He did listen in that interview. You could hear him clearly answer questions that were 5 minutes long with answers that were 5 minutes long, trying to keep an incredibly complicated topic focused and clear, and doing so passionately.
Blizzard wants, and has always wanted, characters to diversify. Preach specifically does not want that. He wants to compete directly as if this was an action game. That’s the underlying difference between the two.
The mistake of BfA was entirely in the gearing system, and that mistake consisted in making advancement unexciting by scaling everything to every item level and repeatedly inserting the same thing, as well as a massive over-reliance on RNG and grinding. I think the core idea was to make it too difficult to get exactly the gear you wanted so you had to make do with what you had, but because of the lack of control over what you got, this got very frustrating - and people just simmed it out anyway. It meant instead of a few people simming a BiS list, everyone simmed all the time.
Therefore, when they speak of player agency, they are referring to the removal or diminishing of this RNG. They are not trying to get rid of choices that stick, and they never have.
His past record means nothing in the face of such a clearly explained vision. If he just said “Trust me, I know what I’m doing”, then I’d be as sceptical as you, but he hasn’t. The only thing I’m afraid of is that these abilities themselves are too one-dimensional and too powerful to add much gameplay, but we’ll see, I suppose.
See, what’s funny about that is that this is evidence he actually does understand the desires of competitive or high-end players.
He’s not upsetting hardcore players; he’s upsetting tryhards and the hyper-competitive. I know there’s an overlap there, but the overlap seems to go all the way down.
You’re not. I have found 5 different fire builds that allowed me to win 65-70% of my solo BG’s, and quests have no stringent requirements. It doesn’t matter if the damage is 5% higher or whatever as long as it works and you feel powerful.
It’s more the areas where you’re being very competitive that might be the problem. But I can tell you that I’ve off-tanked several raids on Mythic, and I can also tell you that I killed Mythic Jaina as one of only 55 Guardian Druids, and the only one using the build that I did in the world.
Then again I’m not trying to be competitive. I’m just trying to complete content and get as far as I can, having fun along the way.
Do you remember my post about my ideal gearing system? I think you made one of the first replies to it. I stand by that post. There’s a lot of skinnerbox systems these days where it feels like you’re just grinding the same thing out over and over and over again.
Covenants, for once, aren’t like that.
In vanilla, whenever they made a huge class change or overhaul, they reset your talent trees for free, allowing you to spec again.
That’s a fair straight forward solution. They nerf your covenant spell? You get to go to another one, even one you’ve been in before, without having to do the re-introduction quests and with your progress transferring straight over.
