You’re not listening.
Other than the Major nodes that Blizzard has described, Soulbinds are really just little buffs, with an interesting mechanic at the end.
They’re looking to use Soulbinds as a countermeasure.
Maybe if you’d just listen or read my posts you’d understand that.
It’s just Legion Legendaries and Azerite Reforging all over again. They’re already talking about its removal. Just do it and have a clean launch instead of having busted systems and spending the entire expansion to fix them only to drop them off by the next xpac.
They ARE NOT. Again read them they are not tiny little buffs a single node can be a difference of 10 percent health. I read your post. I can still disagree with it given blizzard’s track record. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean they don’t understand what you wrote it means they consider what you wrote to be illogical.
You can’t be forced into making a “meaningful choice” it has to happen organically
And the fact that you can’t connect the dots as to how this can to really wrong is worrying
Given that choice, I’ll probably pick Venthyr and make zero effort whatsoever towards any of the cosmetics, which is a real shame. Even more so if Blizz keeps to the time limited cosmetics kick they’ve been on for the past few expansions, because I’d never be able to go back and get the Night Fae stuff I actually want.
I think a decent compromise would be to let the class covenant abilities swap more like essences, or even restricted further (maybe you can only swap once per day, or there is an increasing respec cost to swap them, or whatever) and keep the covenant signature abilities locked to the covenant you choose.
I’d be willing to give up Door of Shadows and settle for Soulshape to get the Night Fae cosmetics, but Flayed Shot is just too good to pass up.
It’s not that it’s because you disagree with me. In fact I agree with you. I don’t want to be forced into a Covenant because of one ability. But I’m intrigued to see how Blizzard seeks to use Soulbinds to change an ability to make them balanced.
I’m open to them attempting this, but if it falls through, I’ll be with everyone else hoping they’re just made baseline.
My point is that I’m going to let them have their fun and try it out. But if it doesn’t work it’ll probably just be added as a talent row or swappable ability as Ion promised twice now.
Why would I want to watch them try and fail a 5th time with balancing borrowed power systems. They couldn’t balance legandaries, they couldn’t balance essences, they couldn’t balance azerite, they sure as heck couldn’t balance corruption.
I don’t think this system would even add enjoyment to the game
I can’t think of how it would be better
I doubt I’ll be saying in 2 xpacs time I’m necrolord and proud
I mean they might be exciting until I get a better looking raid set and just mog over it and add another mount to the collection of mounts I don’t use
Now if the system was to determine your story through shadowlands that would actually be interesting but instead it’s just another thing to plug into a spreadsheet and therefore not have choice about.
They were never trying to. RNG screwed them up. Now Shadowlands is removing that RNG.
Essences aren’t meant to be balanced. They’re just meant to be a bunch of abilities for us to play with.
This is kind of true.
This is true.
But none of that disproves the notion that this could very well work in the way I described. I literally just told you this but I suppose it was another thing you didn’t read:
Ion promised us now on two occasions in the past 4 weeks that if Covenant Ability balancing didn’t work that they’d scrap it, but they want to see if they can make it work before then.
Just let them try it. I don’t see a reason not to.
If it falls through we’ll go berserk and they’ll cave. They have to, and they will.
Yeah but that’s just it, Covenants actually do determine your story in Shadowlands.
But the thing is that choice isn’t actually allowed which is the problem. The choice will be based on what content you play not what story you want. That’s why the whole idea of player power needs to be decoupled from covenants.
Okay. So you didn’t read my posts then. I’ve said this like 5 times now that I understand that this is the case.
What I’ve also been saying is that there is a way Blizz could actually balance the abilities, but we just have to give them a bit of time to do so.
It’s not just the numerical balance. It’s a number of things:
Even if the DPS contribution of the bonus crit from Resonating Arrow was perfectly balanced with the DPS contribution of the bonus damage from Wild Spirits, how do you balance that given the Resonating Arrow also lets you ignore LoS against enemies in the area of effect? How do you balance those against Death Chakram, which is direct damage rather than a setup ability?
The feel of the gameplay is wildly different, AND the numbers, AND the optimal content for the ability (Raids vs M+ vs PvP vs Torghast), not to mention the associated aesthetics.
You are talking about balancing apples and oranges, but it’s totally fine because they both weigh 4oz, and they are all fruit anyway, so who cares?
It wouldn’t be Ion’s Perfect Vision of the Perfect WoW without borrowed powers. You just need to understand he knows what’s fun for us. He was a lawyer! He’s just better than us!
Honestly, a big problem with Blizzard trying anything new and experimental that provides gameplay power is that this game has spent 15 years refining a culture focused around min-maxing. Furthermore, PvE encounter design has devolved into an even more choreographed experience with tight numerical tuning as opposed to a challenging combination of mechanics that you need a diverse set of classes to tackle in interesting ways.
No matter how they try to “tune” the idea of compelling, difficult choices, they will absolutely never reach the mark in this game without shifting their philosophy in a way that somehow manages to pull back on the idea of min-maxing being a necessity even in lower end content. Good luck with that.
An easy, though dirty solution is to add more fancy items, cool abilities, and other systems that you can use in all parts of the game, but exclude them from rated PvP and Mythic Raiding/M+. Min-maxing matters significantly less in all forms of content lower than that.
I already am at a noticeable detriment just based on my preferred races due to the massive power disparity between racials. Every expansion or so the worst offenders get nerfed, and we still have things like a 2-minute CD vanish that triggers an immune frame versus a 2 second, melee-range AoE stun with a cast-time on the full stun DR.
I’m very much interested in more RPG elements in this game (and it’s honestly baffling that the outdoor world consumables and buffs are typically so bad they aren’t even worth pressing), but it’s not fun that a long-term choice that should be primarily decided by aesthetics, story appeal, and other interesting perks is watered down by “what is best in your preferred content”?
I will always take the best PvP Covenant ability for my characters, no matter how much I hate them or how much a different armor set might go along with a character concept. I don’t get a meaningful decision, I get correct and incorrect choices.
You’re not thinking about this the way I am. I’m thinking in the way that they completely change how each ability could work.
For example, take the Warrior Kyrian ability Spear of Bastion.
It’s AOE, and when thrown on the ground does damage and roots targets in place. As targets try to escape they’ll take damage. What if you get a nodes for one of your soulbinds that focuses on Single Target? Now if you select that Soulbind, your ability will now impale the target directly, and do ticking damage on that single target.
The ability is the same, but now instead of being a trash-killing and CC ability, it’s now a single target burst.
No, that was the player base doing that. Gear Score, Raidbots, Arena Junkies, Fatboss, and all the other arbitrary number crunchers did far more damage.
Just look at those rose-tinted people who went back to Classic and we’re outright befuddled that Molten Core was downed in, what, sixteen minutes after it opened?
Not the game’s fault.
Because the progression raiders utterly rage at the concept of consequential choices. As you state later:
You will never be happy until Blizzard makes everything bland and homogenous. You killed Specializations for crafters, you tried to kill racials, and now you’re trying to kill Covenant abilities before they’re even out yet.
Overwatch and League of Legends have all the MOBA mechanics you can ask for.
That would be really interesting. It could either fix the issue entirely, or make it far, FAR worse. I’d have to see it implemented to have an informed opinion, but I’d be willing to try it.
I really don’t think anything is going to beat Flayed Shot for MM though. If you take the Dead Eye talent, the Flayed Shot proc doesn’t just give you a bonus Kill Shot, you also get Aimed Shot CDR, so your whole rotation benefits. None of the other abilities have any interaction with the base kit.
Entirely possible that Flayed Shot being too good is the problem, rather than covenant abilities in general.
This is ludicrous. Of course there’s a reason not to. They’re going to spend all their time and resources attempting to create systems to fix their systems (and ultimately fail in the end, like usual), and not focus on things that matter, like class design and not putting retarded timers on torghast.
I mean, torghast is actually a great example of how this goes wrong. They perceived a problem with torghast. Their immediate response to “fix” it was to create a contrived system that runs completely counter to their stated goals, rather than some simple solution (or even just leaving it cause it’s actually not a problem).
How much time do you think gets wasted on these “experiments”? Imagine what they could be doing instead.
And then what happens if they fail? If we’re lucky, they’ll implement some half-assed fix to let us swap abilities that was clearly never intended and janky as all heck? Sloppy leftovers, so to speak? And all of that work goes down the drain with nothing to show for it.
All because they have to be stubborn about some system with no potential? Some of us want to play a good expansion for once.
I haven’t even looked at the abilities or even care about the abilities. I will be choosing based solely on lore and aesthetic.