Yes these conversations are tiresome, but i had an idea for a potential solution for the covenant issues.
The way i see it there are two major conflicting sides (regardless of player level):
If Blizzard makes covenants all a talent and easy to swap, then the first side loses. If they don’t, then the other side loses. So here is my suggestion.
- Remove the class abilities completely from the covenants. Add those abilities as a level 60 talent row that we will get to continue to use after Shadowlands. The abilities are all pretty cool, and we haven’t had a permanent power addition since MOP.
- Rebalance the Covenant abilities to all be movement focused (which is what they were in the original preview).
- With the abilities removed from the picture, make swapping covenants a more arduous task. I believe you could justify adding more badass stuff for sticking with a covenant instead of swapping. Soulbinds, cosmetics, maybe even some sick spell effects.
I think that this would be a fair compromise for both sides. The guys who want the flexibility get a permanent talent row (and we all get something permanent which would be nice!), while the choice stays just as meaningful because the Soulbinds (which are our borrowed power) and the Cov ability are tied to your choice.
Not everybody wins but I think it’s a fair middle ground.
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Honestly that was kind of my take on it. They literally just came up with 4 new talents for every class. Why not make them a new talent row? Then when you choose a covenant you’re only choosing the covenant specific ability, soulbinds, and aesthetics. Change the soulbinds so they don’t directly interact/modify the character specific COV abilities (which would be talents at this point) and instead have them give you other little personalizations or modifications to the covenant wide ability itself.
You still get the meaningful choice of choosing a covenant. They still get lots of money from me as I spend time doing multiple characters to get the aesthetics from all the covenants and to see the covenant specific stories. And the people who are complaining about being locked into a class specific ability that may be nerfed after they sink time into it don’t have to complain anymore (I’m sure they’ll find something else tho).
And then people like me, who already don’t care one way or another because my friends and I will still get our M+ done every week regardless of if we min/max to the small 0.001% power increase or not, will get the pleasure of finally having a new row of talents letting us play with multiple new abilities for the first time in 4+ years.
That being said, I don’t have a beta key (hint hint, daddy blizzard) so my opinion doesn’t really mean much. But seems like a decent enough compromise.
Ofc, I also think that even if they did fix it everyone would just start whining about something else instead of focusing on things that should actually be changed.
Exhibit A: Why can’t I trade my personal loot to my friend if I don’t want the bloody piece?
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A row of four talents would be super weird. If they went with decoupling them from Covenants, I’d have to be on the side of “You just pick an ability”, not a talent selection. I’d love some kind of permanent impact following through into the next xpac as a talent row, but for SL I think it would have to be that.
Edit: I don’t think it winds up being a fair middle ground either, but repeating myself on why over and over is exhausting.
Well they potentially could just scrap the worst/hardest to balance one of the 4. So everyone still ends up with a 3 talent row.
That’s disappointing because i’m genuinely curios why this isn’t a fair middle ground? To me you get a meaningful choice and also options to suit the content you’re doing?
I’ll revisit this thread later to give my full thoughts then when I’m not also pretending to work!
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Okay, finally got a few minutes to try to respond.
I like this idea as post-Shadowlands, but not for the xpac itself. There are four Covenants, and the talents either get weirdly lopsided with four at the bottom, or a Covenant ability gets lost in the shuffle. This, in my opinion, just won’t work at this point.
Swapping shouldn’t really be made more painful than “You’re not going to do this for a single boss/dungeon/arena/battleground”. Making it painful for the sake of pain isn’t good design, it just makes people resent the system more than they already do. I’m in favor of what Blizzard has planned, and even I wouldn’t like this.
Some Soulbinds directly affect your class ability. I don’t think this level of decoupling is a good call-- what do you do with those Soulbinds? They’re not all generic “increase power” effects, they can change some ways about how your ability works. If you delete them, you’re removing potentially interesting choices. If you leave them, you’re right back where you were, except instead of your choice being locked by the system, it’s a noob trap to not take the appropriate Covenant for your ability. Homogenizing them into generic +% effects only would be the same as deleting them, imo.
It has to be all or nothing. That’s the way Blizzard has set it up with all these systems being tied into one another. As nice as a middle ground might be, it just won’t work that way. I’m also, at this point, unsure if these systems could be decoupled from the Covenants meaningfully, with the Soulbind issue I mentioned above. I’m starting to think you’d have to enable outright Covenant swapping, with everything that entails.
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People who want everyone to be the exact same (freely swap covenants) can go play overwatch
People act like meaning isn’t subjective. What some think is “meaningful” I think is going to be nothing more than an inconvenience once we stop caring about the lore in week 2.
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Yeah I’d be down with Soulbinds
As much as I love the Mistblade tree, I could give that up for a covenant I enjoy more of
You can kiss my butt and stop misrepresenting arguments
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It’s true tho
People who want covenants just want to be best at everything
To have every possible advantage
Just like overwatch. You pick from a template rather than build a special character
I like gameplay more like classic wow where a Druid will never out dps a mage but is very valuable in other ways
Not everyone needs to be max dps max healing max utility that’s boring and everyone is the same
I want the covenant I like + the ability I like
The image of the opposition in your head is not the reality of this argument, we all have many reasons for wanting more individual choices
I’ve made a dozen arguments that do not involve performance
And the thing about everyone being the same
Every Kyrian Mage will be almost exactly the same
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That is not accurate. This side wants punitive choices - not necessarily meaningful ones.
Not entirely true either.
There is a side that respects the second side and that is fine having the covenants be implemented with flexibility.
The first side you mention is really only a small portion of players that prefer to have WoW move towards a single player RPG style rather than an MMO RPG.
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Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m on ‘that side’, and I’m not interested in anyone being punished for their choice.
I don’t know why you’re trying to paint people that don’t agree with you as some kind of bad guys. I, at least, do understand your point of view. I just prefer the vision that Blizzard has over yours.
Stop speaking for other people. Represent yourself.
I’m not putting words in your mouth - I’m telling you that what you’re saying “is not accurate”.
No, you’re acting like everyone that disagrees with you hates you personally.
See, there’s a side that thinks WoW should be an excel spreadsheet where the only thing you do to play the game is input numbers, and you should be able to change any of those numbers whenever you want so you can kill the big flashy boss. The second side is full of saints who respect and love and tolerate the first side for their misguided opinions.
The first side is just a bunch of hateful elitist jerks that want to ruin any semblance of fun in the game.
There. Now we can at least communicate on the same level. You know, with blanket good/bad statements instead of actual ideas.
Oh i’m sorry - I thought you were the OP.
Are you the OP, but now posting on a different character?
I’m sorry, what? Do you mean OP as in the person you quoted, or the thread OP? If the former, I transferred this toon and it reset all my forum stuff. If the latter, I don’t know what I said to give that impression. This is the only Samtaya in WoW afaik.
He sounds defensive for being called out about being in favor of punishing others imo.
But you’re right - a lot of the proponents of the restrictions are more in favor of punishments rather than choices that have meaning.
Aren’t these they same people?
Correct. The biggest value of the system is the number of people that get punished for not playing the game the way we want them to play.
If you deviate, then you get punished either through the covenant restrictions that are built in, or you have to have multiple characters of the same class to work around the system.
Play how we want - or be punished. “Meaningful choices” is an ambiguous term that has varying meaning from person to person - but yes, for those of us that are in favor of the system, these “meaningful choices” involve punishing consequences rather than neutral consequences.