When there are obvious right and wrong choices, choices that will put you at a distinct disadvantage, that’s the game deciding for you, not the community.
If your goal was more casuals in content, it’s actually going to upset you.
The issue is there is no conceivable way to balance them. The biggest problems stem from utility abilities and such that they give. Those take way more than simple numbers adjusting to balance. There is no possible scenario that they reasonably balance anything.
Cross-realm being a thing is what causes this, more than the random people who shouldn’t have the rio score or gear that they have. We effectively have large mega servers, which is analogous to large metropolitan cities. The larger a community, the more impossible it is for any individual person to keep track of who are “good people” and who are “bad people”. It’s actually the largest negative thing they ever did to WoW, was to make it extremely unlikely that you’ll EVER see the same pugs again.
I distinctly remember running into the same people again and again in TBC, bad players got a bad reputation, and good players got a good one. Many of the problems self-corrected, instead of having us turn to soulless numbers like RIO to try and use our time wisely.
Yeah this is way more true that what I said too
These “permanent and impactful” choices that people are defending so blindly are going to go away completely once 10.0 comes out. You lot are losing your minds over Borrowed Power 3.0.
I hate, hate, hate CRZ. Don’t get me wrong the LFD and LFR tools contributed to this but those felt like a necessary evil just so the less skilled players had a way to do content. But CRZ was a pointless thing which only served in destroying communities. Had they kept LFR/LFD on a single server instead of making them connected to other realms. They would have been mostly fine.
In a mmo this is a community. What the gameplay adds and what it encourages reflects on us all. So history can eat me lol
Actually, I’m not asking for that. I think being able to switch covenants easily makes them worthless. What I want is covenant abilities/soulbinds to be talents/glyphs and legendaries to not be locked behind covenants.
Imo covenants shouldn’t affect gameplay at all.
I don’t want to be forced to choose between gameplay I enjoy and aesthetic/lore I enjoy. That makes all choices bad choices.
Exactly this.
I mean… I think he’s even more wrong than that. If the choices are meaningful and impactful then that increases the reason you should make sure it’s the right choice. The more important the choice the more important knowing how to weigh the options becomes.
There’s this very strange idea, to me, that players not only need to make permanent decisions (why, exactly?) that affect the way they play. What if you like one covenants theme and story, but not their abilities? Why should this be a “difficult choice” for you to make? Why are we creating difficult choices that have such impact at all? What you like in terms of aesthetics should not prevent you from playing what you like in terms of engagement. It just shouldn’t.
To be fair I actually thought that the initial traits were pretty decent in that they let you do different things. The problem was the whole “but muh simcraft” stuff that said you wanted X because of deeps so never Y even though Y offered you something different.
OP player agency should not be a forced either you pick RP or you pick game play.
Real choice would be the ability to do both . Covenants should be a rp choice and not a game play choice. Things like the various class abilities should be moved from covenants and turned into talents.
A person should be able to play whatever covenant they like for the rp aspect but they shouldn’t be punished if that choice isn’t good because of the class ability.
The biggest problem with the initial traits was that they went through all the effort to try make interesting class specific traits, and the generic damage proc traits were by far the best for everyone.
It will
Do you even know what portion of the community this system will impact and why?
I’d argue that at it’s core, there’s actually a problem with how doing more damage is king. You’ve got way less interesting levers when more damage is just that good.
It’s my hope that they actually make the decision between more damage/more survivability/more utility an actually interesting choice, instead of just defaulting to damage because it’s always better. There’s so many ways they could accomplish that, primarily by making threat management an actual mechanic again, and unavoidable/very difficult to avoid AOE damage.
The current population of the game is about 10% of what it was at the beginning of wod, when they decided to remove flight. Another purge like that would make the game 1% of what it was back then. Are you sure you would consider it a “success” to turn wow from the biggest mmorpg in the game into a small game with a cult following?
You’re posting on a character that stopped playing during wod. Did you leave because flight wasn’t removed?
That is his point. People complained, instead of continuing to balance outliers and remove problems, they gave up and left the meta established.
It will impact everyone that is why it is so good.
The community will try its might to keep staying the same, and not adjust to the system. But in time they will adjust or Blizzard will cave in and be cowards.
WoW is definitely not where it used to be population wise, but it’s not really fair to compare end of an expansion to the beginning of one. A lot of people currently clocked out, are going to be coming back at the launch of shadowlands, it’s doubtful they’ll see the same numbers as older expansions, but maybe they will.
It’s my opinion that this decision to bring back the sort of feel that WoW used to have, is in direct response to how popular classic turned out to be. There’s a significant demographic of people who would come back to retail if Blizzard managed to recapture a lot of the design choices that made old WoW, old WoW.
I’m going to disagree with you there. Classic is a success because of the classic community. The classic community is the classic community because they don’t like current WoW. Also, they already have the classic communities money because of classic. Alienating their current fanbase is a terrible move and will lose them money in the long run.
The community may decide WHO is invited, but they also decide WHO is invited based on which SYSTEMS give the biggest bang for the buck. The community will learn toward taking those who are using the strongest choices available. Common sense really. That’s the pug community. It’s how they work. They want the best efficiency possible.
And I don’t blame them. If you’re going to do group content, you want the best combination possible. You don’t want to waste your time, nobody wants to waste their time.
And the best combination is dictated by how the systems work with each other.
What the topic is about are covenant and legendary abilities. Would they impact your spec enough that you can’t choose a covenant you like over a covenant that gives as much dps as azerite traits?