Some still will, some won’t. But players will decline people from pug groups without a doubt. Even now, I have trouble getting into +19-20 pug keys on my warlock, despite the fact that it’s now the third best ranged dps after fire mage and bm hunter and the fact that I’ve timed keys up to +25 on my DH which I use to push keys primarily. The simple cummunity notion that warlock isn’t the best gives me a hard time getting into content that is “under my paygrade”. Even on my DH it’s getting difficult to get into any push groups just because the top groups don’t use DH and there’s only 3 demon hunters in the top 100 players. People just look at the best and think that’s what they have to play with in order to get anywhere. Covenants have the potential to add on to that and if they think you are not using the meta covenant, you’re not getting in. People do this BS all the way from +10 keys.
The aestethics, the weekly events, the abilities and how they affect and fit your class, specs and roles, the 3 different soulbind trees and how they alter the abilities of your class, specs and roles… that’s a bit too much to cram into one single choice I’d say.
Even with it’s limitation you will have the best option available to you and even in your own covenant you can play around with your Soulbinds to customize them for different scenarios of gameplay.
An RPG is about making (lasting) choices, if you can switch them around as much as you like at any time then it would hardly be a choice. Not to mention they would have to retcon the entire story around your character to make that work.
Just pick the one that has the best options for your main area of Content (Raiding/M+/PVP) and go for that.
If it’s about anything but PvE or PvP you can pick the other covenants and reap their rewards on any number of alts you have. So generally you should pick the one that benefits you the most in your primary type of content.
Well that’s your idea of an element that an RPG needs to have. To me, an RPG needs a character that the player creates or is given to them, you need to be able to move freely around the world, find new equipment for your character, learn new skills and powers and progress the story. And a good RPG will take different story outcomes depending on what you decide to do in different points of the story, but do not necesarily affect how powerful your character is overall.
RPG is such a vague term and your idea of lasting choice is just a possible part of it, not a necessity to fit the genre. I’ve actually looked around the internet to find people’s opinions on what defines an RPG, specifically searching google for “what defines rpg” and going through the first page + a couple reddit posts, and while the word “choice” popped up quite a lot in multiple forms, it was always related to outcomes of stories and quests. The term “concequences” popped up once in one article, it actually involed making your character a specialist, BUT, the author specifically stated that this cannot be applied to the definition of the RPG genre. Most opinions were more fitting into the basic RPG system that I’ve mentioned above. This only reinforces my conviction that it’s just and idea planted in people’s heads by Blizzard.
I don’t have a primary type of content, unless you clump everything PvE together. I raid on a schedule and I do M+ in between, both of which are fundamentally different.
I wanna address a few points but I’m not gonna quote any of you because its already gonna be too long as is. And can we please get rid of the “and its not just me” lines? enough people have expressed enough both similar and different opinions in various ranges for everyone to be able to use it. I’m fairly certain if I say “I think we should all just delete the game” someone will come to this thread and agree with me at this point.
leveling in D2 wasn’t that hard. You can even pay HRs for people to get you from 1-88 in about an hour. You also have 3 free respecs per char atm. Its also a game where the items have varying stats with equal drop chances, everything is tradeable and is a completely different game (@Blizzard, please DO NOT remaster it). Just because some skills were transferred over doesn’t make D2 and WoW comparable in every aspect. Same for other games, regardless of genre.
Dual spec was a result of most classes having more than one viable spec. People mostly stuck to what they had because in a lot of cases it was the only one that worked properly. Current freedom to switch talents is there because you are missing a lot of the baseline performance increases that the old talent tree gave you. Not saying i like it I’m just saying this is the logical conclusion of the initial change. They removed some passives, moved some over to be baseline and made the rest freely swapable. Given how covenants look right now literally the same logic can be applied. You get some passives from your soulbinds, which you can change around, some more passives from your conduits, which you can change around - so why not the actives?
Keeping it cosmetic is perfectly fine in a way because that means that power comes from where it should - gear + skill (the cherry on top of the cake for that not being the case are corruptions like IS and GW). You play, get gear, get good, push harder content, get better gear, get more powerful. Not having mythic ilvl from +15 weekly chests, normal raid tier ilvl gear from emissaries and gear that has higher ilvl than HC twice a week from visions which at this point seem more than trivial. Borrowed power from tier sets was the best form of borrowed power implemented imo. It gave you an incentive to switch up your gameplay by providing buffs to certain skills/play styles without hanging around for too long. The other good thing about sets is that you didn’t start off the expansion with it, which meant that your class didn’t feel/wasn’t dysfunctional before you got it.
Performance. There is a degree up to which the difference in performance is not an issue. Given how different the abilities are, both class and signature, and how they work for different specs, it seems that we’ll end up with the first of the 2 cases of issues I’m about to point out.
The real issue is if you’re benched because your choice of a wrong covenant means the performance gap is so bad even your guild won’t take you over someone who lucked out when they picked their covenants.
The second issue which I see brought up a lot in this thread is “you won’t get invited to pugs”. This is not an actual issue. If we’re talking WoW game design pillars - the game was designed to be played with a group of people. Thus you join a guild and given the multiple endgames you can take part in, you join a guild for the activity you enjoy the most and join the nicely provided communities so you can easily group up with people of similar skill level and interests.
I can open another forum thread complaining about how I get declined for pug groups despite keystone master (I know its not that hard, not flexing - making a point) and 12/12 HC but I’m not because I know its an issue I’ve created for myself by going against a core design philosophy of the game. TIL people check rio for +8 keys, which indicates its present on every level and the only way to solve this issue for yourself is to join either a guild or community and be done with it. And no, just hosting your own raids/keys isn’t a complete solution because you end up with unnecessarily long queue times, only difference being that you’re the one hosting the group. You’ll still likely end up with people who underperform and have to requeue, deplete and so on. Just apply the same logic people have been applying to arena teams since TBC on a slightly larger scale and move on.
“You chose warlock, not affliction warlock”. And I chose paladin. Pure and hybrid classes don’t magically have different rules apply just because your specs fill/don’t fill different roles. This is doubly so when you consider that the secondary stats you have don’t necessarily function all that well for all specs. This is even more emphasized when you take into consideration how even before the corruption clown fiesta, groups occasionally switched formation to have 1 tank or fewer healers because the ones they did have came with the appropriate toolkit to deal with the situation. The same applies for all the DPS players who were in the group at the time. If their classes and specs weren’t what they were - it wouldn’t have been possible. (talking about current and around appropriate ilvl content here - I know you can faceroll old things however you want). If everyone specs AoE on a ST fight you can’t pull this off because even if you have the skill and the gear you’ve taken away the toolkit so again - why do that with covenants?
This one is more targeted toward Blizzard and not anyone in this thread in particular. For the past 2 expansions we’ve had 2 forms of endless content in the form of M+ and AP grind. Now we’re replacing the AP grind with Torgast’s endless mode which is optional and IMO a step in the right direction. I’m guessing people will still spend a hell of a lot of time there but for the right reason - because its fun, not because its mandatory. Do we really need a step in the opposite direction with a 3rd endless grind system in the form of switching covenants for the BORROWED POWER tied to them?
To everyone complaining about choice - the last time blizzard made a choice for you was islands and visions. Players did choose. Some chose raiding, others M+, some chose to rarely set foot outside arenas and BGs. And no matter which one players CHOSE, that choice was stripped away because the most powerful thing you can get is corruptions. You had to farm islands to get your neck up to par and assaults, emissaries and visions to get your corruptions because it is the only reliable way. Think of how much your choice mattered when you wanted to try out a new build, which works very different from the one you’d used up all your echoes on. And now consider not being able to just farm out 2 sets of gear because in their current design, that wall is there every time you want to switch back to your old covenant. You didn’t choose this - you chose to have fun. What you got was a big middle finger and a resounding NO.
The wall of text at this point is getting so long I’m guessing most probably won’t go through the trouble of reading this far so here is a 2 in 1. “Lorewise it wouldn’t fit” - yeah, probably if you were still A hero. Now you’re THE hero. Your complaint was perfectly valid a few expansions ago, CHAMPION, but unless Blizzard somehow tone it down - its perfectly reasonable from a lore perspective. “Its an RPG choice” - yeah, and they made it for you. The zones have linear progression and each covenant has mounts, mogs and activities tied to it. Having a character in each to get those, see the deeper lore, get the mogs and fit thematically is arguably giving you more of a choice. They don’t provide enough customization to make everyone fit thematically and they’re far from permanent enough to have as big of an impact as they currently seem to have. Your consecration won’t start dealing nature damage because you’re in Night Fae. DKs didn’t go to Dalaran to learn just enough of the arcane arts to cast 1 spell. The best fitting (aesthetically) covenant class abilities fit just as well as the worst fitting ones don’t.
Blizzard actually have a very clear stance of what is permanent and what isn’t. The only thing that is currently permanent in the game is your class. You can change your realm, faction, race, gender, appearance and spec. If we’re gonna be making permanent choices, lets start with ones that last more than 2 years because unlike covenants, your character will still be there in 10.0 (assuming the expansion isn’t a complete flop and there is a next expansion after Shadowlands).
To those that read the whole thing - Thank you for coming to my TED Talk!
That is not a choice that sets your character apart from others. That is just you relentlessly and without friction picking the right tool for every job because you always can.
It’s a choice on a similar level to pressing the right ability at the right time. It isn’t a long-term roleplaying choice that sets you apart from other characters.
If there is a universally BiS choice for every situation in a game mode, Blizzard has failed. If the Venthyr covenant is best against every viable comp in arena, they have failed. If the Kyrian is always best against every boss and every trash pull in M+, then they have failed. Etc.
The worry seems to be far more that they will fail rather than about the idea itself being bad; and there are a ton of people, like you for instance, who just doesn’t understand what a choice in an RPG even is.
I just saw the interview with Preach as well and it was the same thing. It amazes me how people can play an MMORPG for 15 years and yet not understand the power of the combination of being in a community and being unique.
Every single time it is mentioned it’s somehow glossed over or laughed off. “I don’t understand it!” he said. Well, no ****.
This is true to a degree, and this is also why Blizzard are proceeding so incredibly carefully here and taking so much feedback.
However, it isn’t entirely true. A too powerful spell can be nerfed and a too weak one can be buffed; so long as the abilities keep their niche, it should be OK.
Well, they’re not. They’re making them slightly suboptimal.
Which has always been the case in every expansion. Every single one of them! Either it comes from off-spec vs main-spec and loot distribution in your raid group, or it comes from personal RNG, or it comes from legiondaries, or it comes from your ability to do a particular piece of content like getting 1.8k in arena or whatever, or it comes from the artifact weapons where you had to choose buffing one spec, or it comes from different stat weights being important for different specs or even different talent loadouts in a spec and you going for one over the other, or it comes from which ever corruptions happened to drop and if that opened up an alternative build, or it comes fro- you know what? If you don’t get the point after all that, you never will.
Being able to select the ability but not the soulbind does not achieve what you want. Unless you mean you can also swap the soulbinds, then your system will not achieve its intended purpose.
If you do open up all the soulbinds, that’s precisely when the progression system breaks, because the progression systems are tied to the soulbinds.
So then either you have to be able to pick any soulbind across any covenant, which brings us to what I just said.
Or we have to rip apart soulbinds and the talents from soulbinds, too - and now we’ve got this total disconnect between what you can do and who is giving you your power. The sense of world and consistency has been destroyed - the whole thing is making about as much sense as a warlock learning from Prophet Velen. It’s total and complete nonsense.
This I agree with, and this is what I have stated. We need to completely rethink what these abilities are, not whether they should exist.
I don’t think it’s bullcrap. I think that WoW very much lacks long-term or at least blind decisions, and has done so for a long time, because they keep getting this feedback.
Thankfully, FINALLY, they have worked out that RNG to differentiate people is a worse system than player agency to differentiate people, and yet the community howls in agony anyway. “Everyone must be everything! All must be the same! I care a great deal about logs! Rabble rabble rabble.”
Honestly, I don’t even understand why you guys are playing RPG’s sometimes. It really sounds like you should be playing a completely different genre. It is not a story choice that makes an RPG.
No, it isn’t. This is really, really, really important. Being suboptimal in some scenarios does not mean you made the wrong choice. It just means you made a choice that came with upsides and downsides.
A parallel to this would be to say that you made the wrong choice to become an IT specialist when suddenly faced with the prospect of working out a complex math problem instead for a little while, so that you can then apply your solution afterwards as an IT specialist.
That does not make sense. Would it have been optimal to get a mathematician for those brief moments? Yes. Is it realistic? No. Did you make the wrong choice because you decided to go something optimal most of the time but not all of it? No. You made the best choice you could.
Because this is obviously the most optimal way to play it if you can get away with it, and that means everyone’s just doing it wrong if they’re not doing this, and many of us don’t want to do this. So we impose some restrictions on you so that you have to choose where your power goes a little bit, so that if you focus on all 3, you’ll be able to deal with a greater variety of scenarios, but when that moment of extremities arises, you will fall short. You will get your niche that way, and that niche is your versatility, just like everyone else has a niche.
Depends on what you mean. Not every button is available on a single encounter, no; but you are not specialised. You are kitted. Your talents are as interchangeable as gear - in fact more so. Do you consider gear as part of your specialisation? Is this how it works, now?
Again, you’re not specialising your character - you’re just swapping loadouts. The point is missed by a country mile here.
And besides, if this was the goal, I don’t think the system should exist at all. We have a metric ton of systems like this already - the last thing I want is yet another addon and 3 lines in my already bulging load-out macros…
Think that over a few times. If you can adapt your character’s strength and weaknesses to any situation, do you actually have a weakness? When you can always put the weakness specifically where it doesn’t matter? And when that’s the case, you have only strengths, right? And the only thing that’s currently holding you back from that are the systems you can’t change constantly. The only reason you don’t have an answer to everything is that rogues don’t, and you can’t change your class at a whim.
It’s about where you draw the line. And I get you all enjoy not having weaknesses by always being able to “intelligently” spec out of them before encountering any situation. But that’s really, really, really stale.
This is literally FUD. You actually think that the 5% AoE damage you lost for 7% ST damage is going to be a hindrance to you every single week of M+ and make it impossible for you to compete at your level… 0’s? Come on.
An expansion is the time to make such changes.
It seems to me that you’re arguing that the game shouldn’t change back because it has been changed into this. Well, why was it changed into this in the first place?
That was about getting a lot more core abilities available in each spec, increasing the flexibility of said spec. It wasn’t about making it easy to play all of them.
It amazes me that you guys genuinely believe that this ability is going to completely break your ability to play content your character is not optimised for, but the choice of which legendary to buy will not, and the choice of which gear you pass or roll off-spec on will not, and the soulbinds will not, and your stat weights will not, and having to use intellect weapon in one spec and strength in the other will not, etc. etc.
I genuinely fear this community has completely lost perspective.
This system is not new. It’s just a lot more overt this time. You actually noticed it. Congratulations.
I don’t think anybody’s suggesting that literally everything should be locked down. Some things should be load-out and kits, and other things should be more permanent. There’s a balance there.
No, what really worries me, is that so many people think that there should be nothing that’s permanent at all. There are so many calls in here, and I saw this from Preach as well today in his interview with Ion, where the argument is basically “I want my character to be an exact clone at the drop of a hat if I will for it to be so.”
That, to me, is the absurdity. And Blizzard are bull-rushing straight into this debate, and I’m ****ing glad they’re doing it, because it’s hilariously overdue.
Thanks for proving my point. Even if we had to return to town and pay gold, we could still respec whenever we wanted. None of it was gated behind some Aldor versus Scryers reputation grind, which is what Blizzard seems to be aiming at for the Covenant spells.
What worries me is that people don’t see that chosing a covenant for 2 years is just limiting you fun in chosing playstyles. We can not talk about strengths of covenants at the start. We are going to gamble anyway what is good or bad. We have no clue what happens over 2 years with covenant balance. But i see amazing fun playstyles that fit certain builds with talents, and you are only alowed to have fun with 1. Or make 4 chars of the same class/spec.
Exactly. And this is what Ion was telling Preach (watch that discussion, btw). And I 100% agreed with Ion.
A way of playing the game has become the norm (not for everyone of course, but let’s say the more hardcore players), that really shouldn’t BE the norm in an RPG. Blizzard is doing the right thing.
With total control over all aspects of your character and the ability to change that at any time; one thing will always be the best answer. And this in turn leads a large part of the playerbase to adhere to those ‘rules of the best’. And then an even larger part of the playerbase will punish and/or exclude those who do not conform to the ‘norm’ set (not by the game, but by a part of the playerbase). That’s just not okay. That’s basically fascism.
Well, fasicm goes a bit too far. But the current situation of what blizzard systems created is that people of the same ilvl, of the same class/spec, there can be a x2 factor in strength. We can call that of course ‘suboptimal’. I do understand those worries.
Also looking at the slow pace blizzard seems to fix, or not fix at all, totally underperforming classes.
Reading through the replies of the people that argue for the covenant abilities to be locked, I feel like there is a core misunderstanding of Preach’s argument.
First of all when it comes to RPG mechanics and choices, that is actually a very nebulous and vague term. If I play Dragon Age, the rpg mechanic I care about is the dialogue choice system. If I play Skyrim I care about exploring the world and roleplay a certain type of character in my mind. If I play Divinity I’ll care more about story choices and companion choices on my first playthroughs and then the builds I make in later playthroughs.
I’d also argue that Divinity 2 has a great example of this style of choice. You have permanent story choices by choosing 3 specific companions but you can build those characters in any way you want.
Preach’s argument is that this RPG choice hill is a strange one to die one, since every RPG defines its own restrictions and mechanics based on what it wants the players to experience and not because it’s writen in the RPG handbook that it must be so.
So why implement the RPG-ness through this type of hard exclusion between the choices, a system that we’ve never had in this game. People keep pointing out to vanilla talent trees as an example of exclusion, but it costs 50g at max to respec. If you play Classic right now you know 50g ain’t that much (though I will admit it’s a much different ecosystem than Vanilla).
Another point that is worrying and I don’t understand how people so easily dismiss is that historically Blizzard has been terrible at balancing things. Even in the good old days when the only power gain was gear you could have huge balance differences between classes. “This game was never balanced then” is the usual argument. Yes but now we have on top of the usual hard stuff to balance a MULTITUDE of systems that work together to provide power gains. How is all of this going to be managed?
This is honestly the most worrying part, I’m not even a 1% raider I just wanna do heroic and get curve but I still like to feel like I perform well. It genuingly felt terrible in Legion when I got a sub-par legendary as a fire mage and the other guy had the pyro bracers. It felt terrible in BFA when I got an upgrade azerite piece from a boss and I couldn’t wear it cuz I didn’t have the neck high level enough to use the traits even thought I had been playing daily since launch. By the time I wanted to try BFA again there were so much band-aid systems slapped on top of it I just couldn’t be bothered.
At the end of the day we all just want the game to be enjoyable and we want to avoid the mistakes of the past and it’s worrying to see Blizzard fix some mistakes but commit to other apparent mistakes.
You couldn’t respec very often though. People here aren’t asking for a sometimes respec. They’re asking for constantly changing talents to fit their particular need in that moment.
If you tried that in vanilla, you got to pay 50 gold each way maybe handfuls of times every day. You weren’t going to get 200g/day in vanilla, trust me.
What worries me is that people don’t see that choosing a class for 2 years is just limiting you fun in chosing playstyles
^Makes even more sense as what you just said, yet we all accept it.
Ok. I have 2 max level ferals this expansion, and next expansion significantly cuts down levelling time.
For once in a friggin’ life time I read one of your posts and went “Wow, this all makes sense!”
And then you did that.
Why?
Ah! I thought you also cared that making different dialogue choices had different consequences about where the story would go and which allies coughsoulbindscough you would have?
Hold on a second, do you guys want to play a Choose your own Adventure superimposed on an action game? Like that stupid Sylvanas loyalist quest line in the War Campaign? Is that what we’re going for? Seems like that. I hope not.
Nnnnno. These NPC’s have classes and depending on which of them you pick, you get a totally, totally different campaign.
Covenants are additions to your class/spec. You have a lot of the same buttons available of that spec that you like to play, and then you miss out on some because you have no access to them. A class is something totally different than a covenant, so i do not understand the comparison. But indeed. I got all healers except priest available on max level. Because i like those viarity. But now i have to level 12 more chars.
The spell you get at level 50 and 52 are additions to your existing class/spec kit.
What you’re doing is you’re drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “My permanent choice should be my class and race. No more.”
And I’m drawing a line in the sand as well because I’m sick of having to switch buttons for every encounter in 8 different systems, and also I’d like some more character customisations.
So I suppose at this point we can just burn the whole thing to the ground. Nobody gets any of it! Ta-daaa!
I am pretty sure i do not have to switch for every encounter. Not on my level of play. But if you are, then you are just getting benched because not optimal.
but considering that a lot of players are here for raiding why should they be forced into making long term decisions that they dont want to, it doesnt make any sense to remove player choice in an expansion that clearly set out as an expansion where player agency would be more of a priority. i want to optimise my character, i want to be able to choose to take an AoE spec for an AoE situation, i dont feel good about my long term RP value if im forced to play a suboptimal spec for every situation im just annoyed that the devs built a stupid system into the game that forces me to play a way i hate.
please name one time where blizzard has been able to properly balance anything in the past 15 years, even all the way back to classic they designed the game then around certain specs being impossible to play in certain raids.
i understand what choice they are trying to push us to make, i just vehemently disagree with forcing us to make that choice, i genuinely believe it is a completely and utterly stupid idea that will ruin the fun of the expansion for a vast majority of the player base.
a good exmaple is the live servers right now, i have been playing aff since the start of the expansion and i have had a very strict talent selection because most of the talents were so useless they were essentially dead spells. more recently i have had the option to change the specs around in different situations to give myself a better AoE spec and stick with the original talents for ST situations if i was playing aff for them situations, the nice part about that, i have the ability to choose the other spec and play around with it for fun and to test things, rather than being stuck in an overly rigid choice that forces me to play a specific way.
it honestly feels like what they are doing is ignoring a lot of feedback and being overly stubborn about believing that they can balance something when previous experience of 15 years has shown they cannot.
you do realise that someone can understand a point and still think its completely insane right?
why after they have allowed me to make choices over the past 15 years and play a class that has multiple specs to its fullest potential are they now remoiving that choice, i like a lot of other players care about being optimal, and if they remove the ability for me to play a spec optimally they are removing my ability to play that spec, why can you not understand this,
they are basically setting themselves up for failure yet again by refusing to take feedback on a system for the past 9 months that people knew from the second it was announced would cause this exact issue, im not sure if you continued watching preach’s stream after the chat with ion was finished. but he said that he was sat next to xyronic the warlock/mage player from limit on the press stage, and the second it was announced within 10 seconds he looked at preach and said he would need to roll multiple mages, at least 4
9 months later that is still the case, and how can you not see why that is a problem, they ignored all the feedback on azerite and look how much of an absolute catastrophy that system was. untill they finally paid attention to the feedback and fixed a lot of the problems in 8.2 since then it has barely been an issue.
each covenant has 3 soulbinds that gives multiple different options that is fine, and considering that they are looking at changing the destructibility of the conduits, that system is most likely not going to be a problem anymore.
all i want is to be able to pick the covenant that i want to choose based on personal preference, because as i have said multiple times i love the system, i just think its idiotic to place so much player power behind it and then lock it off to people wanting to swap.
and this is the part that is really really really important to me, considering this game has existed for 15 years giving players the ability to make choices to have upsides and downsides that differ in a range of situations they should just stick to what we do, why if i have been playing a warlock for a very long time should i all of a sudden be locked out of playing one of the specs that i enjoy playing so much because there is no way for me to be productive and play it to a decent degree. especially when that has nothing to do with player skill, its down to the potential of having to make a choice that gives me a dead spell that is completely useless.
but why cant they just give us the option to play whatever we want, that way people who wish to play optimally will pick the “meta” spec, and people who dont want to or dont care can just pick the spec that they enjoy and get on with it, surely you can understand how that is just clearly the better way to do things, because everyone gets to play the way they want to, and no one is forced into the whole experience of a patch or expansion being a horrid waste of their time and having the fun removed out of their gameplay.
Well, wouldn’t be a problem for you if you can’t, then, would it?
Probably wouldn’t be given the fact that I raid lead over half the encounters we do and I’m the guild master half the time with Shamborghini being it the other half.
And I wouldn’t kick someone for not doing it, either. I would kick them for standing in stuff, not dealign enough damage when we need more damage, letting people die in the stupidest ways possible, not moving the boss correctly, or in general making mistakes that clearly cause wipes.
However you choose to win is your problem, because I’m not an expert on every class, so I won’t regulate how they should all play it. I care about results and results only. If you do not live up to those results I will tell you and offer help and try to research together. If you refuse help or don’t show up or if the help doesn’t appear to improve your performance, then you’ll get the boot.
People really like to think the high end are all the same hyper-competitive, angry environment. It’s not. We’re about as giggly in here as Kaif’s guild is - but we also just know when to cut it out and get some progress done, too.
That is why i said i want to switch for fun. I want to enjoy the different playstyles the covenants open for my class. So yes, it is a problem. I play this game for fun.
Next to that, i lack faith in blizzard after all these systems that they can balance it a tiny bit.
They are removing the ability to play a spec optimally only in very specific circumstances. In other circumstances you would be optimal. Just not always. And imo that is completely fine.
And yeah that means that if there’s 1 covenant that is clearly better at a certain content than another covenant, Blizzard have done a bad job. But being better in, for instance, 20% of that content imo that’s completely ok and it fights the systemic problem of the ‘optimal culture’ in WoW.
But is your fun more important than other people’s fun?
What about the fun of those people who like to make decisions that impact their character. Who like the fact that their character is a different kind of Paladin than the other paladin their raid? What if that’s their fun?
