People always ask to have covenant abilities (class abilities not general covenant abilities) made into a new talent row. I agree this would be great. Now what I want to suggest is that we get to keep these abilities permanently from shadowlands to all future expansions.
We are the champions of azeroth the most powerful mortals on the planet. We should be allowed to carry these abilities with us on our future adventures as a token of power granted to us as thanks for inevitably defeating the jailer and fixing the shadowlands.
I think having a talent in a row that you can unlock with each covenant is the way to go.
The other skills could be unlocked and then switched for a price.
Soulbinds should also be unlockable, so you would be able to have every skill of every covenant unlocked, so then you could choose the combination of abilities that suits your playstile.
I mean when we inevitably fix the shadowlands all the covenants will probably be overflowing with anima and will be more than capable of helping us wherever we go by letting us call upon their powers. Not only that but every realm and world is connected to the shadowlands, so them not being able to reach us doesn’t seem to be an issue.
Locking people into abilities earned in an earlier expansion would actually be terrible for the game. It would give new and returning players a major disincentive to stay subbed when they found out how you screwed them over.
The community has things literally completely backwards, that’s the problem.
I want my core rotation to remain the same each expansion. I’m tired of getting on my enhancement shaman and finding that for the past 3, soon to be 4, expansions, they’ve changed all of my buttons. I logged onto my DK for instance and his weapons had been replaced by some dual swords. I definitely did NOT approve of that.
But what I want is to have different flavorful bursty CDs or defensive cooldowns. Artifacts worked. They just worked. That system was nearly perfect. Blizzard just needs to ensure that when we lose one set of abilities, we quickly get a new set. Getting our artifacts early in Legion was a great design choice - we could have been limited to getting them at max level but we got them early and we got to bond with them. It was great.
Which is literally why I said “The community has things literally completely backwards, that’s the problem.”
If you’re a WoW addict who plays one class every day you want things spiced up, but if I come back to the game after a several year break I’d like to be able to come back to the game and play it. I should get to play MY character, but with new things added. Borrowed power + unchanging core class is what I want and what I imagine most casual players want.
That’s very subjective. I’d personally like new utility spells and ideas that Blizzard wants to test that will fill a niche role in content like M+, Raids, or PvP. But I’m not a fan of my core rotation being changed each expansion unless the class has huge issues.
This is a solution to a problem Blizzard discovered in MoP. Simply adding talents/abilities eventually leads to ability bloat. Every class would have an overabundance of buttons and could effectively do everything (CC, snares, invulnerables, etc…). Adding earned abilities in expansions allows them to change up the classes without adding lasting balance problems for later.
No. I don’t want to have to relearn my rotation multiple times each expansion. I don’t want to log into a lesser played character and find that they only have 2 buttons that carried over from the last expansion.
Having a baseline playability is fun. Relegating 1/3 of classes to be broken at any time in the expansion, only to be “fixed” by forcing players to pay off a penalty of long, tedious, boring grinding is bad design that has cost them millions of customers.
This is a “solution” to a problem created by ADD designers who don’t want to create expansions that flow from one to the next. They want to create new games only loosely based on some of what went before.
Here’s your broken, unplayable class. Waste your time rolling a new class, because we decided to make yours uncompetitive. Then waste your time rerolling again. And then after we come up with the 4th bandaid fix, you can grind for 100 hours through horribly designed content to go back to your original class, which will be broken in the next prepatch.
Maybe if Blizzard did not keep overhauling classes and reworking them only so that they work within a particular expansion would be more friendly both to older and new players.
Reworking classes, and changes, is part of why WoW has stayed as relevant as it has for over 15 years.
The worst design choice is stagnation. Can you imagine if al the classes played nearly the same as in classic right now? 15 years of the same thing?
Changes, and maybe more importantly possibility of changes drives all this theorycrafting, discussions, etc., on classes every expansion.
Spriest just needs better abilities to handle short duration encounters, which of course is only an issue now that mythic+ is around and competes with raiding for design balance.
Yes_Nord. I would appreciate that. People who are addicted to WoW will play regardless. People coming back to WoW won’t stay for long if the game is radically changed every 2 years.
Broheim. Ask half the forum and they would have loved it if Blizzard locked in MoP class design. Classic class design is garbage and needed to be fixed not just to make it fresh but because it was bad.
I understand the value of keeping things fresh bro. But the freshness can come from borrowed power, set bonuses (borrowed power), trinkets (also borrowed power), and unique encounter designs. You don’t have to reinvent the actual wheel when you want to change how the car handles. The wheel works now.
Literally nobody on the forums during MoP we’re making these statements about class design.
It was the standard crying about homogenization, over use of CC, specs all fee the same, how the baseline sucks and you “need” your set bonus to complete the class.
Probably because the game kept getting “better and better” from a design perspectve. Classic sucked, BC improved upon it, WOTLK improved upon, so on and so forth all the way up to MoP.
I mean if people could see where classes are now, they would choose to lock in MoP class design and would veto the class revamps. Get the classes to a good place and stop tinkering with them.
There are classes in Shadowlands that aren’t getting many major changes so it isn’t as if Blizzard disagrees. They were just too eager to mess with classes during Legion and haven’t found their proper footing since. Once they’re in a good place, you can just stop making changes. It’s literally something you can do. You can lock in the class design and add borrowed power on top. If people REALLY like certain borrowed powers, you can rotate certain core features for those borrowed power elements (see: Glimmer). But adding, removing, and adding resources every expansion is too much. Simply too much.