This can be applied to just about anything though. If somebody WANTS to change their class/race around on the same character. If somebody WANTS to have full mythic raid gear.
Like I said: If you want to convince people this is a GOOD idea, there has to be more to it than “Well you can ignore it if you think it’s bad”.
Otherwise I’ll go back to saying I think it’s unhealthy for the game as a whole, which this doesn’t address that point.
This is an argument that Blizzard should change their approach to balance.
Maybe if the community put even half the effort into getting on Blizzard’s case about balance as they have about this covenant thing.
Letting people freely swap covenants doesn’t fix the underlying issue is my point, which is that Blizzard has a bad approach to balance.
That’s a band-aid, which merely hides the problem rather than actually addresses it.
This concern becomes a complete non-issue if that problem is address and if it’s not, then our problems aren’t solved by letting us freely switch covenants around anyway.
If they approach covenant/conduit balance with the same mentality they have talents and just let them be freely swappable, that’s not a system that sounds good or even passable to me.
I think talents are in a terrible place right now.
They have, many, many times. However, in this case, balance is just a symptom of the larger problem. The root cause of covenants being bad is that they affect gameplay. If covenants didn’t affect gameplay in any way there would be little to no issue with them. They would be a fun choice that we could make purely based on our characters story/aesthetic. That’s what they want us to choose based on anyway, right? And then we could choose our gameplay separate from that. It’s a win win, and the only thing that would truly keep covenants valuable, while also making them a fun choice.
I’ve been around the forums for a very long time. There has never been a significant push for Blizzard to change their approach to balance.
At best, there are threads to nerf a very specific thing that people feel is broken.
I think it would have been better to have all the gameplay stuff be on our characters rather than another borrowed power system that’s going to go away in 2 years, but part of this is that they still want to limit how frequently people can change their gameplay choices as well.
If this was purely about cosmetics, there’d be no reason to have the 1 week cooldown on conduits.
Which I think that’s too much, but I agree with the general idea that completely free swapping has been bad for the game as a whole.
We don’t need to get inside information to know that they’re perfectly happy letting talents or builds under-perform for an entire expansion.
As a Prot Paladin I have a talent that is a complete dumpster fire, Retribution Aura. It’s so bad even Icy Veins suggests that Cavalier, a mobility talent, results in higher DPS by virtue of being able to get to the mob faster.
However Blizzard hasn’t bothered fixing it, and it’s not like people really complain a whole lot about it. Protection Paladin works just fine despite it.
That’s a major problem in how Blizzard does balance, and I imagine just about every class has talents that are like that where there is virtually no situation you’d actually want to take it over one of the other options on the row.
A key part of meaningful choice isn’t just limiting being able to switch the choice, but also making each choice actually worthwhile.
There should be situations for every choice to be optimal, which a wide variety of situations should come up in M+ dungeons and raids to prevent any one choice from pulling too far ahead.
To use Retribution Aura as an example, it should excel when tanking several mobs at once. Cavalier should be for when you need increased mobility. Blessing of Spellwarding should be for fighting against spell casters.
However instead we have BoSpellwarding for casters and Cavalier for every other situation because Ret Aura does such poor damage that getting to the mob slightly faster results in more overall damage.
Now how on Earth would we expect Blizzard, the people you openly admit leave talents in a position to be completely dead, to actually balance all this garbage to match what you are describing?
They’re perfectly capable of doing it, they clearly just choose not to. That’s why I said players should be arguing for Blizzard to change their approach to balance.
You can’t tell me Blizzard is incapable of taking a single talent and giving it a +X% damage buff. At this point it’s not that they can’t figure out how to balance Retribution Aura, they simply don’t want to because it’s not like Prot Paladins are trash right now anyway.
What annoys me is that hardcore players create the problem, then complain if something is introduced into the game that is outside the vision of obsessive min/maxing.
in WOLK if mages say did 10kdps, it was fine if most other classes did 7k dps because they could still beat the content.
Having endless mythic dungeon difficulties, raids tuned for the best of the best min/max, CREATES THE PROBLEM.
Stop making endless difficulty levels and content that requires meta gameplay, and the issue disappears for all but the most try of tryhards.
Its not rocket science. The game had no problem with this all the way up until Legion. It annoys me to no end when stuff like this is introduced and then everyone acts like the game was always like this and would not work with out it. NONSENSE.
And once again, how on earth are we going to push for a change in approach when we have no clue what their approach actually is? You seem to keep glossing over that little detail and no, leaving talents dead is probably not part of it.
Like taking a single talent that has nothing to do with damage and giving it a damage buff?
We don’t need to know every detail about their current approach in order to tell them that it clearly isn’t working.
I’m not glossing over anything. This just isn’t all that relevant to my point that people should be getting on Blizzard’s case for how poor their balance is.
Retribution Aura has no aspects to it except damage.
I don’t even think it’s choosing not to at this point. I firmly believe they don’t have the ability to do it. They’re tapped out creatively. There’s no original thought and, imo, no passion for the game from anyone other than the art and music team.
The devs are not up to the task … or the game has hit it’s best-before date.
Borrowed power has been the theme for 3 expansions now. Classes couldn’t be less balanced as they have been for the same amount of time.
Might be very telling with the new report that Bliz employees are underpaid. We’re now seeing the end result: you get what you pay them for.
As I said before: I’ve been around here for a very long time and there has never been a significant push for it. At best there has been people pushing for a very specific buff/nerf.
Then you should say what you’re talking about rather than being needlessly vague?