The first group to time a +30 was in full veras corruptions essentially taking negative damage.
Efficiency and speed matter more than pure damage. Having a cheat death gives the healer a safety net while it’s not procced to allow them to go harder on dps.
Sounds to me like Ion has learned to have contingency plans in place. That’s progress.
IIRC he was encounter designer (lead encounter designer?) before being overall lead so yeah.
Which just makes it funnier. His guild is the reason why min/maxing and parroting meta is mainstream, he’s done it for years but is suddenly against it and wants to push it out of the game but doesn’t get that everyone has parroted it and pushed it?
Something isn’t adding up.
Mid life crisis maybe it’s just weird. The dude that used to run ej was opinionated but not dumb.
Dude. The first tier of a new expansion is not equal to the fourth tier of an expansion which has had some of the most outrageous power creep of all-time. I think Ion has explicitly said they will never break the game as much as they have in this patch ever again. Using the meta of the absolute peak of power in one of the most insanely power crept expansions and comparing that to what you think will happen next expansion…
I dunno bro, you’re really grasping at straws. If speed was so much more important than damage then why aren’t people taking a teleport and also gives you a run-speed increase?
Implement things flawed so you can string players along as they look forward to the fix patch.
I’m not you don’t get how big a cheat death is. Even if they nerf that there are other soulbind trees it doesn’t have to be instant it just has to be a better option for efficiency than other options. As long as there are good soulbinds in vampy boys they will likely be considered best for most classes.
What if, before we have to chose a covenant, we can earn the class and utility combat abilities to switch around at our discretion by something relatively simple like becoming Honored with the covenant, which we should be at least just by doing the quests in their zones. Then all the rest could be tied to the covenant we join, like the cosmetics.
I mean this would be a cool solution but the entire thing is that “the team” doesn’t want you to be able to switch at all it sounds like, and the “it should be hard to switch” part is a concession over what they really wanted which is “can’t switch at all”.
At least that’s the impression I got. What they really want is to lock you in permanently but they know that will go over like a ton of bricks.
Losing 8-10% DPS for a few safety nets is not considered acceptable in most cases. A dead DPS does no damage but sometimes you need to just git gud and not stand in bad stuff.
Unless the fight is strictly about not dying, you need to do more than just not die generally speaking.
I will buy the expansion after it’s clear that people like me are having fun. I think the “I will pre-purchase the expansion and trust Blizzard to do the right thing” goodwill aspect is going to be gone with shadowlands.
You are correct in that no they don’t want us to be able to switch easily but I think they’re realizing that isn’t going to work well at all. They did say they wanted to try to make covenants work before just scrapping them so really the best solution I see is the one I presented. If they chose not to do that in the beginning I have a feeling they will later on as the complaints and cancelled subs rise.
Imagine having to grind your way through drastically changed content coming in later in the expansion. That would be a confusing nightmare.
The current team needs to be retired. How can you know a system is going to fail, so badly in fact that you already have plans to completely disregard it in the first place and not just change it or do away with it before it causes your player base annoyance and stress.
Honestly the more I hear about it the more I feel Shadowlands is going to be worse than BFA
This “solution” has been suggested countless times. Blizzard has heard it and they don’t think that’s the direction they want to go.
I agree with Blizzard. If Covenants are just cosmetics, I won’t care. And an expansion with no new core features I care about is Warlords of Draenor. Garrisons, semi-meaningless dailies, and a few raids… sounds literally like Warlords of Draenor. Covenants are literally the glue holding the expansion together. You can’t just delete the core feature of the expansion and turn it into a talent row and have the expansion work.
If Blizzard does take the “off-ramp”, it will have to be done slowly, in phases. This is literally not something that they can feasibly “fix” in 9.0. I know this community has a delusion that if you just put out 3 good raids every 2 years that will be enough… but it won’t. We’ve literally already done that before, it 100% is not enough.
This is the biggest yikes of all. They have a backup plan in the event their idea turns out to be poorly received. Shouldn’t that indicate the idea is a bad one if you ALREADY have to have a “get out of jail” card for it?
They already said they knew this would be a problem but wanted to try to make it work before scrapping it. I mean that kinda says it all. I’ll wait and see how it goes but for me the issue is borrowed power, I really wish they’d stop that. All it does is cause more problems. Let our power be from our gear, weapons, and consumables like it had been before.
I literally do not understand how they think it’s okay to even think this way. It’s like turning your homework into the teacher and knowing it’s going to be bad but asking for a redo so you can keep your mark. JUST DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME. Blizzard literally has thousands of people testing their game for free and giving feedback every step of the way. How is it this hard for them to get it right.
I’ll have to listen to the video but up to this point I have never, ever, EVER hear them say “Covenants” are a problem. They’ve said player perception of Covenants has been problematic and that if things don’t work out they’ll be ready to act.
For a long time Ion was hesitant to call them “sub-classes” for instance. He’s finally started saying it to correct some misconceptions people have and using that term but the community has unfortunately already established some misconceptions.
Reputation gating isn’t a good thing and Covenants are based on “reputation”… again. However, they have the option of allowing people to “learn” more covenants via their reputation system and have access. It wouldn’t be that difficult to institute a double covenant system so you could swap between at least two. Or at least make it so that any damaging, tanking, healing abilities are the same across the board and the only difference is visuals.