As a casual player here is my feedback to Covenant abilities.
You just can’t make some really powerful abilities which are situational for simming community and hardcore players. They will always choose the most powerful one. Also I don’t think you should remove them, because there is another community, casuals which doesn’t care about simming these abilities and they want to pick Covenant based on their personal preference.
My solution to this problem is really simple. For example I will pick Kyrian covenant because they are cool. I will eventually get Kyrian ability for Mage class.
I suppose other Covenants will not interact with me similar to Aldor/Scryers. NPCs would be orange and you cant interact with them.
If I would like to get Venthyr ability as a Mage, I will go to Venthyr Covenant capital city or something like their hub. There will be some guy in stealth which will recruit mercenaries. I will do some mission similar to War Campaign style. For example: Infiltrate to Kyrian base and kill their commander and bring me Anima from their storage. After few missions (should not be longer than respec Covenant), that guy will give me Venthyr Covenant ability as a reward.
This way mythic hardcore players have a faster way to obtain all class abilities from each covenant and those who want simple choice to pick one Covenant can optionally do these mercenary missions later or don’t bother at all.
Also I would make Base Covenant abilities only visual, like trasmog your spells or they should not do any damage, similar to Warlock green fire questline in MoP. And Covenant CLASS abilities would be obtainable from those mercenary questlines.
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This isn’t a bad idea tbh.
My Suggestion would simply be to have it as a talent row. We already have the covenant specific ability, I dont see a need for class ones as well. Though I do honestly like your idea a lot
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The talent trees don’t seem to be class specific but the conduits may. Or at least they shouldn’t be covenant specific as nothing was written on the description of the only conduit shown at blizzcon (which was btw really powerful, basically a passive defensive cd… But there were at least 5 such slots in a single tree while classes have at best 2 or 3 such CDs)
Ion claimed at blizzcon that they planned to offer enough options within a covenant through the soulbinds talent trees and conduits so that there was no clear superior covenant and all of the were viable for content.
This indicates that the talent trees will be much more impacting than the abilities themselves, so it’s imo far too early to complain about balance.
Edit : also for the interaction between the ability and the talent tree, that’s very unlikely as there’s 12 abilities for but a few talent trees (3 were shown at blizzcon, we may get more but it’s still a small number) which seemingly do not have spec based talents.
What i dont get is why people that dont care and dont participate in group content are against coventants beeing disabled for group and instanced content.
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What I don’t get is peoples ridiculous need to min-max literally every aspect of the game.
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I have literally 0 faith that this will be true, one year of almost no talent balance/azerite has left me with nothing but pessimism on this matter, even if they do balance them I will remember that twilight devastation has the same chance to appear as the avoidance proc does. That’s enough for me to assume that it will not feel good to have to make a choice, there will be better ones for specific situations and classes, just let us chose freely and keep rp separated from power gain.
That said everything i say here might change once we have more info, what I’m saying here is completely based on past expiriences and what little they told us. Still I will comment onwhat they give us and will comment again once more come to light.
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How is picking an AoE ability for an AoE fight min-maxing ? Also stop calling everyone that cares about their dps a min-maxer.
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ofc so be ready for evry feedback to be ignored!
its not even min max,if you just wanna try a different ability casue seems fun? To abd you cant youre nto allowed!
A few things I just want to bring up because they seem to keep rotating in discussion.
- There is more reason to believe the difference between abilities will exceed 1% performance than not. Evidence is balancing of azerite traits, heck even talents on the same row, intended for the same content (ie the AOE row on enh shaman) are not within 1% of each other, and people think abilities intended for different content will be within 1% of each other on like content? How naive can people be?
The only way to bring it close to 1% is to make the abilities way way way way less dynamic from each other, which kills the RPG choice. So if you’re an advocate of the RPG choice big differences but argue “like it matters, it’s 1%” then youre entertaining two contrary ideas.
- the idea that the only players interested in performance are “the 1%” is a straw man, as is the idea that anyone interested in performance outside of this is a “sheep”. Aside from being downright snobbish, a vast amount of players care about improving performance, and make decisions based upon that without referring to guides. They experiment, trial and error. Locking fluidity harms that playstyle and ENCOURAGES people to be sheep because they don’t have the option to learn from their mistaken choice and amend it outside of a hefty punishment. Why would you punish the curious experimental playstyle in favour of one that encourages people to wait until the fine numbers have been crunched for them so they pick the “statically best on average”? Again, seems like people are saying they support X whilst supporting systems that undermine X. So I’m inclined to say they don’t actually support X, they’re just happy that players with differing opinions to them are peeved and hiding behind other reasons.
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You can, you just have to work for it.
Why does a mechagnome make so much sence?
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if you think its just as simple /easy as that…
If i said what i wanted to say about the people defending this crap id prolly be banned from forums
You just know that when these things hit these same people will be here macking the usual “i cant get into a mythic dungeon because im not from the dungeon covenant fix this now Bliizard” treads.
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OFC, but they still gotta defend the stupid system by blizz for reasons?
Maybe Blizzard should make determination stack in M0.
they would still whine they gotta wipe 10+times before they can beat the easiest boss then.
Cause covenants and what not will be totally unrelavant,and not be huge impacts on dmg/healing:whatever at all >.>
Comes with the territory.
I think Shadowlands by en large is looking like a step in the right direction from a systems standpoint. Covenant Abilities being the one exception to that and I’ve been worried about this since they talked about it at Blizzcon.
There will always be an optimal choice of Covenant to pick for a specific Class and Spec. This will change over the course of the expansion as we move from one Raid Tier to the next and Mythic+ metas change.
That is the reality. People who deny this or claim it doesn’t matter have either not been paying attention or their opinion is moot, as these players are a minority who admit they don’t care either way about the systems of the game.
Personally I have an obvious choice of Covenant from a RPG perspective in the Necrolords, playing an Undead Warrior. While the short preview we have is but a glimpse of the catalogue of abilities that will be available, one can already look at the Necrolords signature ability as a fairly straight forward tank cooldown. Being primarily a DPS player it’s not a leap to speculate that another Covenant will be optimal for my spec. Another patch later this may change and any player who is interested in progressing their character will make that change. Highly competitive players who are aiming for world rankings and the world first guilds will no doubt simply work around this by leveling multiple characters of the same class to max lvl for rapid switching.
Thus, what should be a fun and cool story and cosmetic choice that the player chooses for their own preferences is ultimately undermined by tying power progression into the mix.
Quite simply, the classes and specs need to be on the same level playing field, otherwise the balancing issues that will come from this will result in Blizzard having to make the system obsolete and replace it a patch later, and then we have another BFA at our hands from a systems perspective.
I think as others have suggested in the thread making all of the abilities available as part of a talent tree or something along those lines for the expansion is the right way to go. Draculla’s suggestion of having the player help out the other Covenants to unlock the abilities is a nice one, and this could be a nice way to tie the storyline into the power progression as no doubt the Covenants will probably be banding together as the expansion goes on.
True but they will have that meaningfull choise that doesnt affect them in any way shape or form, exept limmiting them ofc.