this is a legitimately horrendous opinion and it sounds like it’s coming from somebody that doesn’t care about playing the game at all; since it’s doesn’t impact you, who cares right? Because you’d never consider thinking past a singular build, nobody else should be able to even though the ability to do so doesn’t effect you either way
Why are aggro casuals such clowns lmao. I never run into people like you inside the game. All the casuals I’ve ever met in guilds, in raids, events, etc are chill. What is it about these forums that attracts all these spiteful seniors
Can’t speak for some of the other things here, but in respect to water striding they did listen to feedback by not only turning it into a piece of mount equipment, but by giving that piece of mount equipment to everyone who already earned the Water Strider for free.
It was the best piece of mount equipment in BFA in my opinion, so I went from needing to hop on my water strider all the time if I wanted to run across water to being able to use any mount that I want so… feedback listened to right there.
What he is describing here is very different from what actually ends up happening a lot of the time. This makes it sound like devs are honestly adapting their product due to feedback while holding on to key design philosophies that have stood the test of time. What is more often the case however, at least in my own personal experience, is that devs (speaking now of the MMO industry in general, not singling our Blizzard/Activision) have become almost resentful of customers and any critical feedback whatsoever.
Whereas maturity and professionalism ruled in days gone by, now we see not only have many stopped listening at all, there is actually a compelling case to be made of others actively sabotaging their own products and communities with intentionally bad design decisions out of spite, just to get back at those responsible for “all this negativity” they feel in their life, all because a few people posted some critical reviews of a system they were part of.
In a genre that is all about gaining character power AND playing with cosmetics to create a character STYLE, this idea of having to pick one or the other should never have made it past the spitball stage. A simple round of “how is this fun?” should been the end of it. Because it just isn’t. In fact, it is the biggest reason I have barely played this expansion.
Further, going from an RPG history of playing your character how you want, swapping specs and roles as you see fit, to inserting arbitrary hassle and time gating on these most basic of mechanics, just seems to me like devs going out of their way to punish us for some reason.
Why the devs have come to hate their customers so much is a topic in need of a psychological deep dive to say the least. It is almost as if our entire civilization has lost several orders of skin thickness.
Playing more than one spec is not self harming. Playing more than one spec increases the player pool in group content, which is what you want in an MMORPG
I’ve noticed devs react more favourably to feedback that is clear and gets straight to the point. They can work with that. What they can’t work with, and what I see a lot of the time, is feedback that is full of hyperbole and toxicity. No one wants to deal with that, and so more often than not, it’s ignored.
I would like to imagine they just ignore it. That would be the mature and rational thing to do, and I always try and assume the best about people.
Some of these design decisions however… I can’t help but feel they are punitive. They are just THAT bad and counter-intuitive to everything an RPG stands for to be an honest mistake. Especially for a company that has been doing this for several decades.
The problem is not playing more than one spec. The problem is the mindset that you can’t play at all if you are not optimal. The problem is elitism, and the source of this elitist culture are the people who are being annoyed at this system, specially those who are influencers.
The system is trying to show that it is ok to play with a bit of dps missing.
Also, this is an RPG, that means that you will have to make hard choices and sometimes sacrifice a bit of power to get flexibility and vice versa. Systems like this are what keep players from just choosing all options at the same time.
You can already play all specs, but you can’t be optimal in every single one of them, and that is the intent of the design.
It’s not about being optimal, it’s about being allowed to play what you want. Conduit energy is an unnecessary restriction to the abilities of playing characters. If someone wants to min/max, let them. If they don’t, they can do that too.
So the real question is why are you okay with limiting how people play their own characters?
And if I create a new character right now, does it have the water walking ability available? No, it doesn’t. I have to go buy the ability for that character so they can put it on a mount. Certainly it doesn’t cost that much but in the past a new character could just call up the water strider and use that for those rare occasions when I needed to cross water.
In my case, I have the fishing raft which I earned back in MoP so it isn’t a big deal but it would have been nice if they had let the strider keep its ability and also allow for the purchase of the water walking if you didn’t feel like working on getting that mount. I mean, why take it away? And the reason is - to have people spend gold x by however many alts they make that want it.
Exactly. Why they did it this way is absolutely beyond me.
I guess you didn’t check my profile before making this accusation
This system part of a bunch of systems that are designed to encourage specialization. It is because of those systems that i’m an enhancement shaman and not just a shaman. So yes, it affects me.
Of course I considered it, but I chose to specialize.
You are already allowed to play what you want. What you are not allowed is to be optimal at everything.
It might seem unnecessary to you since you don’t care about encouraging specialization or discouraging elitism, but the people who design this game need to think about those things if they don’t want to lose money.
They can already min max. What they can’t do is being optimal at everything. If they want to be optimal they might need to sacrifice some flexibility, if they want to be flexible they might need to sacrifice a bit of power, that is the entire point.
That is the same design philosophy that doesn’t allow you to switch classes at the touch of a button. Yes it might keep you from doing what you want, and that is the point.
The same way it is ok with limiting profession changing, race changing, class changing, covenant changing, and all the systems that create choices that players need to make.
So apparently you’re not super great at reading, because I already said it’s not about being optimal. It’s about playing what I want to play.
I want to play resto, enhance, and elemental. I also want to try out Shake the Foundations. I want to pvp. Oh wait, I can’t even play with enhancement conduits because I ran out of conduit energy and I have resto ones equipped.
If you think playing enhancement with enhancement conduits is “Oh well you cant be optimized for everything!” then you’re a clown that is defending a system that 99% of the community hates. Just sounds like you want to say the opposite of the general flow of the thread. No one is biting and no one is going to be convinced.
While you’re at it, go ahead and advocate for a cooldown on changing talents since you’re fond of limiting player choice and experimentation. Or better yet, advocate for switching to restoration because your group needs a healer but WHOOPS you already changed specs once that day. You have to play restoration with Elemental talents.
And you say this based on what? my profile? And even if I was bad at raiding, how is this relevant to the points I’m making?
Then play it, try it, do pvp.
So what? Who cares? You lost a small bit of dps, that is ok.
Actually might thought is: why haven’t you dedicated one soul-bind to each spec?
The community hates a lot of things, specially when streamers throw tantrums about it while demanding the dev’s obedience and missing the point.
Some threads I go against the flow, some I go with the flow. It depends if my opinion matches the majority. That is expected behavior on discussion forums. Also people are way more likely to post when they disagree with something compared to things that they agree with.
You should probably spend less time breaking up my posts into individual quotes, especially when you cut out half the sentence, because I explain why you’re awful at reading.
You have negative convincing power over anyone on this topic. Your argument is summed up as such: “I think Blizzard has perfectly designed the systems in which there is neither too little nor too much limitation to player experience.”
Your argument is already crap because they constantly change how Conduit Energy works, as well as many other things (How much anima you get, how to swap covenants, etc.) The point is Blizzard is not infallible and make bad design decisions all the time, this one being more egregious than most.
So good luck convincing a single soul that conduit energy is a good thing. You have a tall mountain to climb.
Conduits drop at random from different stuff in game.
You can upgrade conduits as random drops
You can also upgrade them 1 at a time for a currency, but you need a specific rep level first to buy that upgrade item, and the upgrade items upgrades 1 conduit at random before being destroyed.
Each time you place a conduit you lose 1 out of 10 conduit energy
But you gain 1 energy back each day
If a new conduit drops you gain 1 conduit energy
In 9.1 if you gain a renown level you gain 1 conduit energy
If you change specs with an already existing conduit set up it costs 0 energy
IT’S SO SIMPLE
Seriously, why? Look at all that. Look at it. Why are they building that monstrosity? Why are they wasting time tuning THAT.
People want big new exciting zones. Engaging and fun content. People want character customization.
But we have that mess above? Really? What you see above is the best use of time and resources for this game? seriously? Look at it again.