Like what?
People say this…yet the gap between the top players and even solid top 400 guilds is a country mile wide. Remember limit killed mythic Nzoth with a rank 8 cloak (that’s 27 corruption resistance and no 3k stat proc) while people right now are saying they aren’t viable without 89 resist.
Everyone “knows” disc is WAY better than holy for raids yet every single boss on all difficulties but mythic Nzoth has more holy parses than disc.
At some level, further trying to optimize just isn’t as important as playing well.
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Covenants are not two talent rows. They’re those abilities, as well as Soul-binds and the Conduit slot configurations they contain, they’re Covenant-exclusive legendaries, they’re Covenant exclusive Torghast abilities, as well as the “fluff” like mogs/mounts, quests, open-world perks, and so forth. You can’t pull all the game play systems out of Covenants without gutting the expansion mechanically and from a flavor perspective.
Covenants are Shadowlands. Shadowlands is the Covenant system. Everything you do from the moment you enter Shadowlands to when you hit max level is a build-up to the choice you will make for your Covenant. This expansion is World of Warcraft: Covenant. You can’t just take Covenants out without destroying the entire expansion, at least not without layers and layers on extra systems (that do not exist) to hold it together.
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Money and Brand matter. Blizzard will put Methods needs before the average wow player.
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But why does it have to be a punishment for us min/maxers?? Blizzard could surely find a way to make us both happy
The progression most mythic raiders are doing is not the progression that world first guilds are doing. The later guilds have much more gear, the fights have often been tuned down in difficulty, and strategies are more developed. I know mythic raids are difficult these days, but it’s not so much so that you require world first levels of raid optimization to clear content. The amount of time you spent raiding where you’re actually limited by throughput - instead of by execution - is fairly minimal, even for your average CE guild.
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Yes, this is brilliant! The only difference between the covenants should be purely lore and aesthetics.
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Addressing the issue they raise does make it enjoyable for as many people as possible.
In the same conversation they also noted how widespread the impacts of the restrictive system is going to be and that it almost always hits players much lower on the skill/competitive spectrum than anticipated.
They’re not looking at this from just their 0.0001% perspective - they’re looking at it from many other players’ perspectives as well.
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This is about making 4 characters for each class you play, though. So instead of 3 characters you’d have 12, etc. That’s what Method is frustrated about because they think there’s a considerable chance they might be incentivized to do that.
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Exactly, and that is what they were banking on from the start; choosing your covenant for aesthetic.
They wanted us to pick our covenant according to how we internally identified but with the way they’re going with the abilities I don’t see that happening.
I don’t think there’s really a way to give both sides everything they want. The best you could do is design it more towards one side and offer design to ease the problems of the other.
Like limiting respeccing for every fight, but then designing raids with a wider variety of mechanics to ensure that you don’t really have useless talents in raids.
The problem is that if you can respec every 5 minutes that becomes the default way to play the game, and now I’m expected to do it in any group running content on harder than “you’re probably watching Netflix” mode.
and if you can’t respec that often, the hardcore min/maxers don’t get what they want which is to be able to optimize every fight.
They do have a point though, they shouldn’t be forced to make X number of classes beyond what they’re already doing.
The way covenants are built right now don’t work for the ‘Choose your Aesthetic’ thing they have been hollering about at Blizzcon.
I get they are the 0000000.01% of the playerbase, but no one ever should be forced to do something so absurd.
Because to some of us - that’s the biggest value and benefit that the restrictions provide.
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This topic is all over the place, and opinions will differ from person to person. Some casuals love the Covenant ability idea, some don’t. Some people think the choice mattering is awesome, some hate it.
It all just reinforces the notion that Blizzard will never be able to please every player, and people will find anything to complain about.
With that being said, I can understand both sides of the argument as it pertains to specific Covenant abilities and I’m not sure which side I stand on mostly because I have not played the content yet. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t understand why people can see this as an issue.
It really goes both ways with this topic tbh.
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The problem is that TONS of players beyond Limit/Complexity/Method will be incentivized to do something so absurd.
Many people try and argue that those top guilds are the only ones that will do stuff like this - but that’s far from true.
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I feel they should stick to their vision and…ignore what community says since everyone wants different things.
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That’s unrealistic to ask of a company. You can’t expect them to make every single type of person enjoy this aspect of the game, that has never been the case with any gaming company. Each game will have casuals and hardcore and 9 times out of 10 they but heads; this isn’t something exclusive to WoW.
I’m in this camp. I mostly do pve, but I do eventually get into pvp at the end of content patches cause I get bored of pve and need to mix things up to stay logged.
This patch players who chose to NOT do the cloak were actively kept out of rbg games cause the community KNEW x player didn’t have cloak so if they are in a group its effectively a 9v10 match.
It is my fear that covenant abilities will be designed in such a way that if I choose X covenant I’m automatically getting myself blacklisted from groups cause my choice was such that I’m deemed useless in pvp compared to someone who did take the optimal pvp path.
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I think you are over exaggerating how intertwind the covenants are with their unique abilities. Giving them all the same ability with only visual differences does not break the whole covenant system. When I see people getting excited about the new covenants, they never seem to talk about the unique ability, it’s all about everything else.
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I don’t care what people that are paid to play this game think.
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