Pull the Ripcord / Don't pull the Ripcord in SL

Community General Discussion
41

:coconut:?

42

If you’re such a big fan of restriction, how about we divide your talent tree and abilities into 4 as well. Each quarter for a covenant.

That’ll make you really happy.

When you give extremely poor responses, you get extremely poor answers.

43

#BreakTheMeta

Blizz need to take the decision for the direction of their game.
Not cave in to a vocal minority, but take it in the direction that they want and design around.
Take the hit on the player base if necessary.
Its not possible to please everyone so just go for it.
Break a game that end up with all specs looking the same at any given moment.

1 Like
44

You’re wastin your time.

45

No answer me. Will be game better if we would have acess to all game skills and no matter of class we can pick w/e we want?

Cooldowns on skills are also restriction. Tell me would game be better if we had no restriction and just spam w/e spell we want and when we want it without any restrictions?

46

there is no reason to delete things when they have put development time in, just add them to the talent tree as a new row with 4 options,

that way people have the choice of their covenant based on the important things, like story and aesthetics like it should have been from the start. conduits/soulbinds are another problem but less so i think.

this has been explained to you repeatedly, so please actually read it this time, there are RP values to abilities like fear and what not, and there are reasons that they are set with certain classes,

the abilities that we are asking to be able to swap are literally called class abilities which is why someone who is playing that class should have access to all of them, its nothing like asking to have mage abilities as a warlock, you are just creating other ideas in your head and equating them to us, there is absolutely no similarity between what you are saying and what we are asking for. so please just stop it

people are asking for the choice to use spells that are designed exactly the same as talents to be treated as such and be swappable exactly like all the other talents are, why is this such a big problem, it has nothing to do with meta or anything, its just a matter of having access to your Class abilities

literally no one is asking for this you are the only person talking about this at all

1 Like
47

ok, i’ll bite.

I’ll explain this in simple terms.

What covenant system does, is it forces you to pick a side and based on your decision, you get your power. But now, since power is involved, your decision will be about min maxing. Therefore, you go for power instead of RPG part of the game. And now you lost half the MMORPG.

Now since covenants are power based, and are multi layers of power on top of one another (covenant, soulbinds, legendaries, etc. ) and due to blizzard’s history of poor balancing, Things will be a mess. Which results in one covenant being the optimal choice for every class, making anyone who chooses another covenant disadvantaged.

This results in problems with group finders and pugs. people not inviting others with a bad choice of covenants, the way the current raider IO is the indicator. Now there’s another indicator by the name of covenants.

Also, this limitation prevents you from experimenting and playtesting things or changing your game style. A talent tree with one option for the whole duration of expansion.

To top it all off, now you find your optimal choice. You keep playing it. Blizzard after 2 months realises how poorly balanced it is and nerfs it. now you’re stuck with a covenants you chose which sucks now. Feel the frustration of farming back all the renown you farmed in that 2 months time only for it to happen over and over.

Then there’s the issue it brings with covenant imbalance. Resulting in something similar to faction imbalance we have right now. That’ll prevent any future plans with covenants as a pvp war or pve event from being as good as it can be.

Not to mention, now that you’re locked with one covenant, you should forget about playing multiple specs at an equal level, because chances are, you’ll be good as a tank with venthyr for example while being good at dps with bastion and good at healing with the fairies.

Also, the wonderful system that’s locked, is so that you might have advantages in raid or mythic+ or something else while being much weaker everywhere else. Because encounters and pvp stuff will be different.

There’s more, but i think this should say enough.

So yea. Make fun of how giving it all to us as a talent tree thing is as bad as mixing all classes together.

48

But they don’t
it is an illusion. Play the beta if you have it, listen to others if you don’t.

So Mage Towers and Class Halls were ‘nothing to do’ . You are trolling (BfA you can have that one)

49

You know, I wouldn’t be against leaving the ripcord un-tugged
 if I had faith in Blizzard’s ability to balance their game.

If the stats were that making the best choice vs worst choice was likely to be a matter of 1% damage/healing/survivability - I wouldn’t care. One percent doesn’t bother me.

The problem is Blizzard have a track record of failing to balance. Heck, they can’t even balance three specs for one class, let alone balance all the specs for all classes, and now they’re multiplying up the complexity and claiming they’ll get it right this time.

So either the conduits and abilities from your covenant will be nerfed to the point of irrelevance (in which case we might as well have pulled the ripcord), or they are compellingly strong and players will feel bad about letting their team down, and potentially be rejected from pug groups over making the “wrong” choice. In which case we might as well have pulled the ripcord.

I’m open to a really good argument as to WHY we might not want flexibility on something that could turn out to be a significant power advantage
 I just haven’t read/heard one yet.

50

The reason he keeps asking is that this is a bogus answer.

the abilities that we are asking to be able to swap are literally called covenant abilities which is why someone who is playing that covenant should have access to all of them

This has nothing to do with the ability to swap covenant or class. It fundamentally misses the point of the question.

There is no distinction between the two at all. It’s literally the exact same system, with covenants imposed on top of classes in the same way a race or a profession is. ALL of these also feature balance issues, visual effects, different feels, farming and buying different things to produce different results, and abilities.

It’s a completely and utterly arbitrary line in the sand. There can be all sorts of reasons why you might not like Covenants, but this can’t be one of them. It’s a bad reason.

51

there are two types covenant class abilities And covenant signature abilities

we are asking for the class abilities to actually be class abilities and be available to us, considering they are designed in the exact same way as talents are, as i have given example of before, some of them are designed exactly the same as talents to the point of being re-implementations of old talents.

its blizzard that are making the distinction of calling them covenant class abilities and im surprised people would be okay with having class abilities arbitrarily locked away behind something that makes no sense, because the whole RP value argument is complete bull as its been written terribly and the RP value doesnt exist of make sense

52

there are two types spec class abilities And class signature abilities

we are asking for the spec class abilities to actually be class signature abilities and be available to us, considering they are designed in the exact same way as other abilities are, as i have given example of before, some of them are designed exactly the same as other abilities to the point of being re-implementations of old abilities.

its blizzard that are making the distinction of calling them spec class abilities and im surprised people would be okay with having class abilities arbitrarily locked away behind something that makes no sense, because the whole RP value argument is complete bull as its been written terribly and the RP value doesnt exist of make sense

As you can see, you have spotted that, yes, Blizzard are making arbitrary distinctions. What you fail to spot is that you arbitrarily decided to ignore all those they already made.

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but there is actually RP value to classes and reasons for classes to have differing abilities, and specs, that actually make sense, there are distinctions between them, locking these behind the covenants is ruining the abilities and meaning some people will just never get to use them, because they care about player power, and some people are being forced to take a decision that they dont like for the same reason,

i would love to be venthyr because i prefer their story and the characters involved as well as the mogs and that headstone thing.

and yet im unable to justify picking the covenant that i want to use because i have to take necrolord because the abilitiy if too good. its badly designed and people realised this when they were announced at blizzcon last year, and yet its been 10-11 months and blizz are still being stubborn about it

which considering the failure of BFA which was due to them ignoring pleas from the playerbase, you would think they would be better for it and actually listen to the players this time.

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There’s the real reason. You think the story and world building is terrible and therefore find no value in the choice, and therefore view it only from the perspective of competitive gameplay, whereupon it no longer makes sense to you that Blizzard should put in the considerable effort to actually balance it.

That is a good reason.

Almost nobody applies this logic to anything else in the game. There are examples, especially so in PvP - but in PvE people more-or-less play whatever the heck they like, and it’ll usually work. When it doesn’t, we call it a balance issue. We don’t argue everyone should be the same, we argue a spec or class needs a buff. Because classes matter and they’re cool.

55

They may well look like “talents” to some of us, but that is not how they were intended at all.

Ion as quoted from an interview with Steve Messner PCGamer:

“You could ask people in the best raiding guilds in the world, people who were in the [Mythic Dungeon Invitational] which is better (Mages or Rogues), and it’s still not 100 percent clear. It depends on a lot of things. It depends on a lot of situations. Both are great, but which is more fun, which do you enjoy playing more? That’s actually a valid answer that can drive you, and there’s no wrong choice between those two. That’s what we want Covenants to be.”

So as I’ve said in the past, that players say “they’re like talents tho” is kinda a null point when the people implementing them outright stated they’re designing them with a similar philosophy to the Class choice.

Now we can argue the execution between them isn’t similar because X cov ability is miles better than Y, but as BFA has shown us this can be applied to classes too, (Fire Mage BFA COUGHCOUGH) which we tacticly accept. If we wanna pull those numbers we either accept we can’t based on that choice, or we reroll a fire mage.

So this idea of “not having it all and accepting that” isn’t new. Classes may have been introduced as distinctive choices back in release, but their relevance to the game has been 100% central to the game since then, even up till now, and players accept this kind of dividing line without question nor quibble. ANd here we have the guy designing covs going “Yeah it’s like classes, that’s what we want” and people are saying he’s wrong because “it isn’t”.

The question is why is it different mechanically? Yes it’s a dilute form of it, it doesn’t come with stuff like “you wear plate” “you wield a sword” but it’s a decision that grants you a couple of abilities and some passives and says “you picked that, that was your choice” precisely like classes are. It’s a smaller scale of the same thing at the end of the game rather than the start- how is it different in terms of mechanics?

If anything the class distinction should bug people more. The difference between classes can literally mean complete exclusions like “you can’t tank” or “no combat res” etc. In this case it’s differences in numbers you put out, but nothing grander than that. a Necrolord mistweaver will be able to do more HPS than a night fae one say, but they cannot do anything the night fae one can’t, the distinction is smaller between them than say the distinction between a mistweaver and a druid (where the druid can battle ress people) and yet people are more annoyed by the impositions placed upon this choice the stark barriers classes impose and the only reason given for this is “they’re classes, they’re different”.

But as the quote above shows, that is not how the devs are intending them to be seen, so where does the discussion go next? Devs saying they’res “classes within a class” and players simply going “no they should be talents” and it goes around and around.

To be clear, I am sceptical of the locks in the system as i’ve said in this and other threads (too much lack of freedom to explore within the covenant I pick, bad for multispec classes) but the focus on the active abilities and their flex is not one of my major bugbears.

When I pick a class (restricted decision) I can explore that class at will (my specs, my abilities). Yet covenants I cannot (limited number of soulbinds, tying my choices to all specs) which is an issue. There should be much more freedom to “play around” within the covenant you pick. Remove cds from conduits, make soulbinds spec specific would be a good start.

1 Like
56

Here’s my opinion. Having covenants with exclusive player power bonuses is going to suck because inevitably you will have to be a certain covenant that you don’t want to be if u don’t want to be excluded from M+ and top tier raiding & rated pvp. However I feel having the covenant abilities be not bound to the covenants makes the covenant system feel stupid and pointless in the first place imo from a lore, visual and gameplay perspective. Using Bastion spear as maldraxxus champion would look strange because blizzard hasn’t visually designed the spells around that covenant. Without the restriction, the whole idea of picking a covenant in the first place seems redundant and any meaning of covenants that was there is now lost.

Had it been me at blizzard, I would never have done covenants in the first place or done covenants and not done covenant abilities, just add new core class spells instead. Expansion specific power systems are dumb anyway and I wish they’d stop doing them.

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Covenant abilities will never be balanced and people will be excluded from groups for not having the right one. People shouldnt be punished for making the “wrong” choice - a choice we do not know which is the best before playing. Its just dumb

2 Likes
58

People don’t know all of what a class entails before playing it (unless they research it within an inch of their life, which it’s possible to do for covenants and soulbinds) and yet we accept people will be excluded from higher content based upon class and metas that arise as differences between classes. Why does this line of thinking render the conclusion “there covenants should be removed” but not render “classes should be removed”?

You can’t tell me everyone who levelled a sub rogue up because they enjoyed it only to find out it sucks in PVE (assuming 8.3) expected any kind of answer to their problem other than “reroll the class if you don’t like it” as opposed to shilling for a solution such as being able to change into a Fire Mage.

What’s the difference?

59

This is another issue people are ignoring.
A lot of the Covenant abilities straight up suck while you’re leveling, they’re worthless. Once you hit max level having tested these major abilities for possibly not even a few hours you have to decide right there and then what you want to stick with for the rest of the expansion.

It’s insane.

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60

Some one gets it :+1:

1 Like