No I didn’t. I said (and I quote):
‘Covenant class abilities must stay tied to Covenant choice. The whole concept behind the system is the Covenants being a singular choice.’
I did not mention the RP angle until the end of the post and not as a reason for tying them together but as a description of the choice. Please go back and read what I actually wrote instead of your interpretation of it.
I feel like it would be pretty insane of guilds to be benching players because they picked the wrong covenant
and if it is happening that way its going to be to some really niche situations like world first races
You seriously think the difference is not going to be that great? The most recent 2 years of hard evidence and then there’s Legion and the times prior to me playing, and you people seriously believe the balance is not going to be a game changer?
Where were all of you during Legion 7.3 with Legendaries taking over and doing anything over a +19. If you were not a certain spec or have certain legendaries, you could not do x dungeons.
well that didn’t really happen to me at all in legion, might be an MG thing - granted I wasn’t pushing any like mythic raid level content
I’ve also managed to do heroic raids on my death knight and my build isn’t even the meta build and no one has said a thing
No I didn’t. I said (and I quote):
‘Covenant class abilities must stay tied to Covenant choice. The whole concept behind the system is the Covenants being a singular choice .’
I did not mention the RP angle until the end of the post and not as a reason for tying them together but as a description of the choice. Please go back and read what I actually wrote instead of your interpretation of it.
Yes i get that and blizzard has said in the past that it was designed around a singular choice because it would make sense if a warrior was using spear of bastion when they are from the maldraxxus. that is literally word for word from Ion himself. Covenants where designed around a single thematical choice. if you think something else other than what came out of the horses mouth then i don’t know what to say? when i read your post i was assuming you were referring to ians quote and if i’m wrong there sorry i guess.
Heroic is not even that difficult, unless you don’t have corruption this tier. No one says anything when things are dying. People will say something when mechanics are being done and things still aren’t dying.
Covenants are going to be the breaking point. “Well if you chose this covenant then you would’ve had x output since you don’t have x ilvl / x gear”. Literally ticking time bomb til ShadowLands arrives if it isn’t changed.
If covenant abilities can be chosen at will and each is effectively “required” for some particular piece of content, is there any point in them existing at all? The whole point of covenants was to add optionality to the player experience, but if your choice of ability is dictated, it’s not much of an option, is it?
If the devs can’t find some way to make covenants into a true option for all players – aka they have no place in strats/sims/etc and can be freely chosen in all situations regardless of content type or level – they’d be better off removed entirely. The game needs more things that the player chooses because the choice is fun in and of itself, not because it’s yet another faceless power boost.
Thats where this post started from. The guys at the start says
Hello, I’m a 15 year Veteran of the game and current Mythic Raid leader of a 12/12 Mythic guild. I’ve already got two Shamans in preparation for the coming expansion in case Blizzard don’t change their system but I feel like their current locked in system of the new abilities isn’t meaningful choice, but the opposite.
This is where the problem occurs and mythic raiders don’t want to be forced to level multiple characters to be competitive. A talent based solution does effect heroic raiders but allows mythic raiders/high end mythic plus players/high end pvpers to still perform at a high level cause you still get to choose your covenant for its thematic’s and still perform as good as we can.
yeah look I don’t disagree however I feel like the fact that there are 4 of the damn things it should shatter the player base around enough to make it really difficult to just stack X covenant X spec
I completely disagree with the system regardless and I think that it’s going to be frustrating to a lot of players
I think conceptually Ion isnt wrong about choice. I think reality is nothing but the illusion of choice though.
The same people who made azerite, essences, and corruption are going to suddenly be able to balance with soulbinds?
Color me skeptical.
Yeah I totally get that one with high end guilds, they’re hard enough to keep together and I really hope it doesn’t end up being the case that some covenant abilities are just so powerful you end up stacking them
I think a good example is looking at Demon hunters abilities. They have one ability called sinful brand which is just an all round really powerful sounding ability and for all we know could just create enough synergy to be useful in so much content people will seem them out for a single ability
Look at classic alliance priests - all of them are dwarves because fear ward is so much better than all the other spells
Yeah conceptually its a cool idea but the current state of the high end player base and the trickle down effect that follows them means that even the slightest difference can have a large effect.
and yeah they have failed to balance pretty much everything in the past two expansions, i have no faith in the current system at all, mainly cause they are biting off way more than they can chew.
Perhaps there are ways to design the game that shift around high end playstyle and break or greatly dull that trickle down effect. I’m not a game designer or sociologist though, so it may be impossible and WoW will just be eternally stuck with LFR heroes playing like they’re cutting edge raiders.
You won’t be able to break it
the only way to break it would be to break every addon in the game and everything that records data
and then people would still work it out on something
Pretty much. Which is frustrating since…look reality is we cant get new abilities for our classes every expansion. Itll get saturated and overly complex for the sake of buttons not gameplay. However their going too far in external power and relying on it for actual class gameplay to the point core classes feel bad.
This system. With interesting abilities you can take for different content is EXACTLY what they need to be doing for external power. Make the class function on it’s own, add interesting choices, that way when we go into the next expansion you can occasionally take something from it for a specific class and add a new interesting power source.
But currently they keep designing the entire class functionality within external power which causes a disconnect with the class.
Like I said, theres no world were we can endlessly just add talents and abilities every xpac stacking but…this would be so good if they’d just commit to fixing core classes and using a system like this to introduce unique gameplay. Frustrating.
I’ll never understand it, seems like pushing around numbers in excel would be more satisfying for these folks. Oh well.
Yeah I have no idea man. With the amount of present information available to players through weakauras/dbm/big wigs blizzard is pushed to make more challenging fights to combat these tools. This leads to certain classes having a utility that causes them to excel more that any other class on that boss and people see that on the world first race/mdi/awc and they assume that that class or that spec being played is the only way to play rather than the easiest way to play - I think that’s the best way to say it. With the access to more information comes more chances for misinformation, that’s just how the world works I guess. The issue with covenant abilities is it creates that kind of issue within specs themselves and suddenly your not considered to be playing (for example) bm hunter, your that specific covenant bm hunter and you will be judge according to not only your classes power but your covenant abilities power since you can’t change it
Or people are under geared for the content? I can not say with certainty that raids are designed with ramp up abilities anymore but it used to be assumed that you had to get some raid gear to be able to down the later raid fights. That has been proven somewhat false with the world first race but for everyone not doing world first this would hold true. Sometimes you need to gear your raid up a little bit to down something.
Was speaking about mythic fights. Everyone has a ton of gear right now why is everyone not 12/12?
Probably because they are not doing the mechanics correctly. You wipe for two reasons, people do not perform the mechanics or the boss enrages. If the boss enrages it comes down to was it pure lack of dps with everyone alive or was it lack of dps with some people dead? You keep breaking it down and if it comes down to someone is just under performing that badly then you need to talk to them about replacement. Rarely is someone playing their class THAT poorly however in a mythic raiding guild.
Benching people for DPS when your raid is not executing mechanics at 100% is a pretty lame rule. Basically you are choosing to cover for people who can not mechanically execute but not choosing to cover for people who are not performing due to class/spec selection. One of those is choice (not executing) while the other is forced on them (devs).