It’s not the combat abilities, it’s because you cannot freely swap.
The same can be said about your class, though. There’s classes that are perfect in pvp and stink in pve, there’s classes that excel in aoe but stink in single target. You can build your “covenant build” around specific activities, and you can swap your soulbinds as you please. So there probably won’t be a wrong overall choice. You won’t have the “pvp covenant” and the “raiding covenant”. All covenants will offer everything, it’ll just be different.
The way I view covenants is like temporary subclasses, and this is exactly what they are. And I’m kinda excited to see how a subclass system would work in WoW. It’s about time we got one.
I would understand you if… you know, classes. I’ll never stop beating this drum - the choice of covenant is similar to the choice in class, except it is slightly less restrictive. And you’re just as restricted as when you choose a class. If you want to experience some other (sub)class, just make an alt, it’s fine.
How did Blizz managed to balance 12 “subclasses” in Legion, but won’t be able to balance 4 in Shadowlands? Come on, mate. The way this discussion is going, I believe more and more the problem is that there’s a choice in the first place. If they just did class halls 2.0, which is the same except you have no choice, I think nobody would complain, just like they didn’t when Legion was coming out.
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Ion has Already stated
If it flops that hard he’ll Just remove it, hes Just not ready yet to simply throw in the towel and the fix to the situation is so fast He can do it last second if he had to.
Providing they’re not touched balance wise after they’re release its Fine.
- the people who hardcore want the RPG Side. will choose their favorite.
- the Minmaxers will choose their BiS.
providing 0 balancing happens… everything will go smooth. its Fine til they try to balance them.
with 0 tuning done… we dont know the DPS Difference between convenants,. to jump to 20% overall is abit extreme given half the systems arent even released yet.
easy answer
because wearing Kyrian Armour casting a Necrolord Ability would look beyond Stupid.
The fantasy behind it is Strong and your not entirely restricted… no ones forced into their choice you make ur choice and that choice has Actual meaning upon your character.
as i said, its fine providing they put ALL The info out before we have to pick on Live. aslong as Everyone has the Fair chance to pick the BiS One and It remains the BiS one for the entire expansion this wont be a problem .
this is incorrect, the Videos do not Say its a BAD IDEA>
they express concern to how easy this will to be balanced idealistically where Players dont pick 1 Convenant and End up screwing over their other specc etc etc.
Ion has already stated if he cant make it work they’ll throw it out the window and unlock the abilities. but He feels it’ll be Proof that RPG Just cannot exist in WoW anymore and they’ll have to look at something else for WoW to fulfill.
Classes have specs and roles, and specs can be heavily customized with talents, stats and such, which you can change somewhat freely depending on the situation. Sure, you are locked into your class, but you can make it work anywhere by adapting it to the situation. In BFA, I will not play affliction in M+ because it’s not good and it feels bad to play that spec in that type of content. It’s pretty good in pure single target fights compared to the other two, but for M+, I will switch to either demo or destro.
But once you choose a Covenant, you are pretty much stuck with it. I haven’t done any deep dive into covenant abilities yet, but right off the bat I can look at warlock covenants as they are right now and see that the Necrolord class ability for warlocks looks good for single target damage and will probably feel good to use, but it will feel absolutley terrible to play in M+ compared to other options. Night Fae looks like it will only be of any significant use to affliction, so being a Night Fae warlock as destro or demo fill feel pretty bad in any scenario. (Please don’t quote me on this, I could be wrong with this particular example and I’m only using it to ilustrate my point)
Covenants restrict the customizability of classes as different Covenant abilities will compliment different specs/roles/encounter types. The system is nothing but restrictive in it’s current state. It takes away more than it gives and is not comparable to the choice of a class.
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And the argument is flawed anyway, because classes and covenants are not really comparable, while covenants are for all, every single spec and class, classes are just that, they are classes.
Imagine having to perfectly balance each and every covenant to perfection for every single spec, it’s not gonna happen, it’s way more difficult than just balancing the specs, and giving the freedom to choose and swap covenants.
Also, artifacts were only for the spec, not for every single spec, they only worked on 1, so they just had to balance it for a single spec, and not for every spec in the game, imagine having to balance ashbringer to be used for warrior, dk, pally, shaman, it would be a damn nightmare. That’s what covenants are.
I’ll make one too: my prediction is that i’ll choose ardenweald because they are cool, and i’ll have no issues in doing the content I like to do.
You should look more into covenants. You won’t really be locked into one, and the hard part will be rejoining a covenant, not replacing it. Soulbinds seem interesting, although I’m not sure if they are enough to offset the choice based on the covenant skill alone. There’s a deep problem with soulbinds, which runs the risk of repeating the mistake azerite gear had - the spec-specific ones that you slot in - those get destroyed when you replace them, so you have to farm them. This is REALLY, REALLY BAD (I just want people to know I’ll criticize things that I see as bad).
As I said - covenants are a subclass - they give you 2 new abilities, and a new talent tree that has some generic nodes and some spec-specific ones. Each covenant has 3 slots for soulbinds, so you can have a different soulbind for every role or (when they fix the spec specific inserts getting destroyed), you can change the talents of any of the three almost like a talent tree. There is customization in covenants, which will make them an interesting choice. I am so happy it doesn’t just come down to picking one active skill and that’s it.
Dude are you stupid? Sub-classes seriously ? If you want to compare covenants to something, what you described is the artefact weapons, gave you an ability, had a build in “talent tree” , and you could equip conduits oops i mean relics.
Its not a subclass its an arteficial extention of your class.
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I know this and all of the general stuff, when I said I didn’t do a deep dive, I meant that I didn’t think about or try how the different signature and class abilities work in different scenarios. What I don’t know is specifics of the gameplay feeling.
But to the point, the fact that you can only change on way does not address the issue. The problem is that you can’t change for M+ after a raid night and back to raid the next day, not to mention if you want to spend time doing PvP. You will get wrecked by the opponent because they have a better PvP Covenant ability and yours is potentially useless. The only thing this does is that you are no longer locked INTO a covenant, but instead locked OUT of it once you leave.
I don’t think soulbinds should be filling what a covenant ability lacks anyway, if it can even begin do that. That just feels like putting a band-aid over a nasty annoying paper cut. Instead I think the more insteresting option would be to use it to compliment the Covenant abilities more.
So you’re fine with Covenants being difficult to swap, but the same thing with conduits is a problem? I agree with you, it’s terrible, but souds a bit hypocritical coming from you after what you’ve said earlier.
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The thing is that as ion said, even from a lore prospective covenants are NOT antagonistic to each others.
So it would totally make sense if you could use abilities from other covenants because they joined forces.
I do not have problems with progression systems as long as they are handled well, and covenants do not inspire me a lot at the moment, and that is all because of 1 thing, and that is the difficulty to swap between them which will make it basically impossible.
The covenant system will be the failing point of Shadowlands. If history can tell you anythnig is that even if they will scrap the covenant system(they already know it’s bad the same way they knew legendaries were bad as aquistion in legion alpha) they will only do it when the user base plummets. They always do these reverse “oops sorry we didn’t think it’s going to be that bad” when people are actually leaving because of it 100% i hope i get to eat my words they will not remove them before launch even if it’s the biggest crap pile ever cause they want to milk the player time.
In it;s current itteration ,not dmg specific or tunning just from abbilities you have a DPS Gain just from the way the abbilities work just from that,tunning aside .Imagine trying to balance an univeral op utility abbility with that in mind.
You also need to remember that the azerite traits were suppose to be fun ,interactive,meaningfull choice. And hell they were ,they were extremely fun and extremely unbalanced when they finally manged to balanced them all,the fun was stripped and all the abbilities were summarized into does x dmg. And you would go on to pick the top one ignoring all the other “Fun choices”.
You cant balance 3-4-100 abbilities that work differently and do different stuff to be BALANCED AND FUN. You just cant they are either balanced and boring or fun and unbalanced. What you can do is make each abbility shine in another corner and let the GOD DAMN PLAYER CHOOSE FREELY when to swap and have fun with all abilities.
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This is what i really really don’t like.
let’s make and example and say barrage is a covenant ability and careful aim another one. I am obviously picking careful aim because it’s better in almost any situation, but then i go do some islands and oh… I’d really enjoy having barrage here, it would be pretty fun to round up all this mobs and aoe them down, welp guess i won’t…
pretty much agreed, you don’t even have to make covenants switchable you just have to separate lore/cosmetics from abilities and player power, it’s that easy, if they shipped them like this without ever even mentioning this important choice bs they would have been received way more positively.
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then how is it not stupid to see a dk use all of it’s Death themed spells while in a night fae or kyrian transmog?
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Tbh, the first bit was just giving ions response on it, not What i personally think, Slootbag also asked the same question and that was the reply.
As i say, im on the fence with it, If they get the info out early enough and i get the option and they Dont start rebalancing crap Throughout the whole expansion and leave it be, it wont affect us too much… if they mess with it a ton i will proly think much more negatively of it
fair enough, if you were just quoting him not much to discuss, still pretty awkard take from ion imo, seeing how badly some covenant themes mash with classes.
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He said he’ll throw the system out and unlock it all if they cant get it working before the expansions release
So atleast they have a fall back if this does go bad
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Good. I thought that they would just remove it, but the way you worded it makes it seem they are going with either delete or make them more accessible.
The point ion made is kinda dumb not gonna lie, it’s not like every single player around will run covenants transmogs, and even if they did, so what?
But i think that it was just an excuse, i think they do know it’s bs, they just like it this way, for some reason that i fail to understand.
I’d agree with you but when they say things like:
While we all know that true perfect balance is unobtainable, and one option will always be strictly superior by some margin, it would seem that between Covenant abilities, the ability to swap between three different Soulbinds at will, and various Conduit options (some of which may be Covenant specific), the goal would seem to be less about perfect balance and more about obfuscating the balance to a point where it’s hard to definitively say one choice is strictly better than another. This may prove to be even more frustrating to the strictly min-max oriented players, but may actually come as a relief to players who don’t want to feel ostracized for choosing what they like rather than what is demonstrably stronger.
or:
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Covenants are set up to be a different choice than specs or talents.
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WoW is a series of interesting choices – from buttons to gear and talents to class and faction
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Covenants are intended to be part of your identity.
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There’s a lot of customization, if you go into a dungeon, you pick the AoE conduits and the AoE soulbind.
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Nadjia which was shown yesterday is more single target focus and you can socket single target conduits and use that as your single target conduit.
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When returning to a Covenant, it’s going to be much harder to prove yourself back to the Covenant since you left via a quest .
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It should be a similar choice to deciding between Mage and Hunter.
Makes me think they already have made their decision, which i do not support.
This is all from current interviews with ion or other important people, if you want more specifics go to wowhead, they’re all there.
Yes. And artefacts were subclasses too, but there they were subclasses to your main spec and you didn’t have a choice. Here now, you can choose your subclass. Subclasses are an MMO staple, it’s fine. A subclass is an extension of your main.
Literally the only difference here is that unlike in Legion, now you have a choice.
Look… I’m saying it looks good. I hope I get the chance to test it, because if it’s boring or not fun… I’m not going to pretend it is. I want the game to be fun, but part of the fun for me is making weigthy choices. On my fury spec, I’m already there with the gear, and it is pretty good.
The intention behind conduits is that you’re able to swap them freely. My worry is that it’ll create this feeling in RPGs where you carry a million consumables with you that you never use because you’re afraid you’ll run out.
Look, in an ideal world for me, changing talents would be a significant gold sink, we would get the old talent trees back. But covenants are also good.
To me, an MMO that doesn’t involve choices like this… is it really worth it? My main worry is pvp. Because the pvp covenant is the only one that can really matter. All other encounters need to be designed to work with all covenants, so even if a covenant can give you an advantage in a raid, it doesn’t matter, because the raid cannot be designed to take advantage of specific covenants. But pvp is an entirely different, there every advantage matters.
But in the end, I need to play it, or at least see more of it before I can pass judgment. For now, it looks really promising.
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Im not saying it does or doesnt look good, i havent tested the whole system yet, but for someone like me who enjoys high-ish content, cares about lore and not neceseraly min/maxes but chases BiS pieces this lock-in thing is a nightmare. Here is my reasoning behind this:
The Class Abilities:
A) When it comes to practicality they are too different from one another. For warlocks 1 is a resource generator, 1 is an AoE mass curse , 1 is ST execute effect (i will bring this up later) that empowers your filler and 1 is a super heal.
B) They change functionality from spec to spec. That ST execute effect i mentioned does not work equily due to the nature of the filler spells, destro and demo will not benefit the same way Affliction will because Aff uses DS as filler which also has an execute effect, you get where i am going with this.
These by themselves are imposible to balance, and its not just warlocks, mages have a similar ability as the ST warlock one, all of the priest ones deal DMG and heal but Disc double taps in both doubling the efectiveness of these abilities.
Covenant signature abilities:
Right now its a popular meme that “if you dont go venthir you are trolling”. The venthir teleport is just on a whole different level from the rest. I dont think it will hit live the way it is but even if its nerfed the meme just change to “if you dont go night fae you are trolling”. My point is you cannot balance a shield or a potion to be as usefull as a teleport. Furthermore how do you balance encounters with these abilities? You cant balance around the shield because the people that dont have it wont survive the mechanics, if you balance around the teleports what happens to classes like DKs who didnt pick the high mobility covenants, you cant simply ignore the abilities either because we get Emerald Nightmare which was a joke due to people having more Artefact traits available than intended.
Soulbinds:
Now we have a picture of what these are and they are not fixing anything. The traits are cool but nothing that special. I didnt see anything that would make the warlock Maldraxxus covenant (the one with the ST) better at AoE or mobility like the Venthir one, or vice versa. While cool they are just adding up to the balancing nightmare that is this cluster of systems.
Conduits and Legendaries:
These 2 are supposed to agment our abilities, but are still unreleased so i dont have much to say about them, other than there is no way that craftable/lootble items will mirror in anyway shape or form the utility that comes from the abilities. The best case scenario will be if at the endpoint the Abillities do similar numbers which is not the same as performance. Example ability A deals 50 dmg ability B deals 45 but also gives you a buff, something as simple as that cannot be balanced.
All in locking player power behind a choise is a dumb decision, just look at azerite reforging and how that was reseived, and that only locked you from your other specs, now imagine beeing locked from your AoE and CC.
“But you cant be good at everything”- Why? Nothing was stoping me before, why does it need to exist now?
“Well you can AoE with a ST covenant”- Well when i eat soup i use a spoon and not a fork.
Like i said i do high-ish content (>+15, and some mythic bosses due to the nature of my server) having to choose a covenant for the story , mogs , mounts and now covenant events and zone bonuses is more than enoght to make my choise mather. Tieing power progresions to them will 1) will force me to stick to 1 form of content and 2) will make me choose an aesteticly unpleasant for me covenant and 3) will lock me out AGAIN from my other specs.
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