you can see the type of player that is like “muh rpg choice.” they’re not playing at your level. and some of them probably feel like they’re sticking it “to the man” the man meaning competitive players, by being contrary. do you remember a certain panda priests predictions of what was gonna happen with covenants and shadowlands in general?
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Even if it’s not explicitly about the fear of being denied, a lot of people do not like actively weakening themselves.
Like the reason for why “clown suits” was such a meme back in BC is because the average player does not care about fashion over character power.
This is basically how most people in this game make decisions:
Covenants aren’t really any different, especially when the choices boil down to one Covenant being god tier, one being okay and the others being hot garbage.
Like I don’t particularly care for the NF aesthetic or story, but when nothing for Warlocks comes close to being as good as Niya or Soulshape, I’m gunna choose NF over the edgy covenants every time.
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I mean, I understand this isn’t your stance…but if the entire defense of a system boils down to ‘it makes other players feel bad and that makes me feel good’, probably that system is garbage and you’re catering to the wrong people.
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It doesn’t matter what system or design choice is implemented the masses on the forum will throw a fit over it. This has been a thing since the dawn of the game. Blizzard could implement whatever people on the forum want and they’d scream about that too, that’s just how it works. WoW fans are always against Blizzard for whatever reason.
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i understand that completely. and it doesn’t matter at all for players like me but it does for yall. we talked this out before. and i have no desire at all to keep you guys from having whatever buttons you need to do the things you need to do. the “muh rpg choice” for me is about committing to a covenant and THAT being harder to change. i’ve said i don’t care about the buttons. yall could have ten bazilion buttons you could switch out between bosses if you want. it won’t ruin how i play at all.
I agree with that. Covenants should 100% be hard locked. All expansion. They just shouldn’t have power tied to them, thats my stance, personally.
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If people still don’t understand how unlocking covenants would encourage more creativity… I seriously don’t get it.
Hell, the very premise of conduit energy single handidly prevents spec swapping and diversity.
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Agreed.
Disagreed. Important and drastic choices should be a thing, along with actual consequence.
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It’s just time to stop this meme. Nobody wants to be punished for trying to enjoy the game.
You literally do not enjoy the game more just because you cannot swap. You might come on the forums and say so, but you don’t. There is nothing that increases enjoyment that way. The army of anti-swappers were just being spiteful, and the last couple of you left just haven’t moved on. Most have, thankfully.
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This is one of those discussions where there are two very distinct camps… and those two camps will really never meet in the middle, and trying to reconcile them or get them to understand each other is largely pointless.
This is similar to how there’s a group of people who VEHEMENTLY hate Diablo 3 because it doesn’t have talent trees, even though everyone knows the Diablo 2 talent trees were just full of ways for people to screw over their character if they didn’t research one of the handful of ‘correct’ builds beforehand.
Some people REALLY like the idea of having their actions have consequence, and having decisions be able to be wrong, because it increases their engagement with the game when they make the right decision in time.
Other people really like the idea of having total freedom to do whatever they want. The ‘digital sandbox’ idea where they can play around with all the toys and have fun.
Neither of these groups are fundamentally wrong… they’re just looking for different things from their games. The issue… WoW is TRYING to satisfy both of them with the same systems, and not realizing that regardless of what they do one group is going to dislike it. They need to commit. Decide definitively which of those two groups they want to engage and focus on engaging them…
In their defense, they ARE getting better at recognizing when they’re spreading themselves too thin… they’ve recently seemed to make the call to stop catering to non-competitive players and put more resources on focusing on engaging their competitive audience… so maybe that’s a sign that they’re learning that they can’t please everyone and should choose a group to focus on and focus on them fully. We’ll see.
at some point every casual on the forums has decided that wow should be dark souls, that never ends for two solid years, for competitive players- without the ability to do anything but slap at things with a fish. and if you picked the wrong fish LOL REKT. meanwhile we’re playing animal crossing.
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You know how people always argued that LFR should exist because it justifies creations of raid content by allowing more people to do and see it?
How does that argument not apply to covenants? If all things remain the same, I will literally never do 3 of the 4 covenants. People are trying to say that’s a good thing? That I’ll never experiment with their soulbinds or abilities? Never explore their covenant hall or farm their transmog?
Yes, how “meaningful” that 75% of the covenants just literally do not exist to me
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Those two ideals conflict. You absolutely can NOT lock covenants and continue to add to them. Period. You can not invalidate a person’s choice by making sweeping balance changes, or adding more soulbind tiers, or adding covenant legendaries. Period.
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“why do you think a certain way? also I am disregarding your answer on why you think this way because youtube”
This doesn’t make any sense.
We literally could have covenants unlocked. It’s a totally reasonable and feasible thing to do. Unlocking covenants isn’t some cheat code that then gives us access to everything at the drop of a hat. It’s the expansions feature that most people think sucks because there are so many restrictions on it.
What “means something” to you means absolutely nothing to most of the players. Nobody cares about the loyalty to covenants when we spend the entire time assisting all 4 of them. There is no lore reason behind it. There is no sensible reason at all that we shouldn’t be able to swap. The whole “meaningful choice” thing is a gigantic, game-wide meme because everybody thinks that’s a joke and anybody that says it seriously are also thought of as jokes.
Honestly the last couple of you still left on the forums have some really, REALLY dumb arguments.
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Blizzard really chose the worst possible path with Covenants.
Blizzard think that because people care about Character Power over everything else, that they don’t care about other things.
But the opposite is true. People fiercely care about things that in the grand scheme of things don’t matter. Like the best example of this is in recent times is the mount contest.
Does it matter what mount we got? Absolutely not. Functionally they’re all the complete same.
But if you made a thread saying “Jellycat was robbed, the tree shouldn’t have won”, you’d get a lot of people agreeing, a lot of people disagreeing, and a small core of hold-outs who still think the book stands a chance.
Likewise if you asked people what their favourite part of Legion was, I’d be pretty confident in “Order Halls” being a very popular answer despite the fact that all Order Halls were basically the same in the grand scheme of things.
By adding character power to Covenants, Blizzard made it from a choice that is dictated by story, aesthetic and ideal preferences to one which is dictated by looking up Icy Veins or the Class Discords and just picking whatever is best.
The hell is even a ripcord?
Ripcord makes the bey blade go BRRRRRRRRRRR
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you were the one that told me night fae was best for warlock. i decided to not even tempt myself by looking. i preferred the necro mog for my orc, so he’s necro. probably the worst, but whatever. that kind of decision has very little negatives for me but a LOT for you guys. the thing that annoys me about it is blizz knew what they were doing when they did it and that “rpg choice” would be like 
for US but 
for you guys. essentially pitting us in an expansion long flame war. maybe they thought that by throwing each other under the bus we wouldn’t blame them for their stellar design choices. lol
It’s impossible for a choice to be meaningful if it can be made retroactively wrong.
The ripcord is the thing that deploys a parachute when you’re diving out of a plane.
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