Ah I see. Yes the Method brand is dead and buried. Hopefully those who were innocent in the guild don’t get tarred with the same brush as those who were guilty of the gross behaviour/had knowledge of it.
To them I say, go find a guild and some friends.
The pug life sucks, and the game shouldn’t cater to the antisocial.
True as that may be, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t actively choosing to make them pick up your slack if you pick an option that isn’t ideal.
This is an illogical argument. A measure of relative strength isn’t “can you do it or can’t you”. It’s “how hard is it to do relative to different setups”.
You could run with the worst possible specs and all half-naked characters; eventually you might still get there and beat the fight. Does that mean that a setup with the worst possible specs and half-naked characters is equivalent or even comparable to a min-maxed setup?
Every group, every combination of players, skill levels, gear levels, and other variables has an equation where x finally equals greater than 1 and the boss falls over. Solving that equation is the goal of every party and raid. If you choose a value lower than what you could choose for a variable that is within your control, you are actively choosing to increase the value that every other person has to contribute to still make the equation equal greater than 1.
Capability is not synonymous with equivalency.
Blizzard needs to either make all the options balanced enough so that their relative value is not lower than their relative loss, or they need to allow players to choose what relative value they want to contribute. Leaving the choices nonequivalent and locking people in to a given choice means leaving people destined to fail.
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The strange thing in all this is that wow has never once in all its history had any sort of power system that actually had any meaningful impact on ones power in-game. You had the class/race select screen and that was it. There is no example of any past instance of player agency in such a fashion. It’s literally why it’s called a “theme park MMO”. So why Ion is trying to do something of a fashion now is strange and confusing.
And the solution is as simple as 4 NPCs (one representing each covenant) in Oribos that allow you to activate a covenants abilities, but only one can be active at once.
The interesting choice then still remains for which covenant you want to be in without tethering you to a performance gain/hit.
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Noticed you’re playing a balance druid. Fun and cool spec thematically. But you’re actively choosing to make your guild/group pick up the slack by not being a fire mage. Just sayin’, going by your own logic there.
Zandalari Troll too. You know that’s just that more DPS your group has to make up for by you not being a tauren?
Yes, I do. The relative level of strength loss is acceptable to me, and to the group I am with (in actual fact, I mostly just screw around solo these days because lolbfa, but still). I’m not saying that you can’t make the choice to be worse than what you could be and it be ok with those you put it on to, but don’t pretend that that isn’t what you are doing.
When a given power is invariably too weak relative to another option, it will lead to all aforementioned outcomes mentioned in this and other threads.
No matter how much you might try, covenants are not equivalent to player classes. That said; since even player classes are not immune to exclusion based on relative strength, why on earth would you think that covenants wouldn’t be the same?
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Just saying, people using that argument of “if you’re not optimal you’re a drain on your friends” shouldn’t be playing anything but fire mages, unholy death knights, or…whatever the most optimal tank/healer specs are, I actually don’t know what those are there.
You could pick any covenant you want in SL and, if you study the abilities and conduits and soulbinds, and get practiced in them, you can play them just fine, no matter what your race, class and spec is. Picking what you want to play doesn’t make you a burden or a carry.
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The reality is in cutting edge content early on, often times X class actually will be a burden. This will extend to covenants as well.
Those guys will have their research, and probably multiple characters to do the content with anyway. I don’t think the game needs to bend to the will of the top .01% of players in the game.
I think they should. See how ridiculous that argument is?
I see you’re a fan of absolutes.
It’s a false equivalency as has been stated. Covenants are not classes/specs.
In addition, as has been stated (you really like to ignore points that invalidate yours) often times classes/specs are excluded on progression kills for competitive raiding guilds. This fact is what makes us weary of them adding another layer of differing power levels and why we keep referring to a “meta”.
So far you still haven’t made a meaningful argument as to why the rip cord shouldn’t be pulled. You just keep saying “No, you’re wrong. Leave it alone!” I am open to having my mind changed but just telling me I’m wrong without explaining why isn’t a real good way to make me feel good about your considerations.
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There is simply no evidence to support this argument.
In every single release by Blizzard so far, there has been an unequivocally right and wrong choice, where picking wrong leads to to perform significantly worse than picking right.
People picking the wrong azerite traits were burdensome to their groups, even when played ideally. People playing the wrong specs are universally burdensome to their groups, even when playing ideally.
Even now, after a full expansion of balancing, the performance difference in M+, for example, average across the entire player base between the best and worst specs in the game is nearly double.
Even if you attribute half of this effect to the fact that good players gravitate to strong performing options, the average performance difference between arcane mage and outlaw rogue this season alone is something like 33%.
Does this mean that you can’t perform equivalently to an outlaw rogue as an arcane mage? Functionally, yes. It means that if an arcane mage is outperforming an outlaw rogue, other variables are heavily stacked in the mage’s favour (skill, gear, ping, whatever else).
Again though, you’re trying to reduce an argument of scale into a dichotomy, which simply isn’t the case. There necessarily is give and take. But the scope of that give and take across an entire spec’s input is much, much larger than the scope of give and take from two abilities. Two abilities are likely to be a solveable problem; either their value is enough to offset their lack of performance, or it isn’t. One covenant will almost definitely simply outperform another, straight up.
And that isn’t changing with covenants, so we might as well leave the system intact.
And it doesn’t mean you can’t perform well with a spec of one covenant over what icy veins tells you is the “optimal” covenant.
You’re so close to getting the point. I’m getting excited for you. Why should we keep contributing to something that is a problem? Is it really okay to continue making design choices that propagate issues for the player base just because said issues already exist? What kind of argument is that???
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There are certain abilities that will give a huge advantage if used properly in different pieces of content. For example priests who are venthyr gain an ability that when used in arena will be able to negate some super big cooldowns such as Vendetta/Infernals etc, but that same ability is quite literally useless in all PVE content. I’m not being hyperbolic here, it’s a huge deal. I enjoy Mythic raiding, relatively high m+, and relatively high arena. Making a choice that will make me worse in 2 of the 3 things I love really sucks.
I edited my post, but the reality is that one ability is a very computable variable, while an entire class’s input is not. Covenant abilities largely have a high degree of measurability, and very few, if any, of them are impactful enough rotationally to cause skill to be a major factor in the output.
Great news Ripcorders.
Bellular in his latest video mentioned our movement. This is the beginning of something spectacular. I’m glad to have such amazing company for this.
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All the people telling us to stop making so much noise just want to silence us. It worked for shadow priests, and it will work for covenants.
#PullTheRipcord
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#OrcPaladinsPlease