Design by democracy is almost always a recipe for disaster.
Good developers analyze feedback and try to extract the underlying issue: basically the feedback is a symptom and the developer needs to figure out if there is an underlying illness which needs intervention.
It’s very difficult to do but crucial to deliver great products. Whether Blizzard is doing it right in this instance we’ll only know after they go Live.
Tbh shadowlands is doing alot of positive things that the playerbase have wanted. The convenant system regardless what people think of it.
Has no daily content
More optional content
Weekly content instead of daily
Far more front loaded
And far more time efficient
Comparitively to azerite gearing etc etc this system is far more customer friendly and less mandatory as a whole.
I don’t think we will hate covenants as much as azerite gear but some may feel forced into choosing covenants they didn’t rly want to
It’s a massive improvement on the whole over incentivizing content to force players to participate that’s currently going on in BFA.
Yes, I get it
But several of the positive things are fixes on problems they created in the past themselves.
Like the fix on the Shadow spec design.
Well…
I’d argue shadow priest design became a problem in MoP when they tried to go whacky with a off healing support DPS theme.
And the shadow priest we got in legion thematically was amazing. The problems occured after its creation and blizzard wanted to keep it and inevitably wasn’t able to
Yes problems occur. But to avoid them means the game has to take the “safe route” at all times and never do anything as huge as void forms initial sight
FFXIV does this and one of its largest critisms is its lack of taking a risk.
While sure they can never cause a problem… being safe isn’t always successful long term.
I’m probably the only one, but I quite liked the Legion version of spriest.
No we all liked legion spriest, we didn’t like BFA spriest
Most that cling to its return are mainly pushing for the spriest we had in legion and admit BFA was terrible for what it did to shadow
I would had liked Legion and BFA spriest more if not for the M+ meta that needs “mobile AoE Cleaving monsters”.
Tbh it’s not alone in that field. So many classes get written off as non meta these days
I do not know why but I feel that shadow has one of the most incredible concepts. So it feels more sad to see it do bad than lets say… Survival hunters
So it feels bad to me that spriests are often feeling like discount affliction in action.
Tbh I adored legion survival hunter. They were onto something good. But they just went so sour with it going into BFA.
But yeah it’s not shadow can’t work, I mean my spriest can do some good damage in m+. But it’s a case of they require alot of gear and generally suck on their way up
And when the same role (dps) has classes/specs that their way up is like taking an elevator to the top…
Yup haha problem with alot of legion class design was it was built around the artifact weapon and while fun in legion proved very hard to keep it together once we lost those.
Feral in me is still sore about that …
Same, but I’ve always preferred to play melee.
The solution: Bake all these little boosts into specs, spell ranks that you get as you level up, something like that. And here you go. But, y’know, that wouldn’t be enough incentive for the hamsters in wheel…
Arcane Mage says hello. Worked in 7.3.5. Not the top, but mechanically solid spec, fun gameplay, had tools to deal with everything. 8.0: bottom-tier turret spec that only looks good on paper against pure ST dummy, has to suck in either AoE or ST, no cleave, turret issues. Then you look at BM and you see it does everything better than you. So why should I bother to pump their “hours spent doing activity X” again?
Meta isn’t something you can just stop, a meta exists in every game, even animal crossing of all games has a meta.
I think the opposite in that a meta promotes creativity and exploration; you should go to a class discord some time and see how much theorycrafting and exploration goes on constantly instead of only looking at the youtube videos saying x is bad or y is good, without that same theorycrafting we wouldn’t have had fun builds like glimmer paladin or the shortlived haste mistweaver.
Ranged hunters are basically a cheat cause they have both the good things from being ranged and the mobility of the melee.
Well, BM is. MM still has to cast aimed shot.
I don’t understand how Blizzard comes up with this stuff. A holy priest has always been a holy priest. An arms warrior has always been an arms warrior. The only way that players have ever differentiated themselves from each other was based on their class and specialization. They now introduce Covenants so that two players of the same spec can be different to one another? That has never been a part of WoW!
Ion states that they’re doing this so that players of the same spec can “set themselves apart” from one another. What he and Blizz fail to understand is that this does not set the specs apart from one another, but rather it sets the players of the same spec above or below each other based on their respective covenants.
This also is just not true. You know what takes away from player creativity? Covenants, because they don’t let you try different abilities that you think might be suited for a given situation. You know what takes away from player exploration and discovery? Covenants, because if I suddenly realize “hey, this covenant ability could actually be really good here, let me try it out!”, I’m not allowed to. You know what takes away from freedom? Covenants, because I’m only allowed to have one. Covenants are the most restrictive form of game system that they have implemented, and it doesn’t even make any sense from a lore perspective.
Ultimately, another terrible system implemented by Blizzard to fix a problem that they created for themselves, and we as the players have to just endure their crusade until patch 9.3 when they finally wake up and realize that they were wrong.
Blizzard can’t even balance a square cube on a coffee table, and they expect us to believe they can balance this quagmire of systems that all feed into one another?
#PullTheRipcord
Not for people like me. People who refuse to play like sheep.
People who don’t look up class guides because I am intelligent and ‘brave’ enough to decide what I like and what works for me personally.
So it only impacts the sheep. Well… Tough.