That’s the most troubling thing for me though. Time is ticking and the launch is less than 2 months away. At that point they should be at the stage of just number tweaking.
Do Not pull the ripcord.
The months of endless community drama this will create will be more entertaining than the actual game.
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#pulltheripcord let me play all the content I want however I want whenever I want.
I really don’t mind the whole concept and I personally agree with the devs about having strengths and weaknesses, I think that is totally fine. The problem for me comes from whether or not they can balance it more or less, and we all know Blizzard’s track record on that one. Another huge problem is that certain covenant abilities are good for 1 spec, and bad on another. Which quite frankly is really bad if you want to play other specs of your class.
I hope I’m wrong and in the end it won’t be a big deal, but I’m afraid that’s just wishfull thinking. Even more so given the fact that there is little time left.
The lesson in Kung-Fu Panda was that in their attempt to prevent a disaster, people end up causing it.
Nobody thought “hey, I should exclude people based on their covenant” until you planted this idea in their head. There’s people playing garbage classes for years, there’s SHAMANS around, and they get taken to content. It’ll be fine. But you continue planting ideas in people’s heads, who knows, they might take root.
That’s more than enough time.
Literally yes.
I maintain this will not be nearly as much of an issue as people are making it out to be.
Literally the only thing encouraging this atm is players going on about it and the dungeon buffs essentially being a big “bring someone of this cov” advert. Beyond those two, I don’t think it will be a big deal beyond the higher end provided blizz tone down/remove the dungeon buffs.
Almost nobody is going to go “you don’t have your X class cov ability, buh bye” in the same way essentially nobody at current goes “Omg you picked killing machine over skullsplitter? buh bye”. People don’t give a toss about your spec in unstructured content by-the-by, they just assume you are doing “what works” and you know what to do. If it shows you have problems in that area (can’t hold thread, die, crap dps) then people might start looking, but until then, doubtful. If you pull the numbers even when using “wierd” talents, people barely notice if they do at all.
This is not the same as class discrimination. Classes are discriminated largely because of their utility (or in the case of Fire Mage and BM hunter, being so brokenly ahead of everyone else) and the entirety of their kits. It’s not on the basis of one thing, it’s several things. For example you take a resto druid over a holy paladin because the resto druid offers mobile healing, ability to deal good dps whilst healing, combat ress, stealth corpse run etc. It’s not literally on the basis the Druid has Swiftmend instead of Holy Shock.
The difference between class cov abilities in most (not all) cases is the difference between talents on a row. Slight differences that yield slight advantage/disadvantage in a situation. Unlike class kits they are rarely the difference between you being able to do something and you being completely unable to do that thing (like Paladins cannot combat ress baseline) so most players do not care a great deal about other player talents outside of a minority of the high-end game and so it will follow for covenant abilities (assuming the dungeon buffs are dealt with).
The primary pressures on them is internally generated pressure by players to pick what is best vs what isn’t, and this is a bigger issue for some classes than others. Locks for example have currently one ability miles ahead of the others. Monks have relatively balanced abilities but they vary by spec, so what is best for WW is not what is best for BrM or MW so it discourages hybrid play or at the very least punishes it (at least in BFA i could grind my gear sets and then it was done, having to do 2 days of quests to play decently in my off spec is not exactly alluring to me). Those are viable concerns imo, but the meta-invite-scaremongering argument is not.
This. Expansion is gonna be smell like a fart. Gonna be really bad. Like, post-Indian-meal-fart bad.
Probably. Court of Start also had profession buffs, but I haven’t really seen someone requesting certain profession or specifically a DH in group finder.
I bought snacks for this special occasion. Roll on the tears!
Depends how they handle the buffs. I expect they will be requested at the mid-high end so long as they offer somewhat palpable buffs (like they do at the minute). They are however the only thing enforcing this mentality because it confers a buff upon the whole group. It makes the person making the group’s character “more powerful”. Of course they want it.
Conversely a covenant ability from another class does not make their character “more powerful” in the same way a Monk tank running Crucible of Flame major over Nullification say does not make the group creator’s character any better. It’s just part of what that person is doing to optimize their own role.
The only thing most group creators care about is whether you can do the basics of your role (ie heal, tank or dps) and not mess up their run. Whether you do it with a spade, a fork, a spoon or a combination of all three is largely irrelevant to them so long as you do it to the standard they expect.
Yes there are obvious “metas” that say using a fork is better than a spoon when it comes to playing a monk say, but this never manifests on the level where people actively seek only monks who use forks. They just tacitly assume you are, even if they’re mistaken in that assumption. The thing is they don’t check it.
Classes are a different ball game due to hardline differences in capacity of what they can/can’t do as well as aggregate differences that add up over time and multiple abilities. So people will discriminate if they hear a mage is 30% better than every other class, but they’re unlikely to discriminate between two talents a mage can pick that make a 5% difference to their dps.
As I said in another post, I strongly suspect a fair amount of PUG players don’t actually even know what talents classes they don’t play regularly have, much less how they parse, so they idea they discriminate based upon this is wierd. So it will be for covenants. Ironically the more players shout about it, the more likely people are to do it because at that point “everyone knows ability x is better for shaman than ability y” so they’ll demand it. The less people shout about it, the less likely it is that it becomes common knowledge and people won’t be in a position to discriminate based upon stuff they don’t even know a difference exists for.
i remember one particularly wierd run that highlighted this when I ran a 12 key in 8.2.5 on my resto shammy where the tank kept demanding i cured disease and were adamant I wasn’t “playing properly” because I wasn’t doing it. They were completely oblivious to certain elements of my basic toolkit and the entire group essentially had to convince them they were incorrect.
I suspect this player isn’t an isolated one, and I refuse to believe ALL players in the mid-high mythic+ range have an encyclopedic knowledge of all classes, specs and talents that they can recite and thus query and discriminate upon. Or that they’d be prepared to drag up and read a few guides before inviting a class to find what to discriminate them upon. It’s daft. This is not something a majority of the playerbase cares about.
BAN BORROWED POWER!
Bring back Legendaries, Corruption, Cloak farm, AP Farm, Azerite gear and Islands. Add new stuff and leave the old stuff in the game.
Like what? Only thing close to covenants we had in past is class pick.
Or not. Don’t bloat the game with hundreds of abilities where the classes require huge reworks every other expansion. Unless you prefer getting no new abilities every expansion? Then it might work fine.
Delete the class spells, but don’t pull the ripcord.
That was my first reaction to those spells when they were unvailed. They’re just excess anyway and add little depth to whatever class they’re added to, and they’re causing massive social issues.
I think if that one spell didn’t exist, but everything else did, people wouldn’t be calling to pull the ripcord, despite the fact that the ability is a fairly small component of the power gain from covenants.
I want this to work, but it can’t work when Blizzard keeps adding these sorts of absurd abilities. They’re way too strong, all of them.
And have WoD all over again? No thanks. These systems adds lot of content outside of instances. Legion anf BFA were first expansion where i never felt like i have nothing to do outside of raids.
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My thought was let every covenant get each spell set and be able to freely choose between them like with talents, but change their visuals so they match the covenant of the player using them.
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Pull.
Because either it’ll be pull, or they’ll spend 80% of the expansion’s life cycle, trying to balance every mess the current system would bring. And i’d rather have them spend that time in content. Not balance, the way bfa went.
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Should we also have acess to all classes skills so we can swap them around like covenants? You know like mage have acess to fear/charge/shadow bolt etc…?