[Spoilers] Shadowlands Alpha

Argent Dawn
101

You can target bosses for the items. Yes, the drop is RNG, but you can target the item you want.

Then that’s their own choice. Not the fault of the system.

What “people”? Ion Hazzikostas talks about player agency and perception all the time- And admitted as much that it’s one of their biggest problems with the game. They want people to just choose w/e they want but in reality people are pressured/forced to choose x things because the community (rightly so) realizes some choices are detrimental and wrong.

Function over form, as said.

Well that’s good for you but you’d be, as I said, dishonest with your argument if you didn’t take into account that several classes/specs (e.g. warriors, shadow priests, fire mages, boomkins, mm & BM hunters) that relied insanely on specific legendaries.

The same’s the case in current expansion too. On Holy, I could care less what traits I have, but on shadow, I -must- have 3x CoI and 3x SA or my performance will drop insanely- Regardless of how much I might like other traits like death throes or searing dialogue.

In fact, that’s the case for majority of specs. Yes, you can make do, but if you choose to do so consciously, it comes back to you can make wrong choices but wrong they are all the same.

Further, as said, if you truly didn’t care for the choice and you just took the stride ones because you wanted to be a bit speedier, then you can still do that choice in the other system, because your performance won’t be affected, as you yourself keep stating.

Because they are both inherently bad design choices. Doesn’t matter if they serve a different purpose, I can still see the flaws and problems they clearly present.

102

I retain this right as I have been consistently right about:
a) Legion PVP templates
b) Legion artifact weapons and legendaries
c) Azerite armor
d) Essences
e) Titanforging/corruption.
f) Warfronts and island expeditions
g) Gear homogenization

Everybody always says “Just wait till its here” but when you can see obviously the absolute problems a system has, you got to bring them up. I don’t need to have a crystal ball to see that this is going to be a problem- And many other people agree with me. Even some streamers like Asmongold, Preach, Cdew and Anboni have said the exact same thing.

103

…they could make the vendor have the lower, targeted pieces available instead of random, thereby eliminating RNG. You just told me it wasn’t RNG, now you’re saying it being RNG “isn’t the fault of the system”. It’s RNG to get the drop (“wow I farmed this dungeon for months and never got it” is a real thing). It’s RNG to buy it, unless you happen to have enough currency to buy the mythic quality stuff.

Azerite is still an RNG system. And don’t forget the vendor wasn’t even there until 8.1.

Do you think having to choose a class/race is a bad design choice?

104

Maybe blood dk wasn’t THAT reliant on the legendaries, but my fire mage moved from rock-bottom of the dps meters in my mythic raid group (I was being pressured into respeccing because my damage wasn’t sufficient) to the very top once I got the BiS legendary despite having most of the others to choose from beforehand. It did make a difference in some cases. A really massive one.

2 Likes
105

Heck, some of the Mage Tower challenges actually required you to have “X” Legendary to be able to beat them at all.

So much for “its about mastering your class!”

5 Likes
106

Without the grind pressure that legendaries/azerite/corruption has they’ve got no reason not to make throughput on covenants roughly equal though.

107

I’m not saying it’s a perfect system. As I have consistently said, I knew it’d fail, and I knew the system would be crap. I still think it is, but I give it credit where it is due.

You can target specific pieces in raiding and dungeons.
You can target specific pieces in pvp.
You can target specific pieces in m+ residum vendor.
You can scrap items you dislike and use them for other items.

Yes, it is a system with RNG elements in it but it also has gotten deterministic values to it- EIther later, or at the start of the expansion. But make no mistake, I still hate it, and it absolutely and 100% failed at trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist (e.g. Set bonuses), which I was 100% right about.

No? Why?

1 Like
108

Because they’re both throughput choices that you can’t change.

109

Yeah, but the throughput choices are meaningful. I for example like making tauren characters because I happen to really like the utility warstomp brings. Same with goblin rocket jump, or troll berserking.

At the same time they are also so small you can get away with the choices- Though some guilds like method did change everybody into trolls in mythic Jaina for their racial.

110

So why are class/race choices meaningful that you’re fine with but Covenants aren’t?

111

Speaking from a position of someone who predominantly heals, I have less than zero faith in Blizzard being able to create a system or mechanic that invites personal responsibility where people will not just get lazy and ignore it thinking “healer will fix it”. As long as these systems exist there will always be chuckleheads standing in their eye of corruption getting nuked will going “hahaha DPS go brrrrrr”. Personal responsibility is a massive blindspot in Blizzard encounter and mechanic design that they’ve never been able to properly navigate.

5 Likes
112

If I’m understanding your argument right:

You’re trying to say that I’m choosing a race based on aesthetics, rather than the utility, and that somehow proves you right, because its comparable to covenants?

A couple of problems.

a) As I said, I tend to pick races whose racials I also like, so this argument wouldn’t even apply to me.
b) Covenants are -certainly- going to have more impact than 1-2% impact racials have.

Not a really working strawman.

Literally me every grievous week in m+ as a Holy priest.

4 Likes
113

So far I feel like Blizzard have learned from both Legion and BfA when it comes to few of the systems.

  1. The legendary items power and effect wise will likely be like in Legion but instead of random drops, we need to farm Torghast for materials and we decide which pieces we want to craft which removes the annoying part of Legion and keep the good stuff.

  2. Removing the endless farming of AP both in Legion and BfA. I do not mind having a system where you farm a bit every week and you getting stronger but with Azerite it is non-stop and I hated that and with Shadowlands we are getting a weekly cap for power gaining which once cap is reached we can continue to farm but getting transmog and other stuff as rewards instead.

In the end I have enjoyed most of the systems added with Legion and Bfa as in the powers they bring and so on it is just the endless RNG and endless need to farm that made it hard to not feel pressured into doing them.

114

I’m asking questions for your logic.

You’re also, carefully, dodging the class question, something which definitely has more than a 1-2% impact. Just checking Warcraft logs it looks like if I picked a windwalker monk this tier I may be making a mistake.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/24/

Do you think they should be allowed to class change freely a la FF14?

115

No, I’m not dodging it because I had absolutely no idea this was the argument you were proposing, because you literally just asked me whether race/class choice is a good one (since you -have to- pick both). Nor did I think you were referring to a game that I do not even play or know about.

Anyway your argument doesn’t work because ideally all classes should be as close to one anothers performance as possible- This is what I’ve proposed for example by utilizing the templates that already exist for pve and pvp separately. Buffing WW damage in raids for example while nerfing/keeping it the same in other content types.

Since Blizzard creates the game and the classes and abilities, it’s up to them to bring them up to par with one another and balance them out. It’s not the players duty to do so.

So no, your argument doesn’t work, sorry. You’re shifting the blame from Blizzard to the player, where from the start I have proposed the inherent problems the systems have, and have suggested either their removal or change because I know from Blizzard’s track tecord that they won’t be able to do that.

Of course, I won’t expect perfection, but there’s a mile between that and absolute disaster, which all of the other systems have turned out to be.

116

Isn’t that what I’ve been saying about covenants though?

117

No, you said:

You very clearly stated that you do not care about which covenant ends up being the best for x type of content, and would rather pick whichever was the most appealing to you- Whatever that means.

I pointed out that the performance matters, and also that the performance is guaranteed and I am 100% willing to bet on this that they will end up nerfing overperforming/buffing underperforming traits during the expansion, and people will be forced to change, because covenants are a can of worms of a system that they -can’t- balance out properly, hence I want it changed inherently or just ditched completely.

Since we know the latter won’t happen as they are so committed to it, the only thing left is affecting/changing it massively.

1 Like
118

Well hopefully Alpha Testing will make testers see which is more/less powerful and they will be able to provide feedback.

1 Like
119

But they do that with classes too! They nerf+buff things patch-by-patch, sometimes middle of patches with hotfixes. People aren’t forced to change from those*, so why do you think they will for Covenants? I’ve just shown that in current tier your class choice could manifest as 7k+ DPS difference between you and another class (WW->SPriest), a roughly 7% throughout difference.

So I don’t get it. You say that you’re fine with classes being different and Blizzard needing to nerf/buff them with people locked in, but Covenants having to be nerfed/buff with people locked in** isn’t okay? I do not understand, sincerely.

*unless you’re Method but designing the game around 0.0001% of the playerbase seems foolhardy.
**again they have said you can change, though not the process to do so, so I’m equivocating it to changing your class.

Last post though on this specifically.

120

Does anyone in here have the actual numbers yet to say which is better or worse? Utility wise sure, but then again that argument can be made for classes and racials, but what about the % difference in DPS, HPS or just how sturdy of a tank you can be? Anything from 1-5% difference is alright imo and won’t really have that huge of an impact for anyone who isn’t a minmaxer, but above that and we’d have a serious problem.