I’m highly confident that four years from now Covenants will be looked at fondly. In fact, I will craft a Golden Millhouse Manastorm if in the long-run Covenants are put into the same bin as Island Expeditions or Warfronts as a failed, unsalvagable system.
There will always be that minority that hates them though. You see it here and there - people every so often pop up and say the Legiondary system as a whole was bad because it was bad at launch. That’s just nonsense. Complete and total utter nonsense and yet some people think that WoW is sustainable without new systems and that anything that causes even a momentary disruption in their own personal “peak fun” is a “literal slap in the face” to them.
The short and simple truth is that short term disruptions and imbalance are actually completely okay if they bring improvement to the game. Death Knights are awesome. Demon Hunters are awesome. Both were botched on release. The idea we shouldn’t release content because the initial state will be a disaster is nonsense.
Locking it up is how you make players leave. “I want to switch”. “You can’t” Well cya bye. Which is why they work so hard to balance class, because when there class feel bad people just stop playing. And you’re multiplying the issue now by 4.
The community will leave before changing. Blizzard will loose that gamble xd
I don’t think that is necessarily the only way, I think if they got rid of a lot of the overarching systems that interact with each other they would have a lot easier time with balance.
If you want classes to perform at the perfect same level than they need to be the same.
It’s not the only way to try to fix the problem obviously. But covenants are just not the way to go around for many many reasons outside of min/maxing that people try to pidgeonhole it.
You’re starting to come off as condescending, and down right rude to the people who enjoy playing at a very high level who are not toxic elitists. Many folks find it fun in trying to be the best guild, best M+ team, best arena team, etc. Just because that isn’t how you view fun doesn’t mean it’s not fun for those people.
Do they actually though? Blizzard have corrected major outliers in many cases but they’ve lately “let it ride” and let the meta-game exist as it is. Blizzard have been able to patch things incredibly quickly when they prove problematic but have mostly been content to let classes sit where they have and only make adjustments when there’s a very clear defined need for them to intervene.
They just want classes to be “good enough” and then let players decide if chasing the FOTM class is worthwhile for them. Some people swap class each tier. Other people stick with their class. This will be the way of Covenants.
Yep they haven’t tried really hard in BFA. I don’t think BFA should be looked as the golden standard. A bad quality expansion by far. Legion and wod had a lot of tuning as did other expansions normally in the past.
Locked up specs saw the game reach it’s height in terms of players.
People often say a developer change will kill the game. It has yet to be true. Besides, if we care to look at data the downward slope in the playerbase began with the introduction of the modern cookie mold spec system.
There is plenty of competition out there. People leave and come back all the time.
They were never truly locked up, The cost of respec was a joke in Wotlk and in TBC. And classic proved that players can get insane amount of gold in it, making respec a joke.
That doesn’t mean anything.
Wod didn’t kill wow, so let’s make more WoD?
Sort of - in the game’s current state you can’t easily swap to a weapon and shield when you need to, and threat generation is just blanket boosted in prot spec.
You really can’t do anything much like the old days, other than just running as essentially one more dps because you outgear the content. You could arms tank when you didn’t outgear the content back then.
That isn’t the same thing as making your own talent build work when gear is level appropriate; and you can’t really do that now with how much role specific stuff is baked into the specs themselves.
Maybe it’s different for me because when I grew up, I was taught this: If you’re actively trying to be the best, you’re actively trying to make everyone else worse than you.
I don’t mind the people who do hard content if they don’t brag about it and don’t shame others who play the game differently.