honestly covenant abilities should just be a little something on the side rather than having a huge impact on class to class game play, at this rate you might as well just reinstate artefact weapons and be done with it.
I love how this response is basically the transcript of Preach’s video.
Doesnt make it any less true.
Just because he said it in a video, doesnt mean we just blindly follow it. We can think for ourselves.
TBF i made the point that classes are not 2 abilities and a bunch of passives several hours before the video. Agreeing with a youtuber/streamer doesnt make you a sheep, its just some people are way more articulate to get your point across.
I’m not saying that. I agree with everything. It’s just funny to read the same examples that I’ve just heard Preach say out loud.
Choosing them all means making no choice.
There’s this mentality going around where everyone thinks they need to min-max everything and therefore everything needs to be optimal at all times and they need to copy everyone else and on and on it churns.
Meanwhile, on the flip-side, everyone’s always complaining about FotM and not having any customisation and never being able to pick what we want and constantly having to respec for every fight and all that jazz.
These two desires are diametrically opposed to one another.
I want you making a choice based on aesthetics first and foremost, and I also want some cool powers that go along with that choice. It’s no worse than racials or the old talent system. The problem here is not that we’re tying powers to aesthetics.
The problem here is that these abilities are very powerful and will have a profound impact on your damage rotation. Simply picking one over the other can give 5% DPS variances and things like that.
That isn’t what they should be, and I’ve said that since day 1. See here:
I like the idea of Covenant abilities and these more meaningful semi-permanent choices. Deleting it because you can’t understand why people want to make decisions that stick in an MMORPG is an idea that can only be born in the mind of an obsessive min-max’er who couldn’t care less about the world and the social elements.
And that’s exactly what Preach is, and I respect that he wants to be that guy, but most people aren’t that guy, and they want some RPG back in their MMORPG. The fact that you could even respec at all was considered a necessary design flaw in the vanilla iteration of WoW.
I think the solution, the one where we get fun abilities that tie to aesthetics and a semi-permanent RP based choice, while also not requiring obsessive min-max’ing, is to nerf those abilities to the point where they become like racials. Another advantage of this is we also avoid the crazy CD stacking and broken utilities problems like those we had in MoP.
That way we tie abilities to Covenants, but we don’t break the game for min-max’ers, either. What they’re doing right now will spawn way too much QQ from a minority but vocal part of the playerbase. It isn’t going to work.
These two come from two separate communities. So its not a contradiction, its more like butting of heads. There are the min/maxers whos play style is to be optimal. There are also the more casual players who want to experiment, and for some reason think they need to min/max for borderline trivial content.
Right now its around it could go up to 40+%. There is also the argument that you cant put a value on utility.
Stop pushing this narative. The abillities are just way too different and too impactfull to be blanced. You will say that we wont need them unless we are the #1%, we do not know how the instances will be tuned. Will they be tuned around min/maxing ? If so its mandatory to min/max then. Wont they be tuned around that? Then its going to be cheese fest. If we you want the Preach example the TL:DR is you can skip mechanics with the teleport or the shield if its not designed around that, if it is you will not survive without it. What about the soulbinds, essentially and Ankh for everyone, do you believe that cant be exploited, or and execute like effect for everyone, how do you design DPS checks around that ?
Lets not forget about the internal balancing of covenants how do you balance a Covenant wide utility, a Class wipe abillity a covenant wide skill tree and spec wipe sockets without the whole house of cards toppling down. Example lets say Venthyr Arms warrior is overperforming. Do you nerf the conduits? Congradulations you just nerfed all arms warriors. Do you nerf Soulbinds? You just nerfed every venthyr. Does your mage have to be nerfed because the Arms warriors are busted ?
Also there is a good portion of people that like to play multiple specs. How do these abilities balance across the specs. Take my warlock for example. The Kyrian abillity generates 5 soulshards when executed properly. 5 soul shards are 2-5 choas bolts for destro, 5 melefic ruptures for affliction and 5 demons for demo. Night fae and Maldraxxus work very different for Affliction than they do for destuction and demonology. And im not talking about numerical balance here, in some cases such abillities can be semi-dead buttons. Its worse for hybrid classes. Are we repeating BfA where we are spec locked?
Ok so another issue how do you pick a covenant. Yes you get to “test” the abilities during the short time you are leveling, but you dont get to see the soulbinds. One ability could perform well during questing (id say the Necrolord shield) yet in a dungeon or raid enviroment it could be completly useless for you. Again back to Preach’s videos, yes it might impact mostly the 1% that doesnt mean heroic raiders wont be impacted, doesnt mean casuals wont be impacted. Why is it bad to experiment without consequences.
You are getting that. Player power does not have to tie in with RP choices. You can get consequences even if you remove the borrowed power. Also there is nothing RP-ish about a warlock dealing ARCANE damage with a DoT or empower my shadow based channel do to NATURE damage. Nature as a WARLOCK ?!! We are the exact opposite of that . There are so many ways to do this that it could work. What if the covenants augmented you abbilities to be covenant based visually, you can have death themed fire balls if you join Necrolords or a corpse meteor. Preachs example was also interesting about encouraging the swaping of covenants where you become this hybrid, you know how people like the San’layn well Venthyr+Necrolord. Drust ? Got you fam just ditch the necrolords and come over to Ardenweld.
Just because blizzard told you its a “meaningfull choice” and that these are “sub-classes” doesnt make it so , they just want to market it that way. So instead of blaming the “obssesive min/maxers” for warning you that this system is bad turn to Blizzard and demand an ACTUAL meaningfull choice.
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A contradiction does not mean that it’s the same person saying it, although many people are. A contradiction simply means there are several statements that are opposed to one another. And that’s what those two are.
The trick is to find a way to make these two contradicting statements work together.
Probably.
Either way the point is this shouldn’t be happening.
Make me.
Yes. I do think that, which is what I post literally a few lines down from where you appear to have stopped reading.
The idea is that people will have a mix of these different things and encounters will be designed to assume you have a mix of them.
If one of them becomes dominant, Blizzard has failed.
Personally I think soulbinds should be similar across the covenants. Like I said, the variation is fun, but it’s too powerful to be static. We have to tone it way down. But if we do, it will work.
They can make class-targeted soulbind nerfs or buffs if they want to. And they will, for sure. Might even split them for PvP. Not buying this argument.
I don’t honestly think you should be doing that as much as you think you should. I think you should have to sacrifice your offspec for your mainspec - or create more characters.
This is a fundamental difference of opinion on what character customisation means. I want you to be a destruction warlock, or whatever. Not a warlock. I want warlocks to be different from one another, and whenever you come in here and tell me you should be able to choose it all, I just reply that you haven’t chosen anything at all.
This is absolutely fundamental and, ultimately, it’s what drives this whole discussion.
I think it’s reasonable to allow experimentation. That doesn’t mean I think it’s reasonable for your to be able to change things up all the bloody time.
Perhaps something like invitationals would be cool? Like, you’re specced Night Fae, and then for a few days, the Venthyr are having this party and they invite the mortal heroes of Azeroth to re-align with them, to give them a chance. You can then try it for a few days. If you like it, you can keep it, no penalty. If you don’t, you’ll just revert automatically.
Can’t change it whenever you want, but you get chances to test out new stuff and change it. When an invitational happens, the penalty is completely removed.
But again, I want it to stick. I don’t want you changing your entire character build for every raid boss, or changing it back and forth every arena game. The meta breaks.
Yes, it does. That’s exactly what it does. That’s what role playing game means. You’re taking on a role in the world and using the powers that grants you to complete encounters.
You separate those two - you take out the RPG. That’s why I call modern WoW a “reasonably competent action game.” They killed the RPG. There are no meaningful character choices, neither in powers or in storytelling. You have no choices at all.
Finally Blizzard tries to put the RPG back into WoW, and everybody’s screaming about how awful it is that characters are going to be different.
**** that argument in its stupid face.
Designing this is challenging, no doubt. It requires a lot of testing, it requires being careful, and it requires making compromises on its powers.
I want the differences to be somewhere in the scale of racials with very situational uses in raids which you can’t do without. You need a mix of them - and if you don’t have it, it just breaks. But giving mages binding shot silence and things like that… no! That’s not good.
You’re not arguing for a meaningful choice. You’re arguing to remove it because you think there’ll be a wrong one. The trick is to make the choice meaningful AND make there not be wrong choices.
This is hard, but not impossible.
I have a crazy idea, remember that part of your UI called cookie-cutter talents? Add the covenant skills there as you play Shadowlands, pick and choose and grind whatever rep you want for cool goodies. Add to it the soulbinds and utility spells from covenants and bang, fixed.
Remember, is not about just min max is about friggin fun.
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Ok name me some MMORPGs that make you sacrifice power over aestethics, or the so called “meaningfull choice” that gimps you.
Please God, not this again…
For the hundredth time, wanting an AoE ability in heavily AoE base situations, like dungeons, and a single target ability in single target situation like the majority of raids bosses, is NOT min-maxing. For goodness’ sake, you’re going as far as calling it obsessive. It’s the feeling I get from playing my character that matters to me. Being stuck with a single target execute type ability knowing there’s an ability I can’t use that is a ton of fun to use on trash in dungeons is just going to make me not want to play dungeons. I just want to use abilities where they fit their intended design, which I didn’t even have a say in. As of now, for anyone enjoying more than one of 3 core end-game parts of WoW, those being PvP, dungeons and raids, picking a covenant is just about what’s going to universally suck the least in all of their favourite types of content.
What’s a “necessary design flaw”?
And why is respeccing suddenly the equivalent of murdering a puppy? I’ve never seen anyone go “Oh my god I hate that I can change this choice that I regret making in this video game… I hate that I have the option to fix it at a cost. And all these people playing what they want are ruining my fun… but I’m going to keep playing the game and never mention this feeling until Blizzard plants it in my head one day and makes me think that’s what this game needs after 15 years”.
Honestly, by some of these ideologies, I’m getting the feeling you people must think that Witcher 3 is the single worst RPG ever released in the history of the RPG genre just because you can do whatever the hell you want in that game. And believe me that would make you one of the tiniest minorities in the world.
Yeah, this would fix it. Question is how many people would be fine with them being so week now that they’ve seen how interesting a lot of them are. But you still have the issue with the signature abilities. Turning into a fox to run slightly faster and blink 10 yards doesn’t compare to a 35 yard teleport or a shield for 50% of maximum health.
Ill tell you why, because it fits the narative.
Honestly im starting to thing at this point that so many people actually eat soup with a fork.
It’s ok lads, SL will be alt friendly. Plot twist is that you will play 4 alts of the same class.
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That is literally impossible. You can’t design anything around a mix of things on such scale. You have the class, the class covenant ability, the signature covenant ability and then how that class synergizes with that signature ability. Also, you can’t assume that those thing will always be present, because in some cases there just won’t be a necrolord for example. And you can’t assume that it will never be there either. The only way to “balance” around this is to not balance around it and just pretend that covenants don’t exist, which will only make the fights too trivial because of covenants. It’s a mess.
Suddenly everyone who was pushing and celebrating the philosophy change towards more class focus and unpruning is gone and everyone wants a meaningful choice everywhere instead. Must be a coincidence I guess. Nothing to do with planting ideas in people’s heads and fixing problems that don’t exist. I chose a warlock in the character creation menu, not a destruction warlock. I don’t have a main spec. I am a warlock.
I WANNA SCREAM!! THIS STUPID PHRASE HAS NEVER BEEN UTTERED BY ANYONE UNTIL BLIZZARD DID IT!
Every single time complaints have been mate in terms of “WoW is not and RPG anymore”, it was either because of the leveling, the loot, the story, the characters… whatever and I got that and I understood those reasons. A choice that allows me to have more fun in the game is a million times more meaningful to me than choosing something I know nothing about and hoping I’m not going to hate it. I want the choice to mean that I will have fun, not hope that I won’t regret it in three weeks.
Choices here, choices there, choices inside choices, choices on top of choices, irreversible choices everywhere. So I have to choose a troll, then choose a warlock, then choose to be ONLY destruction, then choose to be ONLY Necrolord, then choose to play ONLY with this specific conduit in this slot. You want to change even a minor part of your character? MASSIVE CONSEQUENCES!!!
What happened to just playing the game and having fun doing it…
but there is a difference between min maxing your character which has been present in this game since its inception, and constantly rerolling to different classes each month though.
all i want is the ability to have the ability to make use of different options that should be given to me, rather than having to make a choice that could have a different answer within a month of the expansion launching, considering they are making it difficult to swap and swap back depending on what you want at any given time.
if i for example want to focus on mythic+ as a warlock then i should probly take venthyr, which i like the theme for as well as the ability being a good fit, the problem is that i raid as well, and the venthyr ability is essentially a dead spell on ST. it gives absolutely no advantage and it would never be pressed, unless it isnt balanced and just does insane ST damage.
imagine they had introduced the artifact abilities but they told you to pick one and then in order to get another one you had to give up the progress you had on the other one and start from scratch, you you were basically stuck having to only play a specific spec for the entire expansion, imagine as a warlock that aff is good for the first tier like in BFA. when 8.1 hit the buffed destro and it was good for dungeons, which aff has been terrible for all expansion. as someone who enjoys both raiding and aff how do i make the choice to be good at one and be useless at the other, its just not a fair choice, and just shouldnt exist in the game out right.
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Exactly. If you design the encounters without the min/maxing of covenants in mind, then the people who did min/max will just trivialize the fight, which in terms will force more people to min/max it so its trivialized for them aswell. I also want to point out that i do not want or advocate for trivial fights , but this will happen, its human nature to pick the path of least resistance.
Exept they are not ireversible. By 10.0 we will have scraped this system. The covenant abilities are going to be A) scraped in the next expansion or B) made into switchable talents/build in to your class/spec. Both of these outcomes make your choices meaningless in the long run. Actually in the long run the people that made theirchoices because of the cosmetics and story will be the ones that have had the meaningfull choice. Now the consequences here will be only for those that wanted to maximize their performance and to experiment during the expansion. The thing I really dont get is how and why arent people seeing this.
but this is a fundamental missunderstanding of the game, because there is a difference between someone who is a warlock and someone who is a destruction warlock, i made the choice to actively play all 3 specs because they are designed differently and they each have strengths and weaknesses that make them good in different situations,
much like the covenant abilities, warlocks being the main example as they are the ones im familiar with, venthyr, night fae and kyrian are most likely going to be a lot more effective in dungeons, because of how they work in general, considering that raids are generally more ST focused that dungeons this means that AoE abilities are next to useless and the venthyr ability and the night fae ability would both mostly be a dead spell in the raids. forcing someone who wants to primarily focus on dungeons to be locked into a choice that them becomes completely useless any time you are not in that specific environment is bad game design and should be changed.
and i really dont understand people who claim that giving players choice is removing players choice, there are other people that have commented saying that they will actively go agaisnt the “norm” or “meta” and take talents that they enjoy or prefer. so why is this something that they cant do with the covenants, they would be given that choice.
removing this choice from other players basically sets up one of two situations;
either you have to roll multiple of the same class in order to have access to all of them.
or you have to play through an entire expansion worried that they will randomly decide to nerf or buff something that means you have to then change over to something else in order for your character to be up to par. which in itself is a problem because the next patch will come along and some changes could be reverted, or other buffs and nerfs happen meaning that the one you originally left is now strong, but thats a shame, because rejoining a covenant that you have previously left is being designed to be difficult,
realistically they have 2 main options for the system to not be a completely an utter failure. they need to remove the power from this system and leave it as an aestethic choice which im sure everyone will be happy with, just pick the one you prefer yourself and that you like the transmogs for,
or the other option is to get as close to perfectly balanced as they can for the 9.0 release and then never make any balance changes. anything less than those 2 options causes more problems than the system is worth
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It is. You’re trying to use the minimum number of stacks while maximising output. Your thought process when making that choice is not roleplaying.
No, not that example. I’m arguing for toning it down to the point where only people who are obsessed would still believe it’s an issue. Right now it’s just straight-up an issue. It’s too powerful.
What if it only slightly, slightly sucks instead of completely sucks?
By the way, the current talent system is this problem taken to its logical conclusion. If we can change it all the time, why don’t we have them all all the time?
A necessary design flaw is when you run into a design issue that you don’t know how to solve no matter how long you think about it. There just has to be a compromise.
The issue there was Blizzard wanted talents to stick HARD, but they also wanted levelling to take 250 hours. That’s a bit extreme.
The compromise they came up with was the respec with rising gold costs.
Something similar could work for Shadowlands. But tomes? That ain’t it. Removing covenant abilities entirely? That ain’t it.
There’s a difference between respeccing a few times and respeccing every 30 minutes.
You’re all arguing for the every 30 minutes variety. I disagree.
The Witcher 3 respec potion is exceedingly rare. If you think The Witcher 3 respec potion is anything like respec tomes, you’re an idiot!
No, they can’t be directly compared. That’s OK. The 35 yard teleport needs to be checked for skip issues.
WoD says otherwise. WoD had many flaws, but its reliance on class mechanics being present is well known and was well implemented. Not reading the rest.
I’ve uttered it for 10+ years. Not my fault you haven’t paid attention.
No, I really don’t think you did. Respeccing is fine. Respeccing constantly and losing your sense of identity is a problem.
How does changing talents and your specialisation cause you to lose your sense of identity?
To be honest, you should be able to do them all and once done you should be able to respec into them just like chaging your class spec that way you can choose which would be suitable for the content you’re doing and not be stuck with a covenent you dont like just because its bis for your class/spec.
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