I can understand where both opinions are coming from on the upcoming changes to the games direction. Preach, like most of us, is concerned with how impactful a given covenant ability will be to a players overall performance in a given spec. Having your player power be limited by something external that you can not easily change… just feels bad plain and simple.
However, on Ion’s side they would prefer that not everyone play the game exactly the same to a T. They feel that everyone just runs sims, watches wow logs and crunches numbers in order to play their spec the most optimal. Yes, most of us do this, and I absolutely loathe playing the exact same way as everyone else in a given spec. It’s unsatisfying knowing that there is mainly 1 maybe 2 ways to play each spec in order to be optimal and it gives less of a sense that each person is unique, which I personally feel is important in an mmo.For me it’s like playing as if everyone had the same transmog or the same race, there’s little variance so in the end a fire mage is just a fire mage.
I don’t believe that forcing us to choose a single covenant is the correct solution to this problem. Blizzard is basically trying to induce this problem by limiting access to certain abilities in order to create variation. This isn’t a “healthy” solution as limitation just makes us feel poor about our choice.
- Solutions-
-
If the main issue is that they want more of an RPG feel to it, make our choices more impactful in a different way. For example, if i choose a given covenant, make me hostile to a separate faction making my life a bit harder when i choose to go to that zone. Maybe I need to go there in order to kill certain targets or farm for a specific herb, therefor my choice is impactful to my personal gameplay but not my overall performance to my team.
-
They want variance within classes and specs so they are giving everyone new class covenant abilities. Instead of focusing on external ways to force variance, give us ways to create new and unique builds. For example most of our impactful talent abilities for classes are built for specific scenarios such as pvp, M+ and raid environments. We are given 7 rows with 3 options on each row, so for the most part there is always a correct answer for a specific situation. If you want to add variance create more optimal solutions within our core abilities. Legendary abilities are tons of fun because they alter how we interact with our core abilities and our rotation.
In conclusion, focus on more ways for us to work with our core abilities so we can find other ways to run optimal builds. Maybe if i play destro lock I can work on boosting strictly fire damage in order to make optimal fire builds. Or maybe I can focus on throwing out slower but much more impactful execute chaos bolts, or even bring back hybrid specs now that we have class abilities back! Make corruption more useful for demo if I spec for it or let me add immolate to my affliction dots. There are tons of possibilities for you to create more variation for us to dabble with and bring some flavor to each spec. As it stands now, I will be picking my covenant based on what I will choose my character to excel in, pvp, M+ or Raiding. I will be missing out on the rpg aspect because of your limitations and that’s how most of us will choose to play unfortunately.