Why Tying Player Power to Covenants is a Bad Idea
Locking spells and abilities behind Covenants is a bad idea.
Nearly everything else besides this in Shadowlands looks great. I actually mean that, I’m excited.
It seems like Blizzard wants to give players an added level of choice in Shadowlands that actually matters, similar to Horde/Alliance in Classic or maybe even Aldor/Scryers in BC. I want to take this time to explain why this won’t work and will end up creating resentment and frustration in the community in multiple ways.
As someone who has played WoW since Vanilla and also played Classic, I’ve seen how every change made to the game has been received by the playerbase so hopefully sharing my (and many others) insight into this issue will make Shadowlands a better game.
First off, who thinks that each of the Covenant abilities will be within 5% effectiveness of each other in Arenas, BG’s, Mythic+, Casual Play, and Raiding simultaneously? I don’t.
Undoubtedly there will be disparities between the abilities and it will create an artificial disparity between players that is unnecessary. The fact is that when the game comes out and the weeks leading up to that point, tens of thousands of simulations and tests will be run as to which Covenant you should choose based on your preferred style of content. Hypothetically, lets say that it’s determined that Venthir is the strongest Covenant for raiding Rogues. A large majority of Rogues will be Venthir who intend on raiding. Anyone who’s not Venthir will be seen as artificially handicapping themselves and find difficulty getting into groups because they did not choose the numerically superior option.
Then, what happens when the inevitable re-balancing happens that makes Kyrian better than Venthir? You’ve just earned the resentment of every Rogue who went Venthir because they wanted their character to be as strong as possible.
How do I know this will happen? Because it has happened. Multiple times.
In Legion, if you didn’t get the right Legendaries, it could be the difference between you getting a raid spot or not.
In MoP, based on the patch, 90% of competitive warriors were either Single-Minded Fury or Titans Grip. Going with the other option was seen as stupid and most guilds would have disregarded your application if you chose the wrong one.
Try to find a raid spot as a Ret Paladin in Classic. Or Moonkin. Or Affliction Warlock. Or Arcane Mage. Or Prot Paladin.
Probably 80% of the Alliance Priests I see at 60 in Classic are Dwarf because of Fear Ward. Same with Mages and Gnomes.
In Burning Crusade private servers, unless massive changes are made to favor Alliance, Horde completely dominate the servers because of the difference in Paladin seals and racials that make Horde slightly stronger.
The truth is that people play video games differently than they did 10 years ago. Players are much more goal-oriented and information is readily accessible to anyone. To design and develop the game pretending like that isn’t the case will only make the game worse and create more resentment and frustration in players.
Also, the idea that the differential will only effect the top 1% of players is not true. A good way to show this is to look at the Alliance and Horde raiding ratios. Alliance raiding is dead.
Do racials make the difference between a kill and not a kill for 99% of Horde guilds? No, of course not. Then you’re probably wondering why they’re all Horde if the racials don’t actually matter? Here’s a shortlist of the reasons:
–Would you rather have 100 dollars or 105 dollars? Everyone would pick 105 dollars. Even if racials only make up a small difference, there’s no reason to not play at maximum efficiency.
–The top guilds play on Horde and the aspiring top guilds want to be able to play with them. This also happened in PvP in multiple expansions. The Multi-Rank 1 players went to Alliance/Horde, then the Rank 1 players followed because they wanted to be able to play with the Multi-Rank 1’s. Then the Gladiator level players followed, then the Duelist and so on.
The changes that effect the 1% of players cascade down and effect the entire playerbase. Even a casual raider on Alliance right now has a diminished experience raiding because of the effects that racials had on the top 1% of the raiders.
When you have a best Covenant, and you will have a best Covenant, you create an expectation that everyone will choose that Covenant. You also create an expectation that people who don’t choose that Covenant are bad players. The reason for that is because the ones who don’t make the numerically superior decision are intentionally handicapping themselves. Why would you willingly play with someone who chooses to put themselves, and therefore you, at a disadvantage?
That means there will be a higher percentage of players who chose the bad Covenant who are less skilled at their class. Logically, every player who seeks to optimize their class will seek the numerically superior Covenant regardless of it’s aesthetic appeal because their goal isn’t aesthetics. Because of this, the population of players in the weaker Covenant for their class will have a disproportionately higher percentage of bad or unskilled players. That will create a bias for the rest of the playerbase and cause them to discriminate against people who make that choice, regardless of their skill level.
This same thing happens now with Ragnaros players. Ragnaros is considered by many players in the community as a server with bad players and thus those people actively decline or remove Ragnaros players from their groups regardless of their skill level. Covenants will create the same behavior in different ways.
Players want new power, not borrowed power. Give us the Covenant abilities as a separate talent system where players can choose dynamically which one they want to use for a certain situation just like we do with Essences and Talents now.
It seems as though Blizzard is fixated on making these abilities locked to Covenants even though the overwhelming majority of the feedback about doing so is negative. Please do not repeat the same mistake of BFA with Azerite armor and Legion Legndaries and force players to use a bad system because that system fits your “vision” for Shadowlands.
We don’t need to go through two content patches of the live game to know that it’s going to be a bad system. That’s what we were forced to do with Azerite Armor, Island Rewards, and Legion Legendaries when the changes that ended up happening were suggested in Beta.
Shadowlands is showing a lot of promise and the main reason many people have hope is that Blizzard has shown that they are listening to player feedback.
You wanted Shadowlands feedback? Here it is.
Sorry for wall was jut replying to someones request for it.