Personally I don’t like this system at all. If they are going to give you abilities for an xpac they shouldn’t be game-making critical abilities that we have to include in our rotations. Give us some zone-specific abilities that have relevance to the story maybe. Come back years later and we still have that cool extra ability.
There isn’t any need to totally flip flop redesign a class every xpac. Leave them alone. Give love to those specs that clearly need it, sure. We don’t need a cloak, special necklace, azerite gear, artifact weapons, legendary weapons and other garbage for combat to be cool.
I would rather have class/spec-specific sets that had great art and play a class that functioned well without rental abilities.
2 Likes
What’s missing from the Covenant system is RNG. Perhaps if Covenants were randomly assigned. After a period of grinding rep with a new factor, you get to visit an NPC who puts a Sorting Hat on your head, which determines which Covenant you get.
Yes, I’m a cynic.
It’s only Alpha. There’s plenty of time for a redesign before release.
It’s only Beta. There’s plenty of time for a redesign before release.
It’s only the PTR version. There’s plenty of time before release.
It’s Release. You should have said something earlier in the development process. Maybe we can do a tuning pass in a couple months, but the core system is set in stone.
5 Likes
Don’t assume you speak for me, sparky.
So what you are saying is
I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
So we are all the Walrus
goo goo g’joob
2 Likes
See I like rental powers because it allows each spec to have a “base” that can be added to and shaped within the current content. I mained a Druid from Wrath to BFA and literally every expansion up until BFA Balance got a complete overhaul. I’m tired of that kind of class development. I much prefer just stripping down specs to the barest but having core gameplay remain the same expansion to expansion and then each expansion’s end game providing the power build up.
Though it seems inevitable that every expansion will see some specs get a massive overhaul in gameplay. I just want that limited.
hands down my BIGGEST concern with them tying these abilities together is for me to pick the better of the choices only for it to be tuned and changed where i regret my decision!
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The reason classes are being gutted left and right is because of rental power design. Ask a DK how they felt about necrotic strike all these years.
This just isn’t popular beyond the idea. In practice it sucks. Now of course you can have power gains in expansion content. As explained in an earlier post you do it through era-related restraints where it’s always there or you build it into specs in a way you can control for it later.
If they went for example with the secondary stat passive tree they could adjust it numerically when it creeps into insanity territory. Like the number crunch. Just don’t gut the world to make it happen. Retain all the cool upgrades that players will want through the entire world.
Also the bigger reason I dislike rental power and 2 year class design is that we lose a lot of class and spec variety. Gone is dual wield unholy, gone is sword and board arms, gone is tank demonology. On and on we are and will continue to lose flavor due to rental power design.
It’s not a good idea and should be abandoned ASAP for something permanent and scalable.
3 Likes
Blizz please, don’t change it, people like the OP will never be happy with it. On top of that if you change it to how they want, will become another way to judge players who choose something they think is cool instead of picking what is numerically the best. If they are so obsessed with that 1% and choose it over fun or what they like, that’s their problem.
or, or. make raid ilvl gear at 60 be ilvl 65, mythic ilvl 67 like classic. don’t let final raid go over ilvl 85.
TBH, i think they should discontinue the ability idea or if they keep it make it only apply in the world and blacklist in the major content like raiding, mythic+ and pvp. I want to see you put in the work in your choice like they did back in the day in TBC when you had to choose Scryers or Aldor you actually got rewarded. It would be way better than these ablities thing because you would never be able to tune them to make it fair.
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So when you apply to my dungeon and i notice you have chosen the covenant that brings less dps to the group dont be going and getting upset when i press the big ol decline button.
3 Likes
I think a 2 or maybe 4 year numerical scaling reduction is fine. It just has to be done in such a way that doesn’t make the old world irrelevant, doesn’t hurt class variety and doesn’t leave gaping holes in classes post-expansion.
All of this is possible if they do it right.
the only way old content can’t be irrelevant, is if they go full rng loot like diablo, and borderlands and make all content scale to mythic, or mythic+.
Fine by me, I prefer to run with my guild anyways, less stress and they are about having fun as a group of friends.
Blizz needs to stop caving to the min/max spreadsheet nerds and make this game about fun again.
I want an RPG experience as well as a mechanical experience. I would prefer the abilities be unique even if they aren’t equally powerful. Let he min-maxers use the same boring option over and over again because they gotta min-max. While other people have the option of a unique experience even if not perfectly balanced. The min-maxers can focus on that pefectly maxed DPS, while some of us are ok losing a 100 dps or or so to have a unique experience in game.
Min-maxers don’t care about the RPG element anyway. And that’s why they make posts like yours thinking they are speaking for the community without realizing they don’t make up the majority of the game. Min-maxers would be very surprised to learn a lot of us enjoy playing this game for the unique world elements.
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Nope, it’s possible. It would be done through character passives.
Like if your shadow spec had a full assortment of variations tied to secondary stats and those upgrades were linked to the old world. So when an expansion folds into the base game the upgrades would all still be there and all still be relevant to you.
Their importance over the years would reduce such that what might be 20% live is 5% legacy. And as time goes on becomes less and less important but never to the extent it’d be worthless.
Sorry I kind of just assumed you did higher content, but from the standpoint of how you play the game it will work out well with the way it is currently. I just dont feel there should be 2 different choices.
- Fun
- Damage
Well, when you put it like that
yes
I think it’d be nice if we had one of those giant FF10/PoE talent mosaics and obviously each class starts at the corner most identifiably with each class and reflective more of Classic mix and match than Retail.
Still, no matter the design, people will figure the best route and all other routes are sub par.
With proper world scaling, limiting abilities to PvE or PvP, then the system could be adjusted easier. Blizz has made this system extremely difficult on their part to test and probably knowingly has put this burden of testing out a core aspect of this expansion on the Beta crowd much like Azerite gear was for BFA.
As certain streamers have said, it might not work as intended until 9.3.
On that subject I think this problem is more due to rental design than anything else. We don’t even have real secondary stat variety anymore because most are just not viable alternatives.
Just take demo lock for example. Nothing outside of having a lot of haste is acceptable because of azerite gear. Specifically implosion bonuses scale so well that it eclipses anything baseline in leech or versatility.
Instead of azerite gear a better way would be to have a full array of passive secondary bonuses that make all secondary paths viable. The answer is to dispense with rental power and go full hog on baseline choices.