Because you can’t have a healthy progression if every past xpacks give you something as powerful as those systems.
If it’s meant to last then you can’t have corruptions allowing you to reach 100% haste without buffs, essences which straight up give you secondary stats and passive procs ect, as you’ll have the same issue we had in BFA : systems stacked on top of each other creating massive increases in performances and basically breaking the game.
So it can’t be that impactful if you don’t reset it every so often… But then again, would you grind something for two years if what you got in return was only noticeable months later ?
That’s extremely shortsighted. Read a bit about what’s coming in SL, it’s not just about the class ability you know ?
Nope, they claimed they were ready to remove the restrictions preventing you from swapping covenant. They never said anything about character power.
Big nuance once you realise that most of the actual power isn’t tied to the class ability.
Gotta love when arm chair devs throw numbers left and right with nothing to back them up. Just as bad as a those claiming it would only be a 2 or 3% gap, you’re not helping anyone with that and especially not your thread.
For all we know a single legendary could have more impact that all of the other systems combined.
How about you just wait until tonigth’s news reveal before complaining about how the systems will work ? That would be the reasonable approach less than 24h before a major news reveal : see if they actually address your concerns before making a thread about it.
I don’t want anyone to be frustrated. But I also don’t want people to approach this game as a spreadsheet because then Blizzard has to keep that kind of ‘gameplay’ in mind; which is at the expense of the game itself. Covenants are proof of this. And that’s why I feel they shouldn’t budge. It would only promote more of that kind of behaviour.
Also; I just like it when you have to make choices in games. No re-do’s.
It makes the choices matter. Not to be taken lightly.
Biggest problem in mmos in general are the players, becuse they come in 3 cathegories.
min maxers, who must get the best items, best stats, and then if something aint going their way, they whine and whine.
the followers, theese look up to everything the min maxers says, even though they realy have no idea what they doing, then when min maxer complains, they complain also, even if they still have no idea what it is about.
RP people, theese can be a combination of 1 and 2, but most the time, they do not care that much if they do 1% more dmg or not, and they seldom complain.
casual players, they go for what they like and not care what others say at all, they do their thing, and are happy, probably the best group to have for any game.
in this cathegory is all raiders who do not strive to be the best of the best, but do still raid in their own pace.
you se the minority are those who complain a lot, and unfortunately for every game theese are the ones, that are the loudest also, it would not matter what a game developer does, and they would still complain.
like covenants now, they could be realy good, and fun to have, maby not totaly balanced, but due to the big complainers, it most likely gona be ruined for everyone instead.
There is a huge difference already between the main covenant powers, and soulbinds adds even more.
You can’t have that much gap in things you can’t easily swap, considering the average player does widely different things every week.
And no, the rpg choice element can’t be used as excuse, it’s ok talking about minor utilty or flavor, not on dps difference.
If that will be the case to the point that I will hate the system I will gladly change my opinion
I think Covenant main problem is caused mostly by Blizzard late design direction with classes.
A lot of classes feels lackluster and incomplete without things like Azerite/essences or whatever bandaid they will use.
And while this is a problem that will reflect on covenants too I think that the power spike would be way less evident if classes did work from day 1 of the expansions.
The main problem is that a lot of classes are bad and boring until late into the expansions cycle. This need to be adressed imo.
For those who don’t understand where the OP is coming from then the latest Allcraft episode (it is on YT) with Amson, Rich and Preach spend a lot of time talking about this. Preach in particular has some very well researched views on this. He believes It will not end well if it stays like this and it will not just be the ‘min-maxers’ who will suffer, it will be in fact the casual that will suffer the most.
Was expecting such a reply, some of you cannot see beyond your hate for streamers etc to actually listen to them. Preach has played 100’s of hours of the alpha I’ll take his views over people on here (positive or negative) . I hope he is wrong (he hopes he is wrong) but the opinion from pretty much every alpha player (and there are not enough) is this is bad as it stands.
You need to decouple streamer from WoW player, many of these people you all seem to hate have played over 15 years and are very active players often at the highest levels of the game.
And the whole ‘drama’ thing is a nonsense, constructive feedback is not ‘drama’ it is what an alpha is for
I’m just saying that a video where “Everything is great” won’t bring as much views as a drama one. Also with this “community” anyone who praises WoW will see lots of negative opinions. Just look at the hater comments on WoWHead or Reddit.
If you are not competing for world ranks, even if there are 20% damage difference between Covenants it won’t matter.
I haven’t watched the video (no time at present) but am curious as to the reasoning why they expect it will be worst for casual players? Is it because making non-optimal choices will prevent casual players from progressing, thereby creating a larger divide between casuals and hardcore players? Or is there another reason? I consider myself a casual based on the level of content that I do, and I don’t expect to the negatively impacted by choosing whichever covenant I like the look of. I haven’t been following everything from the Alpha, so could of course be missing something that’s glaringly obvious!
If you would look a second to preaches uploades there are a ton of positive titles (“Not Perfect, But Very Close! - Enhancement Shaman : Shadowlands” for example). And the last one is totally neutral “Blizzards Big Shadowlands Update This Week”. Preach is not know for clickbait and negativity. He DOES give his oppinion and you can agree with it or not. But he is doing his research.
Didn’t watch the allcraft but i checked his video about the subject released after the allcraft one, and he instead sait that casuals were usually against the complains about covenants because it didn’t mattered to them.
Which is kinda true, if you don’t raid above normal or do similar difficulty of content then your covenant won’t matter even if they are terribly unbalanced. So casuals would be fine anyway, even if the content is balanced around the most op builds
if the game is “beatable” with every choice it’s not important, it’s just restrictive and discourages experimentation/participating in different types of content.
if it’s not then it’s not really a choice anymore, because unless you don’t want to win you’ll have to choose a specific one.
This looks like another borrowed power system that’s way too convoluted and messy to just judge by your own and pick it.
Too many components.
-The Coventant itself
-Soulbinds
-Conduits
-Legendaries associated with this
It’s another nightmare to balance and another expansion REQUIRING you to perform dozens of sims, as you just can’t simply tell what is better.
But WOW entered a vicious neverending cycle of those power systems starting from Legion. Legion was so heavy on them, your character had so many things that came out of external systems that once BFA came out and took it all away, the classes felt bland and barely even playable.
What was wrong with the system up to MOP/WOD, where all your skills and abilities were on the character itself, and external systems just boosted stats? Such as enchants, 20 gem slots, profession perks, tier sets etc?
it should be, at least mechanic wise, you can’t have something working only if you have the teleport from venthyr
Which is a concrete scenario, especially in the more competitive groups.
i mean, in the current state word is the night fae is a 15% dps buff, can you really pass on that?
And this drops down to the lower levels where people will try to stack as much of those as possibile because it’s too big of a bonus to pass, so even casuals will be affected.
I think it is good that there is impactful difference between the picks. If all are same good/bad, then there is no meaningful choice, because what ever you pick is going to be same good or bad. What made old WoW good is that not everything was same good in every aspect of the game- Hunters were good at WPVP, Hpally were good for healing.
Personally I think the pick will not matter if you are not attending in World First Race or MDI. Also right now it is kinda pointless to speculate around thing that we can’t even test. Get access to test version, test it out and see if that is the case and then provide results.
