If they don’t change it, I hope they seriously overtune one and everyone picks that covenant. Then it gets a 50% nerf and we can all collectively make a ascii surprised pikachu.
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Yeah, cause it’s all about the min/max people.
Non-min/max people couldn’t possibly have independent preferences, no, it has to be all about the min/maxers.
And it can’t be an objective reason like keeping the RP elements consistent and whole, no, it has to be a personal vendetta against the min/maxers.
And the min/max people, of course, aren’t repeating this malignant narrative in order to shame other players into falling in with how they want to twist the game so they can ‘win’ and be ‘the best’ to boast their egos. No, of course not, they are being all altruistic, thinking of their friends, their guildies, heck, THE VERY FUTURE OF THE THE GAME!
You can keep spinning this tale but it doesn’t count as a positive.
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It does 4 me.
How can Blizzard possibly keep Role Play(That’s what RP Elements mean) without chaining it to Game Play elements? It wouldn’t be consistent! It’s not like they can give the player choice of covenants based of visual appearance/story alone! That’s MADNESS!
If only it could remain consistent ! UGH!
No, we must punish the player for wanting to enjoy all the content.
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It’s supposed to be “meaningful” in that you personally make the decision instead of just doing whatever the damage meters/sims/etc dictate. They’re intended to shape your character in major ways that reflect your dominant playstyle.
People keep saying to turn the abilities into talents, but from what we’ve seen the impact of talents is comparatively quiet weak compared to covenants and soulbinds. To make analogy with cars, if changing talents is like fine engine tuning, swapping covenants like we do talents would be like changing out your transmission and fuel injector every time you drove your car.
If we want to nerf the covenant abilities down to talent-level impact, sure, make them talents, but it doesn’t make sense for such a major component within a spec to flip flop around like it’s nothing. If absolutely nothing else, covenants should work like the Nazjatar buddy system where you choose your covenant for the day and can’t change until the next day.
Sorry, what exactly is stopping them keeping them high impact and making them a talent?
Oh that’s right, nothing.
Nothing is stopping them doing that. Literally nothing at all.
flanders.jpg
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They’d need to be on par with existing talents, and the overwhelming majority of those have nowhere near the combined impact of covenants and soulbinds. The latter two systems border on choosing a class.
Of course they could revise existing talents to be as high impact as covenants+soulbinds, but that sounds like a Grade A USDA certified cataclysmic disaster.
Why exactly? You keep making these grand statements.
A special talent row with 4 choices instead of 3, that goes away at the end of the expansion or is integrated into core game.
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It wouldn’t seem strange to you that the bottom line of talents does more to change how your class plays than all the above rows combined, and potentially even your choice of spec? Existing talents would seem near pointless in comparison.
Why? Why would borrowed power being strong be weird at all? Azerite, Essences already do that this expansion and legendaries did in Legion.
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Covenant abilities aren’t nearly that impactful
The only one i can think of is Condemn for Warriors, but it even then it’s only because it’s hella overtuned, and it even replaces one of their baseline spells instead of being an addition, so the impact is not really there except bigger dps numbers
I believe they have potential to be more impactful than Legion artifacts were once soulbinds are fully implemented.
I’d hope so because covenants are kinda one of the biggest focuses of the expansion.
So why, I ask again can’t they be talents and powerful?
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That’s fine, but covenant abilities are not tied to the soulbinds. What we want is to take the covenant abilities into a talent row, the soulbinds can stay as a covenant-tied power progression.
Soulbinds remaining covenant-tied is completely fine as from what we can see right now, the traits are completely generic and the conduits you socket into them are also generic. Some traits are even not even power increases, I’ve seen one that simply gives mining ore on bosses kills or something.
Hell, you even have the choice between 3 soulbinds for each covenant, so even if you end up picking a not so optimal covenant as far as soulbinds goes, you still have an option between these 3 that should close the gap between a supposedly better covenant.
It would just be awesome if CLASS abilities could be swapped and used at will, as it would not only give them a massive win to gain the community’s favor, it also goes hand in hand with Shadowlands’ massive focus on a return to maximising the player’s agency.
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It just makes the rest of the talent system seem like a joke. You know that meme with the horse that half well drawn and half badly drawn? Like that. It would feel bad to see all these awesome abilities in the bottom row while all your actual class talents all look dry, dull, and even weak. It puts all the focus on the borrowed stuff while the parts that will persist to the next xpac languish.
Really, consistency is the main thing here. Give old talents the same level of punch and I’m ok with covenant abilities being talents.
Talents aren’t supposed to define your characters power, they help fill in some voids in builds. A shadow priest or resto shaman without earlier talents feel absolutely woeful.
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I think that’s a matter of design philosophy… IMO talents should bring something to the table and make you excited to use them, not just bondo up gaps so the class can function.
By your definition current talents are all bondo up gaps, whatever that means.
What we are proposing actually is what you want then. A final row with powerful meaningful talents is exactly what you ordered. Glad we agree.
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I would disagree.
The best exemple that illustrates the opposite of this is the recent rise of the Rising Mist Mistweaver haste build. That talent alone was contributing to upwards of 95% of a mistweaver’s healing throughput. That is absolutely INSANE.
And yet what happened when Blizzard nerfed it so it became more reasonable? People complained a ton.
So we can see that a talent can do 95% of your throughput and people still don’t actually mind (aka they want to keep it that way), and they don’t feel that it makes the rest of the talent system seem like a joke, as they would then be in favor of the nerf if that was the case.