The argument coming from many high end raiders on Alpha is that they hate covenants being a semi permanent choice. Even self described as currently having a toxic attitude towards this system.
The argument they have is that as long as something isn’t perfectly tuned you should freely be able to swap between choices so that from encounter to encounter they can min max anything and everything. And that no matter how insane it may be to take advantage of the ability to swap a system, if it can be done someone will do it and thus they all must do it. Because they “have to”.
Note that this has nothing to do with experiencing all the content each faction has to offer as these players already roll at least four max level characters even if they aren’t all raid ready each their. Many more couldn’t care less about content outside raid.
Ion likened covenants to subclasses and I couldn’t agree more, your character choice is the immediate analogy I drew when I first learned of this system.
So do all these top raiders a favour and end their misery. Capping Mythic raid lockouts to the mid twenties for unique characters will allow raid groups to still have benches. You can replace a tank/healer if they miss a raid night or a underperforming DPs. You can still trial a few raiders in a given week. By the very nature of being a Mythic raid guild members are generally more consistent attendance wise.
This would also add an element of chess to the progression race as raids would have to essentially set their roster for the week.
It would also curb mount and loot sales to some extent of you see that as a plus.
It would also probably curb BoE insanity to some extent.
You would still probably have a quarter of the raid have raid ready alts, maybe some range/melee swaps alternative tank or healers. It wouldn’t eliminate class stacking completely as you could get a reset each week but it would end the race to bottom.
I’m pretty sure a bunch of high end players would breath a huge sigh of relief.
Just my thoughts and observations from the side lines.
Thanks
Or, they could just eliminate the mechanical differences between the covenants, make them purely aesthetic, and solve the problem.
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Why stop there we could just eliminate the mechanical differences between everyone, class included and solve the problem completely. That’s why we play an MMO right? We all want pure homogeneity.
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I always thought you could unlock the other covenant abilities in a talent tree by doing a short questline for each one, that would be pretty cool.
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That’s already done. Every class has the same macro abilities just different resource. I even have all my alts bindings to the same key groups it’s that similar now.
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I have every class at max outside of DK, and I get what you’re implying. For example all my tank specs are generally keybound similarly, builder 1/2, spender 1/2, cc, AOE, ranged, movement 1/2, small dps/defensive, large DPs/defensive. But it’s a long way from homogeneity, some classes may have 10 more spells than another. And their functionality and implementation make a big difference, the fact that different people enjoy different specs and roles more than others makes it clear we are a long way off from everyone being the same. And that is just for tank roles, if we look at Holy pally vs resto druid vs disc priest I’d be hard pressed under any circumstances to call them homogeneous.
I do understand where you’re coming from though.
I get your intent, but my guild can literally have five different players between Tuesday and Wednesday nights so it could really screw us.
Also, building hard limits into systems like this is part of the problem with this game. They end up creating convoluted gating, like Titan Residuum where players coming back late to the game are far less likely to get good Azerite Traits, or crafted gear, where they don’t want you to have too much power right away, or the ridiculous hoop-la that is Conquest Points.
Blizzard’s philosophy: We want you to have gear, but not too fast. First, we want you to jump through hoops, but not too many because we’re afraid you’ll get tired too fast. So here are some quests to limit the amount of hoops you can make. To complete these quests you’re going to need to gather this currency to buy hoops, but the currency is also limited because we don’t you getting tired farming it. Also there’s a weekly cap and the area that you gather from is locked until it resets. Next week we’re going to start requiring signed permission slips and a monthly doctor’s note confirming that you’re remaining healthy.
edited for grammar
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What if they did it for the first 2-4 weeks? Although it doesn’t address your overall systems point, during the first few weeks of a new teir generally players have really good attendance. If your guild knew that for the first few weeks there was a unique player limit would it impact you that much?
Everything is a balance but the idea that content like this can’t be implemented because of competition, may mean a cap would be the lesser of the two evils.
I fail to see the reasoning for this, they want to bring the best possible comp for every boss. Why put MORE barriers in front of them than what they already have?
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The key word there is “possible”, blizzard isn’t allowing you to change covenant to max/min they are doing it so that if you really want to change covenant you can at a cost.
These are incompatible, I’m saying make it impossible for raid reasons and the mythic raiders don’t have to worry about min/max covenant and other 99% can have systems designed around choice.
Saying it’s a choice for the other 99% is false, far more than 1% of players will want to play as optimally as they can. No one on my raid team is happy with they way Bliz is going with covenants/soulbinds and we’re far from the 1%.
If a sweaty world class mythic raider wants to level 4 of the same class… let him? The majority of mythic raiders, or raiders in general, won’t do that. Now is there some deep fundamental issue with the game that you’d want to do that: sure. But papering over that issue with an artificial limitation is not the way to solve that.
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This is exactly my point, the issues effect a very large amount of the player base but also most of that effected group can’t afford the time investment to work around it.
I agree it would be really cool if the world first guilds had to bring not just the same 26 characters, but the same 20 characters. I can also see how it might be unrealistic for most mythic guilds, though.
If they made it a regular thing that the lock could only contain 20 characters, and balanced around that, I think that might be okay. Blizzard would have to do a lot better job of balancing the specs, though.
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What is “optimally as they can” swap for every encounter? This is not beneficial for the game, the flip side is of this stance would be Blizzard is supposed to balance encounters around an entire raid having a tp on a fight and fleshcraft another or an entire debuff immune raid… I’m in favor of Blizzard being able to implement systems like this without people loosing their minds over fear of missing out.
I already swap talents and essences every fight as required and until corruption I had different gear for different fights and for M+.
It’s not fear of missing out, it’s annoyance knowing blizzard can not for the life of them balance classes let alone all these new abilities and then them making it very difficult to swap as fights require.
Looking at your toon you’ve not raided at all let alone at a hard level so you don’t know what is required to play at that level. Unless you’re on an alt.
I think the fundamental problem is the mistaken belief that human beings are perfectly satisfied with inferior alternatives as the default human state.
People drive inexpensive cars and wear inexpensive clothing, so that must mean human beings are ok with lesser products rights? If you remove all the barriers to choice in real life, most of us would pick the expensive car, or the expensive clothes.
By its nature, the game evens the playing field by removing most of the real-life limitations that prevent us from choosing the best alternative- time, money, talent, opportunity, etc. Those real-life limitations have the effect of tempering our expectations. Nobody wants to drive a beater car but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
WoW is offering up four different cars for sale. The entire population can afford to have any car they want, free of charge. The catch is that you don’t know which is best. You don’t which will best suit your needs. IRL you can find some solace in your limitations. “I’d love to drive a nicer car, but I can’t afford it.” So you make your peace and move on with your life.
When someone picks the wrong Covenant in Shadowlands the only psychological defense they can fall back on is that they were almost choosing blindly - that Blizzard forced them into a decision that they are now unhappy with. Nothing more, nothing less.
I don’t believe you can force people to happily accept these choices without giving them a proper psychological safety net to land on.
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“Swap as fights require” is subjective and unintended. This thread is about removing the “requirement”. I’m specifically talking about this slippery slope because I understand exactly what is “required” any and everything possible to maximize throughput.
You can like or not like the covenant system.
I like it and thus my concern is that by the mere fact it’s possible to switch it then falls under max/min or “required”
I do think you should be able to switch, but not for max/min reasons.
How hard is this to understand…
If you don’t like the covenant system in general as a design choice fine… But this is about trying to have a world where I can switch if I don’t enjoy a covenant but not have it become or limit it as a “required” progression max/min.
Note this suggestion also has built in leeway because I acknowledge some fights for progression may require extra heals or extra DPs.
What I’m getting from critics is blizz can’t balance classes or covenants so there for we should be able to switch or stack as we want.
So then what? An encounter should be balanced around stacking 15 druids all in the venthir covenant? Or the system just shouldn’t/can’t be implemented?
I’m trying to find a solution, where as I’m trying not to believe that a free for all is the solution being offered by critics.
If this is the case then, we won’t get abilities or systems with this kind of fun/utility/power as the intention is in my opinion them being “balanced” around that you can’t have the best for a given situation all the time.
I’m addressing your point but have already heard from people in discord and other forums that they feel it would impact their guild as they require more leeway due to attendance etc. So I don’t think this will address the issue without introducing more issues.
The fix then is to remove power gains from the covenants and leave them as strictly lore/cosmetic options and leave the power gains as a neutral system that isn’t influenced by the covenants and is treated as secondary trait system where you can pick and choose different talents to fit the content/fight you are working on. The fix is not to screw over a raid difficulty that you don’t even participate in because you have some poorly understood concept of the content and an even more poorly thought out “fix.”
If Blizzard had any demonstrable capability of balancing this wouldn’t be an issue. If they had made the abilities all single target, or all AoE and with zero utility benefits they could have had a chance at balancing the covenants. They didn’t do that though. They created a system that they will never be able to balance for anyone, and this issue doesn’t just impact the top 1%. This lack of balance will, as things always do, trickle down to PuGs and heroic/normal raid groups who seek to emulate what mythic raiders do whether that works for them or not.
And why isn’t it? Why is allowing players the capability of selecting their abilities as needed to account for content requirements a non-solution to you? Do you also think that talents/azerite traits/essences/etc. right now shouldn’t be allowed to be changed as necessary on a fight by fight or content by content basis?
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If you can’t swap or can’t swap effectively in a given lockout, that is a very effective “fix” lol.
I’d say that for the vast majority of raiders not being able to swap classes on a whim is very effective at addressing class stacking…
Because if you can use any ability anytime you want then they have to be scaled back… what they are attempting to do is give you some awesome abilities even to classes where they sometimes break the game balance but there is a always a draw back.
And using any “system” from BFA as a reference…
And how exactly is it screwing over a raid difficulty outside of what I’ve already acknowledged. What because someone one raid might have 6 vs 3 of a certain covenant ability on x encounter where it makes a difference? That’s a joke because you’re all going to wait to the last moment possible to follow the leader and hop on the bandwagon of whatever the top payers pick. Hopefully waiting will mean sacrificing renown gains so people can’t wait to pick.