Making it choosable would not fix the inherent problems anyways, doesn’t matter if the fixes are harder, more work and therefore less realistic, in the end the choice the neuter new systems to fix the problems of the old one should be the last resort if Blizzard does nothing or fails to address those issues. If that is the case I will stand side by side with the complainers on this issue, but won’t waste my time until I see how the specs work now, how they will work after feed back, and what M+ changes they have in store for us.
I said wow had those elements at char creation. Look in my post. So Im going to ignore your stuff about class differences given I pointed it out.
What I said is beyond that, wow has never been the kind of RPG to throw that kind of “final decision, hard backsies” at you when it comes to engaging in experimenting with later content.
Profession based perks are nowhere near on the same level as differences in abilities. Not even close, and fact remains you can level a profession to maximum in less than 24 hours. A price, but no curtail on time, as I said.
Blizz have mentioned “long” when it comes to swapping covenants. Long implies more than a single play session. So I ask you: where has wow prior to this made you make significant decisions regarding your power performance and capacity that cannot be swapped in 24 hours or less beyond character creation? (because I never disputed that).
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You can do that now, but when the major profession differences did exist, leveling professions cost a lot of relative gold and was very time consuming. Their impacts were major enough that raiding required you to get some of their perks period.
And character creation restrictions do not matter, people had to fork over money to Blizzard to become Trolls for Jaina or goblins for Kil’jaeden. Those choices never had the indication that they’d be a requirement in beating the final boss, yet they became one anyways, ignoring this happened because the choice was made at char creation is stupid.
You also conveniently ignored all the other choices I listed(Scryer vs Aldor most importantly) that were mandatory to do. Even today certain types of content become mandatory for doing end game activities, such as Visions even if you want to stay away from them. WoW has for all it’s existence had choices where your high end performance would be impacted.
Covenants are the best version of these, simply because they literally let you use the leveling experience to test all your options, and choose which you prefer with all cards on the table. Far superior to Aldor vs Scryer at the end of the day, also far superior for deciding to catch up to your peers by starting to partake in other forms of endgame to receive the same benefits they have in the endgame you prefer to do.
Okay, let me just say this. The real comparison to this is the azerite necklace.
Imagine if you got to pick only one essence. And you’re now locked to it. To change the necklace, you have to change between the zone’s factions. Anyone who comes out of a raid and wants to go and do M+ can’t simply change their essence, there are now pre-requesites.
This game, on a fundamental level, wants people to play together with friends. If your friends are pushing M+ and you’ve done a raid, you can now not push keys with your friends if that is your chosen activity.
It fundamentally goes against one of blizzard’s key goals of the game.
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People are already skeptical and Alpha hasn’t even come out yet. Ik Blizzactivision have reduced people’s hope but give em a chance.
But are these classess more unique and have their niches or are you just repeating what Ion said in his interview. I feel completely opposite because:
Every DPS spec is build on - builder -> spender idea. Enh is now a warrior with blue rage, Feral Lunge and Harpoon are basically Charge with different animation, R Shaman and H Paladin single target healing when H Pala has a lot of crit is actually the same - use instant - cast buffed heals while H Pala was the only healer with unique resource - holy power., most casters have rage like resource: Shadow, Ele, Boomkin. Fistweaving is not the case anymore. Enh Ascendance and Survival Aspect of the Hawk are the same spell. Not even mentiioning 90% of utility removed in Legion that they have to add back.
Look back to MoP - have you seen other class than priest having Spectral Guise? Shaman was able to purge 2 buffs at once. Warrior’s were able to eat phisical debuff for you with Intervene if they predicted well. You had Stormlash totem buffing teammates and their summons. Affliction had to snapshot dots. Boomkins had amazing mushrooms that were one of the most fun spells in the game. Paladins had auras to buff mounted speed for the party or give resistances. Enh had unique Searing Totem buff that they needed to track. DKs had different rune management and many, many more.
Which expansion had more unique classes actually then?
The fact you press 2 after 1 not 3 doesn’t make classes distinct. They are very generic in most cases and that’s the main reason spec x is not viable because it’s a bit worse than spec y that can do the same thing and more damage while in MoP every class had it’s purpose. Not even mentioning Wrath and Cata where specs had their unique buffs. You always prefered 1 player playing weaker spec just for buff to others so every spec could find it’s place.
How many chanses can we give them, we have been listening to this “we are listening to feedback” bull ever since the BfA beta, even worse no only did they ignore it back them but they streight up lied when they said they didnt get any feedback. Dont get me wrong everything that they said they would do in SL sounds awesome but covenants even on papper raise glaring concerns that will streight up undo everything they hope to achieve.
We are. By having an active subscription and actually bothering to read what they’ve posted I am in fact doing just that and I know I’m not the only person on this thread in this situation.
We’re just saying “This is extremely likely to ruin the game for a lot of people and eventually run it into the ground. Please reconsider.”
So, your evidence for wow being an RPG rooted in the theme of making players make meaningful content related choices at hard cost are:
Aldor versus scryers (I’d argue this isn’t similar to covenants as aldor versus acryer had rewards that were clearly tuned with certain classes in mind, ie casters went acryer, as aldor offered them little. Covenants make all classes choose between options within their own class. Also gear has replicates or replacements, abilities are not so clear cut)
Profession based perks: something that was removed and despite what you say about gold, you could still level it within 24 hours so does not dispute my claim. Costly, but not necessarily time consuming.
Hardcore raiders race changing for get a world first. A bit disingenuous given you can’t race change in game via choices, and this is linked to my earlier concession that races are an example of that. In fact, this is evidence FOR my point because it shows blizzard have implemented ways to “reverse” one of their RPG decisions, races and faction.that fact a race change undermines an RPG decision means bringing this up weakens your original point.
Let me offer counter evidence of what I look to to suggest wow is more about not fixing you on hard decisions where they may effect gameplay. Im sure I can come up with more than three.
- you can change your race
- you can change your faction
- changing specs has no cost and is immediate
- changing talents has no cost
- tomes allow you to change talents on the go.
- once grinded essences have no cost to swapping.
- gear has dual primary stats to ease transition between spec swapping.
- since aldor and scryers the game has never had an antagonist faction grind that awards gear or power.
- they removed profession perks
- all dual choice RPG events (DH order hall, sylvanas) come with a huge disclaimer that THIS WILL NOT AFFECT CHARACTER POWER.
So from where I’m standing, there’s more I favour of wow being that kind of game I’m saying, and thus covenants breaks with tradition, than there is it being what you say it is, and keeping with tradition.
Il give them a chance when they show they actilly take feedback in acount from players and actully change stuff
This is going to be horrendous Blizzard.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Solid class design is all we need, not this weird multi-choice special ability that will be a massive toothache.
IF it worked out well, yeah it would be amazing.
But it’s simply unrealistic to expect anything more than unbalanced talents.
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But here we are talking 3 abilities designed to be used in three different specs, covenants abilities are 4 and have to be balanced on all 3 specs, it’s not the same thing, is it possible that in hte end they will be? sure but i doubt it seeing as they are more design with content in mind then classes.
Entirely possible, still don’t think it will happen and find it unlikely. As i said I am assuming the worst possible outcome in my posts, because of what they have recently delivered, but I’d be happy if they proved me wrong.
All that aside, I still think it’s a waste to be relegated to only 1 of 4 spells for an expansion, they are cool and interesting and would enjoy switching between them more then the added rpg flavour.
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I will just challange two of your points, because that is all I need to do after you managed to dig a grave so deep you cannot escape it.
Can you earn the gold necessary for a race or faction change in game within a 24 hour session of gameplay? The answer is maybe less than 1% of the player base could. If your answer to RPG choices being undone easily is to either throw money at the screen or be a real goblin to actually afford it in realistic gameplay time.
Choosing a Covenant is meant to be on the level of choosing your Faction and Class, it is treated on the same level for this given expansion, being given the same level of importance in the story as both your Class and Faction did in the previous two. Tying a flavour of power to this makes complete sense, and has the checks and balances in place that the impact of it should be merely overblown by people if Blizzard does not astronomically screw up.
Soo divide the player base even further gotit.
The method of reversal is irrelevant, if WoW were all for such choices sticking, they’d never allow you to faction change in the first place. It costing IRL money is irrelevant. You can argue all you want that people can’t grind that money in game, point is they can reverse one of the core RPG choices of the franchise. Now if that’s not evidence I don’t know what is.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like choice. I like flavour. I like the idea of covenants. I like it because I want to try it properly. I don’t like the idea that to do so I’m going to have arbitrary punishments thrown at me. For me RPG is captured by the fact that I can make choices continually. Locking the freedom to do so behind time and then saying “meaningful” is disingenuous to me given this game has never really presented that in a hard fashion before.
As you said, we have to see the final numbers and talents In the covs. It may turn out my fears are baseless which I hope is true, and thus the difference between choices doesn’t feel so bad. We’ll have to wait and see on that front. I think we’ll disagree until then and we see more. Hopefully we’re both satisfied as in the end that’s what we all want after all.
What divide? There is no inability to play together based on the choice? The difference is literally in the form of a single ability and the various flavours the Soulbinds will take. You’d see a fairly bigger divide between those who practice Jewelcrafting now than those who stick to say Engineering.
Odd, last time you said the method of reversing choices mattered because wow only makes those that do not require long time investments to reverse. But the second I point out that race and faction changes do require that for the extreme majority, suddenly they don’t matter anymore, eh?
Dig, dig, dig your grave, for this is how you use arguments.
I hope you are right, i hope that your faith in blizzard is not misplaced but the way i see it, its going to be the M+ covenant that groups will want your AoE ability, the Raid covenant where raid leaders will expect you to be with you ST etc etc. The devide will be between the different types of content. I have no faith with blizzard to pull this off in the way you expect it.
You not even fully know one out of the 4 changes which will impact classes and balance (class update, legendaries, covenants abilities and covenant soulbinds with talent trees and conduits)
It’s not a matter of waiting for the end of the expansion, it’s just having an idea of what will be there at launch. And right now we’re still missing almost a third of these abilities on top of knowing nothing of the other changes.
So yeah, too early to complain about balance. Or rather to give feedback rather than merely barking complains about things you still ignore
Can we finally be done with 3rd party powers and just get more spells and talents instead? I want more WoW not “systems” that are ruining my fun for 2nd expansion in a row. I feel that Blizzard is playing safe card here. I mean that if players will hate the covenant system they won’t bother fixing it but they will remove it with the next expansion and add something new. I see it as a wrong approach because if you add new spells you can always tweak, tune them properly and make them work. It happened in early Wrath, Cata, MoP and WoD so it’s normal that some tuning might fix things but if you add a system that is not fun and irritating like Azerite armors and you make it the main feature of the expansion then you are in trouble because you can’t remove it or drastically change it. Both legendaries and azerites were heavily complained about so I don’t get another similar system like this added.
Can we get more WoW and less “systems” that Ion loves so much? Just make Covenants Suramar/Class halls. The biggest problem of the current Blizzard is forcing us and telling us how to play the game when old Blizzard back then just gave us sandbox and toys to have fun as we wish. I’d like more freedom finally like in old times not another “system” that is gatekeeping my must have spell that I need to even be viable.