAT HAS NUMBERS ON IT. Because how do you think that “choice” would look if say Sylvanas offered her followers 475 ilvl stuff and Saurfang only 450? This is, in a BIG simplification, how Covenants work with all their Conduits, Soulbinds and whatnot. One offers you better stuff for X, other offers better for Y. While we’d like to either rely on our own class/spec abilities or be able to swap these addidional at will because they’re for all practical intents and purposes another tier(s) of talents, and we can swap talents when we fancy that. Do you get it now?
WoW is MMO with RPG elements, power > looks. Doesn’t matter what color your spells are. Doesn’t matter what transmog you wear. What matters is: the numbers your character does. There is a story but it serves as a background to players’ actions.
And, y’know… Blizzard made these unbalanced abominations against all common sense. THEY created it - heavy-handed shoving RPG elements in MMO game - and seem to be very surprised people don’t give a crap about their “meaningful choices”, except “which one does the most DPS”. If they didn’t want it, they shouldn’t have created it, because a 5 yrs old child could tell them this is how it will end in the age of SimCraft…
More complexity creates more failure points. I’ve got about enough complexity in BFA. Don’t need, or want, any more. 12 classes. 36 specs. x4 covenants. You think those low-paid interns can balance 144 combinations when they’ve shown they can’t manage 36?
Again with the choice. Writing from the comfortable position of the one class that doesn’t have to choose anything because Maldraxxus is best for any situation. Kinda like Warren Buffett talking about how meaningful it is to choose what to do with zillions of $ to people whose only “choice” is whether to buy cheap food and live or do something else and possibly starve. What’s the English diplomatic word for that? Unethical? Immoral? Hypocritical?
It’s a good thing you’re not a raider or M+ player - nobody sane would tolerate sabotaging their group deliberately just to see if these talents really are bad. I don’t have to poke, prod, smell and taste a turd to determine it is, in fact, a turd, and I pity you if you do. Wasting your time before coming to the same conclusions is just wasting your time, and if you do it with other people, also likely to waste THEIR time, as it generally lowers your performance before you find the best option. This is what sims are for - to do these calculations quickly so you don’t have to try them all out. Sure you might get lucky once and choose that one best of over 9000 possible, but will you be lucky again next time? And the next 2578284 times? Or will you either 1) be simply worse because couldn’t bother or 2) use the tools you were given to find out what works and what does not?
Part of MMO gameplay is to instantly filter out people who couldn’t bother to spend 30 seconds to find out how their char works BEFORE getting in action with some other people and then are very surprised other guys don’t like slacking, if not deliberate trolling. Good players wouldn’t run into a minefield to find out how it works and that perhaps it would be better to detonate them from distance. They DO have functioning brains in their skulls, after all, and are not afraid to use them. Only a bad player - or a troll - goes into group activity having no reasonable idea of what’s expected from them.
Differentiating between an experienced player and a noob can take just a few seconds in some cases. Like if they cast their buffs before combat. If not, well, 5 seconds of reading too much for them = any more than 0 seconds spent in group with them is too long already for me. Dispel/kick use, positioning, CDs when needed and not when they feel like it, all these things are markings of good player as opposed to bad one. But you should know that yourself being PvP player, so who exactly you’re trying to charm with your fairy tales of having a choice, feeling good, and experimenting? Seduction failed, target was, is, and will be immune.
I don’t care if people have the same builds or different ones. I care if they work and how are they using them - how things WORK, not how things LOOK. If they have abilities and don’t use them when it would be clearly beneficial, well, they suck. Should have spend 5 seconds reading what X does and when to use it. I could do that, they could too. Otherwise they’re wasting my time.
Instead of “meta-slave” it should be “bad sites content-slave”. Nothing prevents you from applying your own brainpower to the problem of finding out best combos of talents, abilities, etc. in any given situation. Might get tricky though with the amount of variables involved, but such is the fate of silly people who fear sims… And again, that part about an option not being good in every situation? That’s rich coming from a Rogue…
Dude, in PvE you have rotations or at least priorities. You keep to them, because they exist for a simple reason of being best solutions of performance problem. You screw them up, you suck. “Playstyle” doesn’t matter if you can’t deliver enough DPS to justify keeping you in group because you just had that burning NEED to breakdance with the boss. Form follows function, always. Not the other way.
just because Blizzard couldn’t be arsed to pay real beta testers and listen to their opinion on stuff, so now we get to watch Rextroy’s hilarious videos about how 8.3 PvP is broken beyond all notions of decency. And because his shenanigans generally work only in very specific conditions, which you usually don’t get in everyday playing, aka too impractical to apply.
Good guides do reference all sort of things you should know about. If not, you are hereby warned about sadly lacking quality of said guide.
Fixed that for you.
See the part about wasting time being wasting time. If the result is the same, why bother with the hard way? Do you REALLY need to poke, touch, smell and taste a turd to find out it’s not sugarcane? If that’s your kind of fun, eh, whatever floats your boat. Just keep the hell away from any sort of group activity. People have a good reason to dislike slacking freeloaders who get their fun from sucking at WoW and slowing others down.
Says PvP NE rogue, aka one of THE most broken class/race combos in the game. Grow a pair. Get a spine. Admit you don’t give a withered crap about balance because right now it’s in YOUR favor and you’d like to keep it that way.
Well sad news for you, the worse general state of class balance, the worse game gets, less people play, and less reason people have to even try playing. Because game in which several classes are clearly better than all others is simply not fun for those not OP. So they stop partaking in the activity they don’t consider fun. And then you will come to forum, crying that “PvP is dying/dead”, hands dripping red with its blood, because yours were the hands on the murder weapon.
Oh and btw are you by chance an used stuff salesperson? The flowery yet vague style, all that FUN and FEELING and CHOICE and FREEDOM just screams to me “Selling X, looking for suckers to buy it”. But when one examines that beautiful dream of yours, it’s all fancy words but no solid matter, appearance over substance. Things like that just don’t work in MMO. Perhaps you can get away with testing bad talents the hard way, being solo PvP player, but it’s not going to fly in any sort of group activity. And for a good reason.
This. You know very well you make a bad decision that will cause a lot of bad stuff to happen in game. And you keep pushing it as the very best thing since, um, the previous very best thing! Sometimes things like that make me wonder if Blizzard’s employees are sober/clean while working.
The problem: DK lacks mobility that everyone else and their pet has.
Solution: Improving baseline DK mobility.
Blizzard’s solution: Put an option to improve mobility that has to compete with DPS abilities, so while other classes get to hit harder, DKs get to not be left behind on “move outta fire” encounters. And then they will have to balance this against DPS options. And buff DK numbers because they won’t get dmg ability. Then nerf others’ damage because it’s still ahead.
See how overcomplicating stuff is just asking for trouble? One failure point after another, just waiting for detonation sequence.
See above. Blizz seems hell-bent on those 1-expansion solutions that don’t work and then have to be scrapped and replaced with other 1-expansion solutions. Looks like someone missed the investing lessons: Cheap things work for a short time and then get more expensive than long-term ones that save your money in the long run because you don’t have to fix them over and over again.
Yeah, this is BIG problem right now. Class has a problem > borrowed power. Spec has a problem > borrowed power. And then borrowed power is taken away and the problem is still there. If not getting WORSE. Shouldn’t even be an issue but backronym “Beta for Azeroth” wasn’t coined out of nothing. Investing again, cheap quick fix is good for now, but MMO doesn’t generate profit just now. Subscription-based games need to keep their playbase or a big chunk of monies goes away. Thus the necessity of long-term solutions, aka BASE CLASS/SPEC stuff. Not Newest and Most Improved crap for 1 expansion or 1 patch.
And let’s not delve into why the f like 90% of 8.3 content hates ST turrets and is cleave-friendly if not straight-out requiring AoE without sacrificing ST. Or why Havoc and BM get all the advantages of being respectively melee/ranged and none of drawbacks. Suffice to say that guys who were balancing the classes/specs performance have failed miserably. If they ever were working on that. And existed.
And then they do it all over again. Unbalanced, untested crap that incentivizes you to have 4 characters of each spec you want to play. Because spec-locked parts and switching is timegated. And trademark ActiBlizz’s “balance” trollercoaster, aka every few days another Covenant is the best-performing one in activity X. Holy %#*@, why can’t they get into their heads we’d like to play just our characters, class, spec, spells, and that’s all it takes? Just for one Void-damned expansion?
For those who don’t like tl;dr or need everything pointed out: The system is unfixable because the idea is deeply wrong and it cannot be fixed as long as that idea is influencing the system. 100% agree.
Indeed. Like their BRILLIANT idea of no flying in Draenor. Oh man, THAT went well with players! They were leaving in droves! Even the last spiteful act of rejected devs aka Pathfinder is considered infinitely worse than the tried, tested and reliable solution of requiring some gold & certain character level to fly. And covenant locking doesn’t make any more sense than not flying in Draenor. There was no problem until they created it, so why do this Bad Thing again?
The past has also shown us one more thing - that if there is a way to go around something, it WILL be used, and it WILL be done if only because it’s mathematically better. Certain guild has blown thousands of $ on transfers to improve their chances by clearing AHs out of BoE items, race changes to get those 0.5% better racials, realm transfers to clear other realms’ AHs, etc. This has pretty much shown that “normal” player has no chance of jumping some loops while sponsored groups can do it, ergo p2w. Wouldn’t be surprised if transferring a character turned out to allow Cov switching over the “normal” limit. Just the thing I’ve come to expect after Beta for Azeroth.
How can you be so wrong?
Players need that 5% extra to pass mythic 7 and heroic bosses.
They need it more than the top 1%.
So what you said is factually incorrect.