You playing a completely different role is completely different thing from you only being good in specific scenarios in case you want a certain type of tmog.
Do you honestly believe “I want to look like a vampire knight instead of an angel knight, guess that means I’ll be good on ST raid fights and suck at everything else” is good game design?
The end of this is my concern: the spec thing, because it undermines spec versatility which is not good (Legion can get lost with it’s “pick one spec” design).
I agree with the rest however.
When someone picks a class, they don’t know everything. They don’t know whether they’re going to enjoy how that class plays whilst levelling or max level, they don’t know whether they’ll enjoy it in raiding or mythic+ or whether they’ll get bored of it entirely. Nobody rolls a class knowing exactly how they will feel about it in advance (unless they’ve rolled the class before), it is a somewhat blind choice. People can tell you what to expect, but you don’t know.
So when you pick say, a fury warrior, and you discover at max level that actually, this isn’t that great, i’d like a bit of ranged combat or something, or perhaps a rotation with more nuance (sorry Fury), what happens now?
You either pay a price and reroll (which is a wall in terms of levelling time plus gearing and catchup) or you make do what what you picked.
Most people have come to find the class that “works for them” after trial and error, and through this, finding what areas they absolutely must be decent at (the stuff the class offers) and finding what areas they’re more liberal about (the weaknesses of the class). ie those who enjoy the play of MM hunter typically aren’t particularly fussed about dealing tremendous AOE damage at current because it’s not exactly something their spec can do, so it’d be a wierd thing for them to play if massive aoe damage was really important to them. They’ve found their comfort zone: dealing big upfront damage, a decent cleave game with some excellent burst windows. They may “want” other stuff, but to the extent they’ll change class? No.
So it follows covs as planned can be viewed the same, it’s a similar choice to the class one, what are you willing to excel in and what are you willing to sacrifice or be less optimal in?
I’m not saying I necessarily support the model (I want to see how it works in playing first) but I can get the justification behind the reasoning. A lot of the counter arguments regarding “it’s not classes tho” are quite arbitrary, as Ion point-blank said they wanted covenants to be like a class thing, so when people say “it’s not like classes”, well, according to the guy designing it, yes they kinda are. Disagreeing with him doesn’t change his intention in that area.
Thus the question becomes “are more permanent choice systems like classes good for established characters?” as opposed to questioning whether covenants are supposed to be like a class because Ion said that’s what they wanted them to be kind of like.
Bruh, I’ve talked on these forums how I want transmog removed precisely because of this. I want players to have to measure fashion versus power. This is another thing I missed from TBC. I was what, 15 when it came out. I remember wearing gear solely because it looked cool. I miss that part of the game so much.
Because transmog exists, so I don’t need to consider the fashion elements of the gear I’m getting. So my untransmogged gear looks like trash. Same as flying - even if I dislike flying, I fly around cuz why would I deliberately nerf myself.
Are you saying you need blizz to force you to play in a way you want? You’re either incredibly dumb or just weak mentally. Write down a list of the changes you want, specifically what you want removed and then play according to that. Then count how many times you think “damn I wish I could just X” to yourself.
It is a social game. I can’t play the way I want, because my playing affects other people. For example, I can’t pick less than optimal gear when transmogging exists, because the rational mind would say “Just tmog your gear” and they’ll be right. Same thing with flying - I can’t force people to wait for me because I’ve decided to prance around on my raptor. I have to fly. Both transmog and flying are too big of an advantage to not use them. With transmog, the appearance of gear doesn’t matter at all, it should never be a consideration, and with flying, the world doesn’t matter at all and none of its challenges can ever be a consideration.
But we are getting situations that there is a covenant that is good for one class and others that are garbage… and Blizzard will spend all of their resources trying to balance the system, rather than freeing up the resources to improve specs and create meaningful content.
The only way to “balance” things truly would be to make them worthless, at least if we have a choice to choose between abilities the balance doesn’t really matter as much.
I do not think your points regarding warriors, rogues, paladins not being able to be range make any sense for this argument. The fact is, each class has tools and options which can strengthen and weaken them for each given piece of content, and it’s at the players disposal to make those choices. Yes if a player didn’t enjoy what they rolled they would re-roll, but that choice of re-rolling gives you a whole new spec and class to experience.
Do you not see how frustrating it would be for a player to want to choose a covenant based on their RP/Lore, but be completely handicapping themselves if their choice had the worst ability. So they feel forced to choose a different covenant and not experience the RP they wanted.
I don’t see how people think what is happening in Shadowlands is a “meaningful choice” it just truly isn’t.
The way I see this, is that they have developed a couple of new abilities/talents, but rather than just letting us use them, they are locking them behind walls for no real reason.
Just to finish my point -
Scenario 1 - Continue as Blizzard intended, the players against “pull the ripcord” are happy because they are locked in and their “meaningful choice” was to choose their covenant based on the lore and which they wanted. Meanwhile the players that are for “pull the ripcord” are unhappy because either they go with the covenant they want and handicap themselves of the better abilities for their class.
Scenario 2 - Blizzard pulls the ripcord and allows ability swapping only (not covenant swapping). EVERYBODY gets to choose their covenant based on the lore/RP, but at the same time gets to use the abilities that the covenants has granted them during their leveling experience and not feel they have to “pick the right covenant”
You have to be trolling. Remove transmog and you’ll just look like a mess. That’s the difference. Just like people don’t want to wait on you on your ground mount, nobody is going to want to carry you because you’d rather wear cool looking gear that’s expansions old.
I am under the distinct impression you believe the active abilities are what determines which covenant is the best and… boy that is so wrong. In fact, the active abilities don’t matter all that much. The main thing that determines how good a covenant will be for a spec is the soulbinds. There’s spec-specific conduits, and soulbinds can make or break your character. You can get upwards of 30% difference in performance just based on the soulbinds. 2 characters, same spec, same covenant, can have drastic difference in performance based on soulbind builds. The active abilities can be removed if you ask me, because they’re causing infinite confusion and don’t matter all that much.
I’m very much in favor of Blizz allowing us to completely mess up our builds. I’d much rather have our power rely on builds rather than gear. We’re getting both in Shadowlands and that’s… something, I guess.
So lets all be ‘worse than we could’ and not have goals … or at least this sounds like that. Next we remove damage meters because it would be unfair for someone.
This sounds like how blizzard are viewing it to me. As i’ve said elsewhere, whilst I can appreciate their reasoning, it doesn’t mean I support their current covenant stance. I can’t say that without playing it myself in whatever form it ends up in.
But yeah, it seems to me to deal with the impossible task of “convincing players optimization isn’t the most important thing” their solution is to try and make it impossible to be optimal and hope it convinces players to change their outlook. Risky play in my book, it’s more likely to simply really peeve a lot of people.
Oh yeah man, damage meters are so toxic…
Who doesn’t want to see their own performance… and ultimately, their own growth?
I remember critting with Templar’s Verdict for 20kish when i got to max lvl at the start of the expac… and now i’ve had crits with TV for 500k. That’s growth of power that i personally enjoy.