Thanks for the feedback. 
Once upon a time, decisions we made for the direction of our characters actually held weight. We didn’t always just swap our entire spec on-the-fly just because it performed slightly better on this boss or that one. We didn’t change three talents before an arena match just because class X was on the enemy team.
We made impactful decisions that dictated in which area of the game our strengths were and in which areas we were weak. It was kind of like an RPG.
Let us have weighted covenant decisions, please. It’s okay for you to be good at some things and bad at others. It’s alright to not remap your build to be perfect for every encounter.
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Maybe finish flying after story completion of each Covenant at 150% flying. Second part would be to unlock Max speed (310%) for completion of REP? Maybe something to that sort but I’m open for ideas and different opinions.
Unlike some people, Most players derives no pleasure from being shut out of 3/4 of the game’s content because the so called “Meaningful” choice.
Unlike some people, most players do not derive pleasure from needing multiple copy of the same character in order to participate in the entire game’s content.
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It was different back in the day. They had PVP class sets, Mythic+ didnt exist and you’re correct, there wasnt a need to change specs because most found a cookie cutter that sufficed in end game content.
It wouldn’t be a remap for every encounter, I’m actually against that. However, it would be nice to remap for each specific piece of Content.
No we did… it’s why they introduced dual spec way back when. Blizz employees got tired of having to use screenshots to rebuild their bars when they switched specs. That said, the old talent systems did have more things players could individually tune and I’d love to see that come back.
As much as I hate to say it… not really? Player impact is always limited beyond yourself, generally speaking the devs have always balanced for meta and ignored aught else. The old talent systems allowed for more agency but they seem dead set against bringing them back.
If this was less than 5% tradeoff I’d be arguing less, but as it stands it’s 30%+ based on what we know. Simply put it is not acceptable to basically cut off content I like to do. That’s de-facto telling me to go find something else to do (e.g. unsub).
Also it’s literally impossible to swap to be perfect for every encounter, so that sort of hyperbole is not helpful.
It’s almost like choices matter then.
You don’t. Way to grossly over-exaggerate what is happening.
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Lmao. Good job blizz, just get rid of the main part of the expansion!
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Except it’s not, full stop. The differences in utility and power are extreme enough that it’s game breaking for those that like multiple different types of content.
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… Are we talking about the same thing here? Which covenant can you pick that would effectively shut you out of 75% of all content? There’s a lot of hyperbole on the forums but this here transcends anything I’ve seen recently.
You understand what I mean, there’s no reason to split hairs. You can swap your spec, individual talents, essences, etc. to be the best suited to an encounter that a single class can.
The decision between mighty bash and typhoon is a lot less compelling if I can just open up a menu and swap them around to suit certain pulls.
I’m not here asking for players to be locked into a single specialization again or even specific talents. But for god’s sake, can this community not even handle committing to a covenant? It’s a couple of abilities. Some will be strong in some environments and others will be stronger in others.
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If you take it out of context sure. Original quote in its full context below.
Let me be blunt: There has been a lot of hyperbole about “being perfect for every encounter” and it is extremely unhelpful. It discounts that the system as designed can de-facto lock people out of content because of the disparities in power and utility. That is not trivial.
Yes… you are in effect. That’s how big of an impact covenants have on classes and gameplay. That’s why this is such a big deal. Covenants that may help your tanking spec may be horrible for your DPS/healing spec. So de-facto that locks a player to a single spec.
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ya account wide would work too
You don’t know the numbers to even get a whiff of that being true.
It’s bad enough that players want everything given to them, but this is a new low.
Why stop at Covenant abilities? I’m sure Rogues would love healings spells, Resto Druids would love to have all the Balance abilities, and Prot Warriors to tank with two two-handers.
Why bother even having classes, Blizzard? They just limit my particular type of gameplay and I shouldn’t be hindered by your barriers… Let Priests wear plate, Shamans shoot bows, and make everything utterly bland to sate me.
Actually we do, they are posted. Having talked with people playing the alpha it’s a major deal.
Secondly: The attitude of “Don’t complain because it’s not released yet” is extremely unhelpful and contrary to software design principles.
Ok we’re done here you’re just here to troll.
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Yea, because pointing out the flaws in your argument is trolling. The whole point of an MMO is to work with what you have and make the best of it, not be given everything on a whim because your precious Sim says you get one more point of damage by stuffing your helmet up your keister.
We already know that certain abilities blow others out of the water in regards to utility.
Like for example the DK Pulsing Grip (Necro), the Hunter LoS Arrow (Kyrian?) and the DH Shadowstep (NF) are all going to be indispensable in PvP. They’re just all straight up ridiculously powerful forms of utility.
Which means that:
A) Blizzard either have to make the other Covenants blow them out of the water in regards for DPS, to make utility-less Covenants compete.
B) Blizzard lets the Covenants with powerful utility ALSO have the best, or at least similar levels of damage.
If it’s A), then anyone who PvE’s and PvP’s is going to be incredibly frustrated when they have to roll two characters of that class, because the PvP covenants are complete trash in PvE.
If it’s B), then you’d be stupid not to pick the utility covenants, simply because, well, it’s essentially free utility. Even if it’s a corner-case utility, there’s still no downside to taking it, which makes the utility-less covenants objectively worse picks.
It’s only:
Alpha
Beta
PTR
Live and they’ll fix it in:
X.1
X.2
X.3
Next expansion prepatch
We don’t have to worry about it anymore, because it won’t be a feature next expansion!
If that was the point of an MMO, Blizzard would have stuck with the design of Vanilla, where X classes are allowed to be bad in Y content because of Z reason.
But they didn’t, so it’s pretty easy to interpret that that isn’t what Blizzard thinks the point of an MMO is.
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Except Blizzard had no idea what they were doing in Vanilla and outright admitted it, going so far to acknowledge they weren’t even expecting WoW to succeed.
TBC and Wrath both point to a time when Hybrid classes were extremely popular and access to information was limited. People created classes that worked without the need for a Sim and still do fine.
I’d like it if they stopped changing classes all together.
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Yeah, and it’s the only period of time where Blizzard were okay if you sucked at something but were strong in other things.
TBC and Wrath marked the “homogenization” era of the game, where Blizzard realized that existing as a buff or auto-attack bot sucked, and worked on making every class at least passable in every form of content. (Or at least, Raids and Arena, since they were the only real forms of endgame until M+ came along).
Not that it’s perfect, but stuff like Shadowmourne Warriors or Cata Mages existed because of Blizzards incompetence at balancing, not because of design choices where those classes were explicitly allowed to dominate end-game content because reasons.
Covenants in this regard are a massive step back. In practice, picking X Covenant for Y Content won’t be considered an addition to that class/spec, it will be considered a baseline, which means if you lack that baseline for other content, you will be significantly weaker.
It’s a lot like Legiondaries, where in theory they all offered a bunch of useful effects for different scenarios, but in practice you just picked the ones that were objectively better and if you didn’t have the good legendaries, you got crushed by those who did.
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