6% per rare, 12% per dungeon boss in the same zone
Had Blizzard never justified the no-switching as “RPG meaningful choice”, no one would bring it up as an argument. Really.
How is it RP-friendly to lose your abilities and then suddenly gain them again the next expansion? How is a Death Knight getting Corruptions and no Fear invulnerability RP-friendly? How is it RP-friendly for Mages to be able to open a Portal in Nazjatar when the game literally says some magic was blocking teleportation in the area?
Edit to say that meanwhile, it is RP-friendly for the Maw Walker to suddenly turn hostile to three other factions who admit they aid each other.
Please calm down sir.
First of all, your premise was wrong, it’s not about semantics at this point.
Secondly, Covenants are less than Essences/azerite gear passives were and clearly those weren’t a sub class.
Thirdly… there is no 3rd, you lost on the 1st one.
So, it is a bar AND the WQs it seems. This is too much. You can totally do it in 2 days, it’s 8WQs and 2 dungeons. And on top of that, there’s even more steps after it. Changing back to an old covenant might take a full week 
This is too much, it should be doable in a day, even if it takes multiple hours.
the annoying part is that you dont turn hostile to anyone, you are still their hero and the maw walker, you are still expecting to show up and protect them each day and deal with the callings (new emissaries) and yet if you try and go near their house all of a sudden they hate you and you have to leave,
it makes absolutely no sense and has no RP value at all, or at least the RP value is all over the place.
firstly your premise is wrong, because covenants are not working like subclasses either, they are literally an aesthetic choice that gives you a new talent and themed ability. 2 abilities is not a sub class.
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Idk how you read that like that, but i’m the one saying that Covenants are not in any way a sub-class.
Look up the conversation above if you want to know more.
It’s blizzard’s fault, for not being in touch with how gaming has evolved.
I would not be against this kind of thing in 2004, since the game was fairly more about exploration. Sadly, as we saw with Classic, gaming community in 2020 has changed towards that min-maxing behavior.
And that’s the thing…It’s like Blizzard is trying to reintroduce design that would have made sense back then in 2004, but the sands of time ran, faster and faster.
Design should always be in touch with current gaming community. This is sad, but true.
Arguably true, I do agree that gaming and gamers have changed, but thats a natural progression I suppose, with a genre and playerbase that have kind of evolved with each other.
Classic was a prime example of the kind of behaviour I am decrying here.
Before it was released it was all “We want it for the RPG elements!” “We want it because it was a more pure version of the game!”
Two weeks after it was released “Nah, we wanted it so we could min-max the stats and rush content, right, done that, now, what’s next?”
Thing is, that wasn’t Blizzards fault, they gave a vocal minority of the public what that vocal minority of the public said they wanted, and it turns out Blizz were right to have originally refused. People didn’t want Vanilla again, they wanted a content race. Big deal, they could have got that with Retail, and most of the people who Go Go Go rushed Classic then came back to Retail and did exactly the same.
These are the problem people. Not people who are actually playing the game for fun.
You see it all the time on the forums, people posting things like “Can we skip the RP Elements in Raids?”
Well sure son, you can do that with the click of a button. Oh wait, you don’t mean Cut-scenes, you mean the actual plot and -reason- for the Raid you are trying to smash? You mean the actual -game- parts of the game? What do you want here, a glorified maths test where everything is based around numbercrunching? Do you not remember being at school and hating those?
That is true, but in my experience it is not the older players complaining, it is the ‘Go-go-go’ raiders, and they are poor examples of gamers, they’re not playing a game at all.
Character progression, is not the same as Min-Maxing, at all, Sure we all want our characters to advance and get better, but who decides that? Icy-Veins? The US Forums? Streamers? Min-Maxer players, or is it the person actually playing the game, ourselves?
I don’t know, maybe it is because I grew up with RPG’s since I was about 12, donkey’s years back, but thats how I see WoW still, and evidently how Blizz see it as well, or they wouldn’t waste time hiring authors to write novels, or bill it as an MMORPG or even hiring the array of Voice Actors they do.
This is true, but that also leads to things becoming incredibly dated, incredibly quickly. Some things stand the test of time (an unfortunate example being the AK47) and are classics, E-Type Jaguar’s, the Spitfire, -some- old comedy shows, and then some do not, because they tried too hard to plug into the Zeitgeist, which is great initially, but when it moves on in a few years, where are you?
Good design is not designing just for ‘Now’, but it is planning ahead and designing something appealing in the future also. Something that people who never saw the original product can go “Thats damned cool” even five or more years later.
You see what I am saying here, people are already slating a product that -has not yet been released!-
In any other industry we would call these people idiots, because it is kind of weird behaviour, consider if this was a car. “Yeah, I know its not been released for purchase yet, but I’ve seen a picture of it, and some bloke said it’s rubbish, never driven it myself, because it hasn’t been released for sale yet” Or a type of drink. “Yeah I hate this drink” “It’s not even available yet?” “Yeah, but some bloke said he didn’t like it, so now I don’t like it”
Thats what people sound like talking about Covenants. “Well it ain’t live yet, but some bloke said…” Even the people on the PTR aren’t really getting the full experience yet.
Now if a few months in we see these problems, then that is a different matter.
Design should never be in touch with what is current, Design should -always- be trying to pre-empt the next trend. Designers of any product who can do that, are the successful ones.
I agree with the basis of what you are saying, Gamers and Gaming has changed, but I also think we have to take our share of responsibility for that as consumers of the product, in the -manner- that we consume the product. We are so fickle and inconsistent in that regard, whereas it never used to be thus.
You have a very skewed vision of what these players like and do.
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I swear every time someone compares wow to an fps I die inside…
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After all the derailing in this thread I doubt anyone will read this far so here is one for the void.
This much borrowed power is way too much and they’re using it as an excuse to not fix classes that are broken to begin with. You treat a rash with ointment, not with a skin transplant that falls off in 2 years.
The power vs aesthetics combined with the loot handouts and gear’s overall diminished impact on a character’s power level will just cause a lot of players who push content to disassociate with their characters even more than the corruptions did. You should be able to look at someone’s performance and say “wow, that guy is really good”, now “wow, that guy is really Necrolord”.
Make gear matter, make effort result in performance improvement. Stop handing out power like free candy! As a soon to be Night Fae Blood DK I don’t even want to have blue D&D I’m obviously there to get the one thing my toolkit lacks - mobility. (not saying that said toolkit should have it in the first place - just saying it seems like the largest improvement)
From reading through this thread I saw a number of people fundamentally misunderstand what we want - we don’t want to be the best at everything. We want to be the best we can be at the things we’re interested in. Min-Maxing is the natural progression of character development when the game is interesting and you’re having fun with your character instead of playing an alt. At one point the only gains you can get are minimal and you want those so you can have the only barrier between you and the content you want to take part in be pure skill.
Stop making systems the true end boss of the expansion (some lasting more than one unfortunately). Players can’t defeat those and time gating is not content! Waiting for 2-3 content patches for the expansion to be in a decent state is inexcusable at this point.
Its not a subclass, its not an RP choice, its not a choice that matters, its a bag of stupid amounts of borrowed power and inconvenience. Kill it with fire before it lays eggs!
#PullTheRipcord
P.S. +1 from Amonet whose sub ran out.
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Youre all whiny little losers.
#Pullthepulltheripcordjerks
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#pulltheripcord
Pull the ripcord and set fire to it. Watch it burn away to nothing like ActiBlizz’s subscription and customer satisfaction rates.
No.
This needs to be pulled. It’s not a CHOICE, if you want to do certain stuff people will make you choose a certain covenant and it’s just a cookie cutter for every spec yet again.
It’s on paper a choice, how exciting we can choose any of the 4 but really … its not.
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who are you to dictact what is fun for other people, why is it that people cant have fun by min maxing, thats exactly how i have fun in wow, because i like my character to be strong, that is whats fun for me, so them designing the covenants as they have is removing the fun from it.
i think you will find that people are askin for skippable RP things in old raids because lord knows its insanely fun listening to thrall and the dragon aspects talk about deathwing for the 8 billionth time.
min maxing and optimising your character is the exact same thing as character progression, increasing item levels and optimising stats/getting the right gear pieces is what character progression is in wow.
if they are planning covenants for the future it would be even worse, because there are some outlyers that will get buffed or nerfed in the future meaning they are now best and people will feel forced to swap, if they keep it as it is then they just cant balance it later on without forcing people to have to swap. because some people actually enjoy playing to optimise.
but when the people that are telling you these things are professionals then their opinions carry a lot of weight, take the TV show top gear, jeremy clarkson, richard hammond and james may know 10000% more than me about cars, so them giving their opinion on something that they have access to and i dont carrys weight as they are experts and they know what they are talking about,
the people complaining about covenants are the same people that had issues and complaints about azerite, and they were correct, blizz refused to listen to them and it lead to the system being completely broken for the first 6 months of the expansion, so if they have similar concerns with it now, why shouldnt we believe them, they have a better track record on this kind of thing that blizzard does.
with the way the covenants are designed people have been able to see the issues with them since they were announced at blizzcon last year. xyronic one of the mage/warlock players in limit said to someone else instantly when it was announced he would have to level 4 mages at the start of the expansion, and that still seems to be the case, because the lack of swapping will cause too many issues, spceially with soulbinds ontop of that.
people seem to think that the only reason that people want this system changed it because of optimisation and min maxing, which is not the case, there is a 50/50 split for a lot of people. it sucks not being able to properly optimise your character for people that want to do that, but it goes deeper than that,
i have said before on this and other thread about this topic that im stuck as a warlock, i want to go venthyr because i prefer everything about that covenant, the story looks better, the characters involved with it speak to me more than others, and the i also prefer the mogs even down to the little headstone back mog thing. and yet they have made the necrolord thing too strong so i have to pick necrolord to be useful as a warlock.
i would rather they just decouple the abilities and use them as a talent row, so i can pick venthyr and use the necrolord ability. because that way i get to use the covenant i want for its RP value and aesthetics, but i dont get stuck with an ability that would be essentially a dead spell half the time.
as well as being able to swap to venthyr, kyrian or night fae so that i could have some fun with them in dungeons or in the open world or in torghast, because there are anima powers in torghast ill just never get the chance to see or use because i dont have access to the ability that works with it.
does that make sense?
No, they won’t. Here’s a challenge. Pick the worst talents for your spec, then queue for dungeons. See how many people tell you to swap your talents.
It’ll work EXACTLY like it currently works. People will be fine as long as you’re good enough. The moment you’re not good enough, they’ll start inspecting you. So if you’re not objective garbage, you’re going to be fine.
Things are different in the top 2000 players, but that’s an entirely different tier of game and nobody really is in it.
I want to be able to switch so that I do not have to make alternate characters just to experience all the zones fully. This has honestly never happened before.
I don’t think top 2000 players made their best m+ runs pugging.
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pugging is not a concern, as people there only inspect you if you’re sucking at your role. Otherwise nobody will be arsed to look at your build and covenant. Required covenants will be just as much a thing as required azerite traits and talent builds are right now. Meaning, they won’t be a thing. Unless of course, the people afraid of this don’t insist on making their fears a reality. I’m 100% certain they’ll be the first to push covenant discrimination.