Not everyone does. Just don’t change if you want permanency.
#PullTheRipcord #MakeGameplayChoicesSimpleAgain
Nothing good will come from player power in the covenants.
This is not a single player game.
I do not want my covenant choices to be affected by performance.
As long as there is an choice that is better for X content, the majority will take it and drag everyone who cares about how they perform with them.
Blizzard can never balance something so complex.
If our choices are to meaningful, they have to not be forced out of necessity.
Here I quote part of the post of a warlock on the US topic who was on the beta:
I just ran a dungeon as Affliction and Venthyr. After the dungeon concluded another member of the pug group whispered me and said “hey you should play Necrolord its way stronger.” Even in this environment where the goal is to test things out, people have already determined that X covenant is the best and if you aren’t playing that then you are playing suboptimally.
Blizzard are trying to engage in a crusade against a mindset - optimisation. There’s not really much you can do to combat how players view the game.
It’s especially tricky doing a U turn after BFA, arguably the expansion that required the largest amount of theory crafting going to work out your performance due to the sheer amount of variables that you could change. Everything about it encouraged you to test stuff out and find “the setup”, so it shouldn’t be surprising that players recuse to drop this mindset heading into the next expo.
But what we see is blizzard simply going “if you put this blockade here, we interrupt it, so they’ll stop doing it.” No they won’t. They’ll still do it, they’ll just be consistently conscience of their potential underperformance because they can’t switch, but they won’t suddenly drop their interest in being optimal altogether, not those who were all about that.
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Their crusade will fail as much as the real crusades.
Even in Classic, people will pick the right race for that 1% more dps.
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And not everyone wants swappable covenants or covenants with player power removed. It gotta be tough to be a dev.
Yup. I wouldn’t want to do it. You’re constantly embroiled in a conflict of doing what the players (with their multiple viewpoints) want you to do, and what you (and your seniors) want to try and do, and if the two conflict, it’s a mess.
The Covs show that.
Ion basically stated he wants the game to “move away from the min/max mentality” to bring it back a bit to roots of simply making choices and not worrying too much about performance but making these choices for other reasons.
A lot of the players simply don’t want this, they want to min/max, they want the freedom to make choices based upon optimisation and optimal play and they don’t want to the devs to try and stop them doing this because that’s how they enjoy the game. So essentially they’re saying “we don’t believe in your vision for the game, we don’t think you can do it, so we suggest you don’t do it, let us play it the way we always have.”
To try and balance this out is a horrible job, because if you continually capitulate to the players, you have essentially revoked all creative licence within your own game, because they’re very rarely going to suggest “switching things up” of “changing the vision” if they’re satisfied with something the way it is - this is even assuming they’re unified in what they want (which they aren’t) or they can clearly articulate what they want (some can, but many seem to leave it as saying what they don’t like but not being clear about what they’d like instead other than “change it”).
However - if you’re making a game you can’t just ignore the players, they are your lifeblood and you are providing them a service at the end of the day so you can’t just march ahead and keep changing things if it risks their enjoyment for the sake of pursuing your vision.
Absolutely difficult scenario to be in.
Pull the cord.
It’s like making icecream flavors… the devs want to focus on pistachio while the players want rocky road.
You won’t sell as much pistachio at the end of the day as opposed to rocky road.
Some of the players may like pistachio more, some might not care for either flavor… some might like rocky road.
When this hits live, we’ll see how many like pistachio. 
#PullTheRipcord
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They bring their own problems on themselves by doing a handbrake turn every 2 years and completely changing the game. It’s self inflicted so they don’t deserve sympathy. Covenants aren’t their vision because they almost certainly being deleted in 2 years time and replaced with something else, and that something else may cultivate minmaxing all once again, making a different set of players bitter all over again.
The lead up to new expansions should be exciting and joyful, but now every 2 years like clockwork the community will be plunged into drama and fighting and tedious meta discussions about game design philosophy over and over and over again. It’s all so tiresome.
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What about keeping Covenant signature abilities the way they are, but allowing players to choose one of the 4 covenant class abilities?
They could simply recolor those abilities, so if I want to choose Kyrian class ability as Venthyr it would have red tint instead of blue.
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I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what people are asking for… I do not wish for us to be able to switch covenants. I want to choose the covenant I want based of lore and aesthetics and feel, but not be penalized for doing so because player power is locked behind this choice.
I don’t understand why people are opposed to the idea of having the abilities as talents. We help all of the covenants and gain these abilities throughout the story, only for them to be stripped away from us for no lore reason.
Another huge point people are missing is that the RP element is being diminished because people will feel forced to choose the “best” covenant for their class, rather than choosing the one they wish to go for due to RP/Lore etc.
Having the abilities as talents, but still locking you into a covenant of your choice for the visual, lore, RP etc is a win-win
So I agree NO swapping covenants, but NO locking player power behind the covenant for arbitrary reasons
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What I don’t get is how your choice of covenant is different from your choice of class? Or even your choice of spec. Switching from Fury to Arms would take me a solid 2 weeks of farming. I have a prot spec because I’ve been playing dual spec since 8.0 came out, but if I hadn’t, that too would take weeks of farming to swap.
RP is rooted in restriction. Without restriction, you can’t have RP. Take warrior for example. RP-ing a warrior requires the exclusion of using magic. You can’t be a warrior throwing fireballs. Mages can’t wear plate. There’s all kinds of similar restrictions in the game that are remnants from the time when WoW was a roleplaying game first.
To me there’s no difference between a choice of covenant and a choice of class. Class discrimination has always been a part of WoW. I think by a huge margin, people will pick the covenant that makes the game more fun for them. Just judging by my own experience in pugs, I think most people don’t even look at guides. We can’t be at the end of the expansion and have people with 470+ ilvl not knowing basic boss mechanics.
To me a choice that doesn’t have gameplay ramifications isn’t really a choice. In that sense, having an objectively best choice also means there’s no real choice. My major worry is that not all covenants are equal in the fun factor. The Kyrian’s content looks so damn boring to me. Revendreth and Maldraxxus look so much more fun, and I’m probably picking them for all my characters.
For me, it all hangs in how covenant swapping works. Obviously I don’t want it to be too punishing, but I also don’t want players swapping covenants between bosses. Just like your class has permanence, so should the covenant. My entire opinion on covenants can flip depending on how restrictive switching is.
Popular enough to be wanted AND got to sit with several groups. Although to be completely honest I think most people were just afraid of another SS.
Yes but imagine being a fury warrior, then when you wanted to try prot. So you spend weeks grinding to gear up for prot, but then there be an even bigger barrier to return to fury. That would be extremely frustrating
I also disagree than picking a class and a covenant are even remotely similar. A class comes with 2-4 specs, plenty of abilities and talents etc. A covenant comes with a couple of abilities and a very slight storyline change (which if you have kept up with the Beta, you will see that there is very little difference between the stories anyway)
Again I want to reiterate, I’m NOT asking for covenant swapping, I want to choose Venthyr or Necrolords for my DK for a lore perspective… but when you are penalised because Night Fae was the “right choice” how is that fun?
It seems the restrictions of choosing a covenant FAR exceed the benefit
Why can’t the abilities all be flavoured to the particular covenant, and you choose them based on the content at hand.
This would also make the system less reliant of balance, and make people feel more free to choose their covenant based on their preferred lore and flavour
I’m all for impactful choices, but this just isn’t it
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Well first of all the covenants don’t make sense lorewise either, why would they lock you out and not trust you after helping them but then also want your assistance?
And classes are fleshed out with multiple specs and setups you can switch almost anytime. Covenants are a few abilities that blizz throws onto your class and hopes it won’t be too broken, while also building up a big wall for you to climb in case you even want to test a different spell.
Yeah sure it might take you a week or two to be able to switch to another spec right now but guess what? Once you’ve done that you won’t have to do it again. The carrot won’t be taken away once you’ve got it.
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If they remove player power from covenants, I really feel that they should make the covenants a permanent choice; no switching whatsoever.
BUT… the story doesn’t support this.
It’s all against the maw, isn’t it?
So no switching wouldn’t make sense from a lore standpoint.
It’s a weird situation they’ve created.
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I just wish they’d stop putting these lame ‘fit all class’ spells in like the pathetic Essence system. It’s just a mess and those abilities feel out of place with the class, which they would really wouldn’t they— and they can never really tie deeply into specific spec mechanics because again they have to fit many. So what you often end up with is a long cooldown ‘press thing to make things explode’ - yawn - how exciting button.
What they should’ve done is simply give every class a new ability-- or focus the resources on giving us a universal class progression that starts at 10, and as such isn’t ‘borrowed power’.
As I’ve said before many times, Mastery is extremely underdeveloped and that could easily be tranferred into a talent tree. Isn’t it supposed to be the very core of specs? Yet it’s a single ability learnt at 10 with no fanfair or anything.
Yeah, make it a new talent line. Give it the ‘special name’ of Shadowlands power and let people choose which one they want. Some people will pick one and never change it (me), other people will switch around depending on situation.
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But that’s not the point. The point is that when you pick a class you lock yourself into restrictions. Warriors, rogues, paladins can’t be ranged. And in some contexts ranged is preferred, in others - melee is preferred. The point being that you can’t always be preferred (unless you’re a tank, but tank is ez mode). As a warrior, I can’t be a healer. But what if my party needs a healer, why can’t I be one?
I still remember that time I played WoW for the first time, and I had no idea what any class did, and I picked one and played it and that lack of knowledge was part of what make the experience so good. My first WoW character was a blind choice and I’m looking forward to making this type of choice again. If I mess up, I’ll reroll the choice. Just like I did when I got bored of a warrior in vanilla. It’ll be fine.
And I get that you can’t swap covenants based on the activity you’re doing, but I’ll treat that just like I treat my characters - if I want flexibility, I’ll just play multiple characters at the same time.
The only potential problem is if the same covenant is best for one spec of the same class and total garbage for another spec of the same class.
I think they just didn’t want to complain due to the smell.