There is a part of me that hopes they’re using borrowed power these days as a testing ground for base-spells.
That said as a Shaman we’re still flooded with mandatory talents in our tree. /sad!
1 Like
One can only hope. They might just keep recycling like they did with bfa arcanic pulsar trait to a legendary lol.
High end players just read way more into it than the casuals Blizzard designs this stuff for.
It’s a group package choice of basically a sub-faction that comes with cosmetic, story, ability, and other benefits themed to the covanent. Something that makes picking one make you a little different than someone who picks someone else.
Ironically, players are the ones who can only view anything through a spreadsheet (actually raidbots) and belly aches about min/max performance.
Then we’d just end up with massive ability bloat.
People who complain about borrowed power rarely have a viable alternative. Do you?
Nothing is actually on rails though! The players invent the rails!
If Blizzard wanted to force you to use option X for fight Y… remember what happened if some guy showed up to N’zoth without the right cloak? They CHOOSE not to do that. They WANT people to experiment with builds or play whatever is fun for them.
Then a lot of players look up some sim result and complain about how they are “forced” to follow it.
This is wrong. Every DPS spec literally has single target and AOE/cleave/multidot built into the spec. Yes, even arcane, although its AOE is poorly designed IMO (just blink into melee range!) You can do single target and AOE before even reaching 60, and you’ll probably need to.
Tanks too, although their AOE is more for threat reasons than actually blowing everything up.
There are some healers that legitimately don’t have AOE, but I doubt that’s what you’re really talking about here. Rather, this is a barely disguised optimization whine.
Warrior single target was nerfed into the ground in the prepatch for these systems. So yes, the only option to recover some of that single target damage was Venthyr. The other covenants provide mutitarget boost. They then had to this patch boost single target for non-Venthyr Warriors. Then decided to nerf the covenant legendary for Venthyr, which they are reversing. Because Condemn was never OP, just effective. And Warrior overall is about mid-range dps even with Venthyr.
The game is on rails when the only way to get legendaries is through crafting or the AH. When a vendor or drops added could help create more avenues.
It’s on rails when this patch they decided to have pvp players be forced to play pve to gear when they had a better system for 9.0. That allowed PVP players to gear through PVP.
It’s on rails when domination sockets and gems are mostly through raid. When adding drops to dungeons and other sources could be done for options to gear.
There also could be a general gear vendor to help everyone doing higher end content get certain pieces that refuse to drop either in instances or from the vault.
More gear craftable through professions is another option. And there are ways they can do those multiple paths and not have people gear immediately. They’ve done it before.
They do it right now for casual gear. And did the same in 9.0.
I think they don’t because they wouldn’t be able to take it away
And next expansion they’d have an entire new talent row to balance not only against one another, but also against all other talent combos
Sounds like a giant mess to deal with
“Meaningful Choice” is a meaningless self defined term at best.
Just an empty justification for an arbitrary design decision.
1 Like
“Meaningful choice” assumes all options are meaningful. But what is meaningful to one person may be meaningless or worse for others. You can’t force emotional states on individuals.
It feels meaningful for the devs to force this on the playerbase.
1 Like
If it’s anything it’s more a euphemism for “Consequential choice” But that’s a much harder sell in terms of game play. Especially in a persistent world MMO with grinds that make it a tad cumbersome to start over and try the other consequential choices.
2 Likes
Meaningful choice in this expansion largely means to chose to be competitive or choose not to. Like Wow’ers like to say “there is a sea of dps, git good”. A few specs are losing over 10% in 9.1 comparing the best cov to the worst. So the wrong cov+legendary you just can’t compete in M+ or Mythic or PvP. If you don’t change covs you’ll find yourself replaced and benched in a hurry if nothing else by player bias.
If you only roleplay or LFR, then yeah. Priorities are Aesthetics and personal class/lore fantasy desires.
1 Like
Not everything has to be more buttons, you can improve functionality per button instead.
Take a tier. It offers a couple choices for ONE button’s improvement.
Then do it again with another button. And another. And another.
Want to add a button? Then you remove the button that’s supposed to be on that line.