I’ve wondered the same thing. Allowing anyone the ability to think and make a choice about which ability to use based on the content they’re about to play doesn’t prevent anyone from just picking their covenant/ability once at the start of the expansion.
Any value they get from their single decision is still possible, unless their value comes from others having to play the game the same way.
In a more simple game, I don’t think it would be a big deal. But today’s WoW is vastly different from what it used to be. There’s just so many more ways of playing that restricting and inhibiting performance would just feel bad for players that diversify their time across the different ways of playing.
A line is drawn somewhere. Or why bother with classes? Why punish players at all? Just let me play an Outlaw Rogue in keys, Fire mage in pvp, and Brewmaster when I feel like tanking. No leveling, no gearing, no boosts… just a simple toggle.
I think drawing the line at classes is fine. Adding anything beyond that feels bad.
Also - when you create another character that’s a different class, you don’t have to relevel and regear that character whenever you switch from your main to play it. This is essentially what we’d have to do under the current covenant system - so not only is it an ADDITIONAL layer of restriction, but it’s worse that the already existing layer.
A small thing but they did say that they want switching to be easy, but coming back to one to be harder. Which I think could be a very decent compromise IMO.
It’s not helpful. Maybe if you stick to one spec it is, but not if you’re a muti-spec class. I play ret/prot. It’s no compromise when I already have to grind out two sets of gear, now the water is muddied with a third system with no promise of a balanced situation.
Plus I know of at least 1 ability that is an aura, therefore you need all of one paily to have it. Which means you need to, IF your want that aura, choose one person to take that covenent, and everyone else gets to choose something else. There’s no point in having more then one because auras dont’ stack.
Considering a minority of the player base RPs, it would be stupid to cater to that crowd at the cost of people unsubbing due to poor gameplay or poor aesthetics because they are forced to make a choice they can’t win with.
It doesn’t help at all actually. Abilities and legendaries (gameplay) should never be restricted or tied to aesthetics. That’s a great way to make most people unhappy.
Don’t forget that soulbinds can help tailor your playstyle with your Covenant ability and regular abilities in order to enhance it for different content and are easily swappable like talents. You may not be absolutely broken or whatever in the piece of content your ability isn’t the best in but you shouldn’t feel as if you are useless in any given scenario.
It definitely doesn’t completely break characters - but its an unnecessary restriction that doesn’t even come with a benefit for those that enjoy the RP aspect of a single choice.
It’s nor only an RP aspect of the choice, but gameplay as well. Some people have slightly different playstyle so this gives them anothwr choice on what to pick based on what they liked playing the best.
It’s a pros and cons thing, kinda like choosing your class at the start which is what Blizzard intended. There ia even a talent-like system in the soulbinds in order to balance out thw strengths amd weaknesses, just like classes do.
There should be character-defining and tactical choices.
Basically a loadout that can be easily adjusted according to the encounter mechanics or dungeon affixes, and then some choices that are part of your character’s identity for a more extended period.
Other than class, WoW only has the tactical type. It’s good to have that, but Covenants are meant to provide a character-defining progression path.
Rather than reducing the choices to cosmetics, I think that making sure each Covenant has a flexible talent system that can balance out performance in different types of content would be the right way to go with it.
Basically, if a particular Covenant has weak mythic+ active abilities, the “soulbinds,” or whatever, can compensate. That should allow the Covenants to be balanced as closely as can be reasonably expected, certainly as closely as specs are currently, and a particular soulbind could be buffed if a Covenant ends up needing a boost in a certain type of content.
I think the character defining components should stick to class, aesthetics and story and the tactical choices should be separate.
The idea behind choosing to follow saurfang or sylvanas was a good example. Gameplay and performance wasn’t impacted in any way but provided value beyond just some xmog sets and a mount.
If the game was more simple and streamlined- like WoW used to be in Vanilla, I think it would be possible.
But expecting balance from the game we have today is ridiculous - especially after we’ve seen how badly Blizzard does when it comes to balance.
There will be people complaining about class and spec balance no matter what. There has never been a time in the game’s history when players were not complaining about it.
“Balance” in the sense that you mean has never existed. Even if the devs deleted Covenants entirely, players would still be complaining about it, just the specific points of contention would have changed.
So I am not expecting it. I am expecting the opposite. But some “imbalances” existing has never been this game-breaking thing that players always argue that it is. Even when some specs were totally useless at end game (which is still the case in classic and will be again in BC when it releases).
That’s partially why eliminating a cool idea like Covenants in the name of “balance” is so foolish.
There will always be pros and cons. It’s more a question of getting everything within a reasonable range, which one might call “viable,” I suppose, but not necessarily “optimal.”
And there can be some tweaks and tuning in the first few patches of an expansion, which is frequently the case.
I don’t think they should eliminate it - I would just feel better about it if players that wanted to think and optimize would be able to do so across the covenants.
Some specs still are useless at end game; I think mages, rogues, and hunters all have at least 1 spec that’s pretty useless.
As far as balance - yes, players will always complain about class and spec. This is why I don’t think adding on an extra layer into that equation is a good thing. If Blizzard already couldn’t balance their stack very well - why would adding another layer of complexity do more good than harm.
It’s fine to hold that view. Once we strip away all this hyperbolic BS about punishment, suffering being inflicted, etc., it’s just another version of a discussion/argument that has been had many times about WoW and other games.
There are a couple of different types of choices that can be offered to players in the area of gameplay: choices that are about planning, defining and customizing a particular character to have a certain playstyle, and choices that are tactical, basically a loadout that can be adjusted for a particular dungeon or encounter.
Diablo 2 versus Diablo 3. In Diablo 2, it was more about character-defining progression, while Diablo 3 is entirely about loadout.
The reality is that both of these types of choices can be fun. And it can be fun for a particular game to offer both.
At a certain point, WoW essentially abandoned character-defining choices, outside of the most basic ones. That was understandable as a way of getting all specs to the point of being relatively viable in a particular role and in many different types of content.
But it also left the game without any of the character-defining choices that can be extremely fun and engaging. You can see it already in the discussions around the Covenant choice, at least when players aren’t having this panic reaction about not being optimal at all times. Which choice fits my character, what do I want my character to be?
So it’s fine to prefer only tactical choices, but there are very strong arguments for some important character-defining choices to exist.
But I don’t agree that WoW abandoned character-defining choices. They may have abandoned forcing those choices on everyone - but a lot of us casual/rp players still have the ability to make character-defining choices.
We can make only one character per account. We can never change our spec and talents. We can choose not to fly or use transmog. Not only do I know a lot of players that value and take this approach to the game - but I know of a lot of communities, discords, and forums that support this play-style.
That’s why the system forcing everyone to undergo the restrictions feels bad. With every other choice we had to make character defining choices - players that valued a different playstyle could do so.
Like you said - both can be fun; and both sides could play the game in a way that was fun for them.
With this system, it doesn’t actually give one side anything that wouldn’t have had with a flexible system while forcing the other side out of the fun playstyle they prefer.
I like the story and RP aspects of Shadowlands and Covenants - I just think they could have gone a much different route to “making choices matter”. It would have felt a lot better to reward loyalty rather than punishing players wanting to optimize.
Character-defining choices are choices that are part of your character’s identity and cannot be changed on a whim.
It’s what separates a particular paladin from other paladins. A bone necromancer from a summoner. They generally require a certain amount of planning and commitment.
This is why the term “player agency” is used with regard to character-defining choices. The game offers the player a set of classes at the beginning, but the player can further define those classes by making certain choices as they progress their character.
It’s a core part of what games like WoW, and RPGs in general are popular and compelling to people, so there’s really no way to argue around it.
This idea that everything should be swapped essentially comes from a combination of certain social pressures that exist in multiplayer games and the impossibility of precise numerical balance.
Myself and the players I play with don’t feel like the character-defining choices we make are invalidated just because others can change them on a whim.
I’m not sure where players get this criteria from. Other RPGs like Final Fantasy allow class swapping - yet players can still make a personal choice to stick with one class because they want to and that’s how they prefer their character to be defined.
Maybe that’s the crux of the issue. Some players feel like not being able to change something is a key criteria while others don’t.
In the end it seems subjective since there isn’t some almighty RPG diety that can definitively state which is correct.
But because of that gray area - and the fact that many people still feel like they can define their character meaningfully within a flexible system - all of this negativity pops up when restrictions are put into the game that add to the already existing restrictions.
It’s really not this nebulous thing that you are making it out to be.
And it has nothing to do with there being some perfect or pure idea of what an RPG should be. The concept of an RPG is very flexible, there are many different types of RPGs, and games with RPG-inspired character progression.
It’s really simple. The best comparison in Blizzard’s games is probably Diablo 2 versus Diablo 3.
In Diablo 2, rolling a character was about creating a certain type of necromancer, or a certain type of barbarian.
In Diablo 3, there is no such thing. Every necromancer, every barbarian is the same, for gameplay purposes, because they have access to everything on the fly.
That had a particularly catastrophic impact on Diablo 3 because it’s really bad for an action RPG to discourage making multiple versions of the same class. That is the main reason to play an action RPG past a certain point.
WoW can get away with it because it is such a massive game, with so many different types of content, but the principle is essentially the same. If everything can be swapped, then there are no character-defining choices.
This is not D3 though, and even with it’s incarnation of Torghast will be as close as it will ever be, however this is not what you want to do in an MMO that functions completely differently