I’m saying that if you’re looking at a fruit tree, then you’d be a fool for trying to grab the piece of fruit on the tallest branch when there are plenty of low-hanging fruit right in front of you.
Right, but then you’ve probably chosen that Covenant because it is beneficial for other reasons than Mythic+. And then you’ve probably evaluated that despite not being the best for Mythic+, then you’re still going to pick it, because you like the Covenant for other reasons.
That’s a meaningful choice in an RPG game.
If you always want to have the best for everything, then it’s just an action game you’re playing.
Yes, but why? Is it because Bob picked Night Fae instead of Kyrian, or is it because Bob was standing in the fire and died? Or because Joe is still running around with item level 194 gear, because he can’t be bothered to log in and do anything outside of raid hours? Or is it because Karen has decided to play healer, but she’s actually not very good at it?
If you’re doing Normal content, then you’re not playing with World First raiders, so there’s plenty of room for improvement before you even have to consider min/max stuff like optimal Covenant choices.
Oook, so lets say your character does 10 dmg, you can get an extra 3 dmg from BiS gear, 1,5 dmg from socketing that gear and 2 dmg from covenant abilities and soulbinds, soo what exactly is the lowest hanging fruit here, farming out the gear and sockets or changing the covenant ?
There is a reason why some choices, such as talents are allowed to be more fluid than others. Are you saying that because I can swap talents whenever I want they are not a meaningful choice? Does it stop being an rpg when you allow the player to change talents whenever he is in a rested area? Personally for me the more customisation both in visual and game play elements of the game the better. When you make a rigid system that restricts and punishes change you just end up with a boring and stale system.
You are below “average player”. You cannot speak on the matter. Of course this doesn’t matter to you.
On topic: I’ve personally made a lengthy thread about how this will hurt the players, and it has. It is a bad system. Blizz needs to stop creating systems. And instead focus on creating classes that are whole and complete on their own. Then, instead of trying to balance these systems, they can finally focus more of their time & resources on creating more content: more dungeons, more raids/bosses, more story, more side acitivies.
Well if you’re doing Normal and Heroic mode content, you’d be more than fine by just improving your gear in a steady fashion.
I mean, the context matters.
If you’re a World First raider, then you’re going to do all of the above and more.
If you’re doing Normal and Heroic mode, then you don’t need to switch Covenants or buy BoE epics on the AH or have 10 alts and do split runs or bench your raid leader so he can provide coaching during the raid, or any of those other extreme ways of min/maxing that hardcore players pursue when doing bleeding-edge content.
That is kind of the pitch Ion Hazzikostas (Game Director) gave for Covenants versus Talents. Blizzard wanted a more permanent choice (though not completely permanent), because it is indeed a more meaningful choice within an RPG.
Cut the crap. I’ve played this game for 16 years and have Alliance first Ragnaros, M’uru and Kil’jaeden pre-nerf and all that other early day hardcore crap. I’ve done the min/max playstyle. I’ve changed to Draenei for +hit racial. I’ve changed to Jewelcrafting for gem bonus. I’ve farmed Elemental Plateau until my eyes bled for the Frozen Shadoweave set.
I’ve done it all.
I may not have played this game in such a hardcore manner in recent years, but that’s because I’ve already been there and done it. I don’t feel the need to do it again and again and again when it’s essentially the same approach each expansion. A few times was enough.
So I damn well can speak of these matters. So get off the high horse and spare me that pathetic attempt at faux authority. You have none.
I can’t tell you what you should do, but I can tell you what I would do.
I wouldn’t do a God damn thing.
I’d just show up for my guild raid and do as best I could, using the gear I had acquired throughout the week and the Covenant I had decided on because I liked it the most, and otherwise just tried to learn the encounters to the best of my ability. And then, if the guild was capable of making progress through trial and error, the success should come on its own. No Covenant changing required.
In what bizarre guild does someone sit around thinking that they need to change their Covenant in order to single-handedly carry the entire raid team through Normal and Heroic mode? You get through it as a team, learning the encounters and not standing in the fire. It’s always been like that. No different this time. People PuG that crap already.
It’s a hypothetical so you don’t need to be defensive with the “I won’t tell you how to play the game” crap. I’m trying to show how wrong your argument about “the low hanging fruit” is, that phrase meaning is to describe a faster or easier way of doing things (context). Do you honestly think that even in the current system the fastest and easiest way to get more troughtput is by gearing up than by just switching your covenant to the best performing one ? And this doesn’t affect the world first raiders only, the notion of “path of least resistance” is foreign to no one.
This is really a lack of understanding what the issue is. It’s not what other people want out of my character, it’s what (and many more) want. The fact that I am not doing everything that is feasibly possible at the moment to improve our chances of survival is to put it mildly disheartening. If I go into a raid in the next 5 mins I cannot suddenly get full socketed BiS, but what I can do is switch my covenant with 2-3 clicks to improve my dps.
I was using it mostly to describe the easier way to reach your objective. In this case it’s easier to just take the fruit right in front of you, as opposed to try and climb the tree for one at the top.
And in regards to WoW it’s easier to just upgrade your legendary, get a weekly vault item, and teach Bob and Joe and Karen in your guild raid that they need to avoid the fire, than it is to make a difficult personal choice about forsaking your current Covenant for another one in order to acquire a performance increase. The former is just playing the game normally without any hazzle.
In the context of doing group activities at the low and mid end? I honestly don’t think either approach matters much. It’s rarely the best player that carries the group to success. It’s the weakest player that dooms everyone to a wipe.
You make progress when the weakest player figures out how to avoid the fire and everyone plays decently well. That’s my experience. There’s no need for any individual to go all out an min/max like some World First raider in a guild or PuG or community that just does Normal and Heroic.
That seems like an absurd mentality to me unless you’re doing bleeding-edge hardcore progression. I mean, that is the mindset of the hardcore player who skips sleep so he can farm an extra dungeon or level another alt as a means of raid preparation.
That’s cool if you are the hardcore player doing the bleeding-edge content. But if you’re just doing run-of-the-mill Normal and Heroic, it seems like an unnecessary burden to apply to oneself (and subsequently complain about). Just don’t.
So in your mind, collecting the soul ash/mats/gold, clearing a M+, waiting to open the weekly vault is a faster more easier way to acquire power than simple switching your covenant ?
And that’s the issue, the people that are complaining about this system do not want this “difficult personal choice” to get in the way of their gameplay. No one is here to ponder upon the the great philosophical question “which is better power or cosmetics”, we are here to play a game.
How so ? If I can drink a flask what exactly is the reason I should not drink that flask when my raid starts ?
I personally don’t care that the powers are locked. They don’t matter much to me.
But I HAVE discovered that I would much rather be able to hop from Covenant to Covenant without that week waiting time; because there is so little for me to do, I can easily just do all the Covenants on my main character. The cool down is preventing me from doing this however.
Yep.
That’s just playing the game as you would anyway.
Switching your Covenant is evidently something you don’t want to do. So don’t.
Like I already said multiple times; it’s a matter of proportionality between what you’re getting out of it versus the cost of doing it.
Most people think that using a flask during a raid is worth the price of buying it.
Not everyone think it’s worth buying expensive BoE epics on the AH to get some item level increases, so they don’t.
And likewise with Covenants. You make the evaluation of whether it pays off in a manner that makes it worthwhile. If you’re doing Normal and Heroic raiding, I don’t think it’s necessary at all, so I don’t think you should feel pressured to do it. You’re probably not mass-buying BoE epics for the guild or doing split runs either, right? You’ve already drawn a line in the sand about how far you’re willing to go to progress.
And yet the bottom line is that by chosing a low performing covenant you limit your character to 70-80% of its potential instead of picking the right one and having the maximum.
Any flask or prep that you do is mandatory in most cases anyway, because that’s the minimum you can do to prepare for an encounter, so it’s irrelevant to the discussion because it’s a given you’d do those.
Now what the covenant system does is it severely limits your gameplay options.
Having the option to switch your powers easily will make you able to switch it up in case you want to do different content.
Your current “meaningful choice” means that if you go into a type of content where your covenant underperforms then that means you’re dragging your team down over a choice made at the start of the expac.
Now if you had the choice to switch it up, then that meaningful choice just became meaningful to your team. Are you someone who cares about the team, about winning, or someone who doesn’t give a crap what the best option for that content was and you decided to underperform?
Take note that at the start of the expac the difference wasn’t calculated exactly between covenants, i myself didn’t see any hard numbers, so everyone had a different idea of what the differences were, so your “meaningful choice” was made somewhat blindly and isn’t any longer a meaningful choice.
This doesn’t excuse that your “meaningful choice” is also the choice to ruin your chances in other than your main content in case you like to do multiple types.
So much for “meaningful choices” when Blizz doesn’t provide any numbers for you to assess with, more like a “feelingful choice”, what a joke.
Only powers i really use are the Venthyr teleport on my mage, condemn on my fury warrior and ww monk’s night fae ones rest of the covenants have no real interest for me.
Most of the damage ones just feel pointless bloat to me with barely any interesting effects or just make gameplay cumbersome and annoying.
Ok… you know that getting back to covenant takes …2 quests which is practically the week you said…ok?
However…you can plan doing it near reset day, so …you can let’s say wake up and here you are back to your covenant.
Not…that bad to be honest…
The bad thing is… You may not min max for how long it takes to do stuff in the new covenant…but, for example if you have time and interest get them all to a playable level of renown and…swap around every reset playing what you feel like…
I didn’t know till very recently that my gf changed covenant … You keep everything in your past covenant or so they say…surely you keep soulbinds and renown, the part that affects gameplay and character performance…
So it is not as bad as it seems… And if i knew it before i would have done at least 2 covenants from the start of the expansion…just to have them there in case great changes happen…
I decided to do that stuff when the season ends…or when i decide to actually stop making alts here and there and get done with stuff on main…
The renown part is just rng and can be achieved over a week, the issue is that you have no sanctum buildings, so you have to gather thousands and thousands of anima… and level and gather your mission table companions.
Trust me, i’ve changed a month ago from NF to Kyrian and after grinding all anima dailies each and every day and i’m still not caught up with my buildings… follower levels too.
Perhaps if you’re doing a one-time switch, but it’s not a solution to the greater problem.
Not to mention, the entire reward structure of the expansion completely falls apart if you’re regularly switching covenants. Blizzard has put so much stock into developing these rewards & using them for marketing material that it would be irresponsible to say they would not be an issue.