Meaningful Choice Assumes Ideal Design and Tuning

Community General Discussion
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Old topic. But I’m bringing up an issue I didn’t see addressed. I saw a lot of “people are optimizing” and “All the locks went NF when there was no thematic reason to do it” arguments. But this one keeps bothering me.

The Ele/Resto crowd went Necrolord. You could call that optimization - except that what the Necrolords game Ele/Resto were things the Shaman had been asking for over a long period of time:

  1. Better Flame Shock management
  2. A defensive

Those aren’t ideal solutions to the design problem, but they were better than nothing. And here’s where the design concept of “meaningful choice” can’t ever be right under current conditions. Meaningful choice means there’s no demand for better specs.

And while I agree that Convoke did gross numbers to the point that all interrupts were saved for it, I don’t agree that the Warlocks going Night Fae was “against the theme.” Maybe forest creatures weren’t linked with the Fel. But Soul Rot was.

And while Affliction is the strongest spec - and therefore people who enjoy affliction are more inclined to play Warlock, seeing a massive movement towards the Covenant with another DoT was logical.

So what’s the point?

My point is, that Covenants being optimized is not ideal, but things like Convoke was the icing on the Druid-cake. Druids, being a pretty top-tier class, allowed them to take optimized numbers on a covenant that matched thematicly. Warlocks took a Covenant that, while optimized, still fit the theme of the spec if not the class. And Shaman took the Covenant that shored up design flaws.

In hindsight, these appear to be the takeaways from the Meaningful Choice design philosophy:

  1. If the covenant is thematically in line with a class, make that classes Covenant talent off-brand, and start it off weak and buff in into relevance
  2. Make the Covenant abilities less aligned thematically more in-line with one of that class’s specs. While these first two seem like a cheap gimmick, it would create a meaningful choice
  3. Classes who’ve been asking for buffs - read: this is free design feedback ahead of schedule - should have those buffs scattered throughout the Covenants. The mistake, therefore, with Shaman/Necrolord was putting the two most requested QoL abilities in the same Covenant.

I don’t think the Meaningful Choice is flawed. But it does sit upon a flawed foundation of class balance. For classes that are strong, enhanced abilities are grossly OP. For classes that need tuning - which we just do not get enough of - there can’t be a meaningful choice because the choice has been made through the lack of tuning.

This system can work. It just requires quarterly class tuning. Every 3 months things need to be tweaked.

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“Meaningful Choice” to the activision team = Todays mandatory item is next patch’s trash can.

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I spent probably 20 mintues making sure I articulated this correctly to take a meaningful position, and you read the title and posted a talking point. But you know what, let’s address it, it’s Friday:

This is the response to the original meaningful choice not going well. I don’t condone it, but I get why they did it.

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Every class has a covenant ability for each covenant. I don’t want any difference to be made between covenant abilities from covenants which are “thematically-aligned” or not. A more elegant solution would just be to disconnect covenants from the abilities.

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That’s not elegant, that’s just new powers. You can have that position if you want, but it’s not what the design team was going for. And if they’d done that we’d all say it was uninspired.

They wanted to add more RP elements. More diversification between 5 classes of the same spec. I applaud that, I’m trying to help them improve it.

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I just wish they’d add more talent rows/columns and end this stupid borrowed power schtick.

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Meaningful choice means nothing when most everything is on rails.

Fun should be the next expac’s motto.

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How are two Elemental Shamans have slight differences effected by “rails” at all?

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What I’m saying is that I don’t want to either be pigeonholed into picking “thematically-aligned” covenants or the opposite. If I want to be a nature-loving DK, then fine. If I want to be a Necrolord, then also fine.

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I’m meaning the whole expac.

No real choice in whammy power.

No other way to get leggos but crafting/auction house.

Everything getting funneled into the same grinds instead of variety, etc.

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How would you indicate your Nature-loving personality as a DK?

Your post seems off-topic but how do you not have a choice? You mean because you’re “forced” to pick the highest simmed power?

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Going Night Fae is what I meant.

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…You can go Night Fae as a DK. Problem solved.

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The covenant ability is so bad. That’s the issue.

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Right so your problem is optimization?

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No because if I want to have both single target for bosses and multi-target for mobs, I literally don’t have a choice.

And while there are few choices for soul ash and cinders, there’s not much outside of Torghast.

If someone only wants to PVP, they are back to having to do PVE this patch.

That very few gear drops in instances so there is only that option since knowledge only gives up to 235 gear.

That most shards of domination only drop from raid. So there’s only one chance a week for those.

I’m saying if there was real choice, there’d be more variety in choice. Your “choice” is play that exact content. It’s not really a choice other than just don’t do it, so don’t gear and can’t do certain content. So quit the patch.

Now me, I don’t mind pve content, and don’t need more than 235 ilvl for what I do, but I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that meaningful choice prevailed this expac.

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These are all valid complaints, I just don’t think it’s right to ask the Covenant System to solve that.

  1. “No because if I want to have both single targets for bosses and multi-target for mobs” - This is a class problem. Both should be an option, and the Covenant should enhance one. This is what I was getting at with the Shaman issue. Our defensives kinda suck so we really had to take Necorlord.

  2. “If someone only wants to PVP, they are back to having to do PVE this patch. That very few gear drops in instances so there is only that option since knowledge only gives up to 235 gear.” - Gear drops is a problem, but that’s not on the Covenants.

They seem to have a weird understanding of how their own game works. With PVP they don’t seem to get the concept that capping gear means you’re going to lose players. Never mind the rampant boosting. YOU DON’T EVEN EARN YOUR PVP GEAR - YOU BUY IT.

But also, the “frankly that’s a skill issue” line is only for PVE. And the insistence on “one character. All aspects of the game” is rich coming from a bunch of people who aren’t seriously competing in end-game PVP.

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The covenant system wouldn’t have to solve it if they didn’t gut classes for these systems. There was no reason on earth to gut warrior single target damage. When condemn was not op. It was just effective. Then try to balance other covenants single target, because they realized what they did to single target damage when it got to raid time. Now they are nerfing the Venthyr legendary. So that creates issues for warriors that went Venthyr for whatever single target damage they could get.

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Yeah, to be clear, I don’t agree with that. But I get why they did it. If the initial system was this “Spreadsheet” focused, they had to disrupt it.

It wouldn’t have been like that had they trialed something like the Covenant System in a small, insignificant way prior to Shadowlands, where it became a core-feature of the gameplay.

I’ve said this for awhile now, but Blizzard has a project management issue. And I’ve been in the working world long enough to know it when I see it - people are saying “This is going to be a problem” and the decision-makers at some level just either aren’t listening or have some pride-based alternative issue they’re allowing to trump the prevailing problem.

At my job, we have budget issues. Can I get our management team to cut stupid costs like hiring a band for our year-end celebration? Nope. They love prestige. So our budget suffers. Just as WoW suffers from poor pilot-testing. And I guarantee you real solutions have been suggested.

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I like where you went with this. The thing about convoke is it finally gave us Druid’s a burst. Without it, we are back to building up our output. Sure it is OP but it’s what we needed.

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