Nah man, in a MOBA you’re always a rune / gear swap away from doing whatever any other versions of the characters you play do. They’re all cookie cutters of one another. All differences are just accidental.
If all differences about your character are swappable on demand, then the only differences in output between two people playing the same class/spec will just boil down to APM / Spatial IQ. That’s how players are distinguished in MOBA’s, action games, FPS games, but not RPG’s. In RPG’s, differences in characters, even the same class, shows up as immutable choices made on character creation or through leveling, which show up in dice rolls.
Obviously video games can’t be just dice rolls, so some expression will have to come out through how a character is played. The philosophical question is if there are any differences between two people of the same class/spec that show up purely because players made different choices, and committed to different strengths and weaknesses on the basis of those choices.
I think the RPG philosophy is healthy for MMO’s. The more differentiation, the better. Players should need different classes, different specs, and there should be niches that people who take the same spec could fulfill separately even being in the same party. Specialization of labor and opportunity cost are paramount, otherwise you just have an action game where you’re frustrated by other players screwing up and holding you back from your rewards. And, oh right, that’s the “toxicity” WoW has been spiraling down since Cataclysm. Imagine my shock.
To me that’s bad design. I shouldn’t need to have 3 characters to be optimal in each of the gameplay aspects Blizzard has made available. This has almost never been the case in any of the expansions before and there’s no good reason to start doing it now. Especially since they make content that’s outcome is shearly based on the players performance.
Is confusing to me. The reasons do not line up whatsoever. Anyone wanting to jump up and down about RPGs do not seem to understand that in single player RPGs, the world is essentially set for you to succeed and you have all the time in the world to complete the game. I could pick it up, stop playing for a year, resume my gameplay and not miss a beat. But in WoW if you leave for a year, God help you with catching up and on top of that all of the exclusives like AotC that you missed out on.
also dont forget the catching up will be nerfed pretty hard due to m+ loot system gutting. pretty sure thats how i got back up to speed after like 2 weeks when i quit during uldir. Really depressing just getting less and less excited as time goes on for the xpac
I think it’s important to always come back to the point we pay money per month for this game, it’s a luxury.
We don’t owe anything to Blizzard, it’s up to them to make a game fun for everyone, that includes the 1%. We don’t need to applaud them for every change they make without asking why they are doing what they are doing.
Covenant dungeon perks = good
Covenant base abilities = good
Covenant transmogs and mounts = good
Covenant stories = good
Amount of covenants = good
The covenant link to player power dividing the player between their personal design style and their practical ability to play = bad
Solution: all Covenants send their 3 soul binds to Orbos under a Main NPC who brokers that class ability power to the player. The soul binds work for whatever power is chosen by the player. The class ability is no longer linked to the covenants while still keeping the feel of the covenants intact.
BUT gah what I am I saying! all that would be logical…I’m sorry. Forgive me for soiling GD with my dirty logic. (walks away in shame)
If it were my decision I would make it to where all the player needs to do is complete the covenant’s full campaign to access the abilities. Then it becomes like another talent choice, between all of the unlocked covenant abilities. At the end of completing all the campaigns, that character is now a hero to all the covenants, regardless of outside relationships, etc.
It’s basic MMO design. Players are either necessary cogs in an interdependent community, or other people you have to “deal with” to get your phat lewtz. If you don’t design characters from the ground up to be limited and need other characters, then other players are just a nuisance you deal with as little as possible.
It was prior to “bring the player not the class”. Prior to the MoP talent system and how they tried to make all classes cookie cutters of each other, you defnitely needed a cleave class, a single target class, a buff class, and so on. There was no expectation that a single character would be the best in all dimensions in all fights with the click of a few buttons.
Which is why subs absolutely cratered in Cata and haven’t really recovered since. They took what was a pretty social / casual RPG in Wrath, and made it a gogogo MOBA fest in Cataclysm to the point where they had to keep making pre normal raid difficulties to justify developing raid content (the amount they had to nerf Firelands in such a short amount of time was hilarious).
That’s fair as there’s some high degree of inflexibility, so it’s not just a UI switch to keep things optimal for all content with just the flick of a button. I care about the system ensuring that players have to specialize and need other players to complete them in whatever content they’re playing. However that interacts with covenants, or doesn’t, is irrelevant to me.
You’re going to have to point me to where the basic MMO design should be that in some areas of the game you’ll be able to perform well while in others you get the short end of the stick solely based on a decision that you made as an endgame feature that restricts you whenever you want to change said choice. Because I’ve never seen it.
Great, that wasn’t the case and still wouldn’t be if Covenants and Conduits were interchangeable. No matter what you do or how you optimize yourself, there’s going to be a clear best and worse.
You can see this in WarcraftLogs too with each raid tier that has come out. If your class design system is based on people being completely useless during some fights, that’s. Bad. Game design.
Even in Classic with those “holes” that needed to be filled didn’t result in some players being almost useless.
They designed the game based on what the players were requesting. They said that the game was too easy and Blizzard listened and made things harder. That’s not a “Gogogo” mentality. If anything, Wrath had that going because of how dumb easy it was to get through everything and Cata put up roadblocks that stopped people from doing just that. Actually needing to CC before each pull in dungeons again is a prime example of that.
Sorry but I’m not really interested in sitting here and arguing about the rose tinted goggle days. We’re here now in SL. There’s a clear top end of the game that a clear amount of players partake in. The system clashes with that top end and a variety of different players. We’re essentially walking right back into a Legion/BFA launch. And anyone who thinks that’s a good thing is straight up not paying attention to what happened in both those expansions.
Exactly. In these other games you mention, a character is just a weapon/skill skin you choose for the moment. There is no investment. The character is just a tool.
I don’t want that here. Here my character has a history, my choice of class, and spec, informs how that character grows. If you wanted to add sub-specs to my spec to create more diversification - fine. But a 2 year random and mutable abilities that hamper me from enjoying the various end-game content and open a dialog such as creating multiple weapon/skill skins to engage in various end-game content?
No thank you.
I even get tetchy when they glibly just suggest that I change spec based on the content I’m engaged in. Nope. I expect for my character choices to be viable in all end-game content, and I will complain when it is not. (viable not to be confused with awesome-sauce)
The problem is you’re conflating different game modes with a single encounter or instance. In a single raid, yes that absolutely makes sense and should be encouraged.
What isn’t okay is, say, I go to raid with my buddies, then the next day I’m doing arena and uh oh, everything I have is for raiding. Now all of a sudden my gameplay is negatively impacted. It’s not a matter of single target vs aoe, or damage vs utility, it’s literally two different game modes that are played differently and value different things. Another example I used in a different thread: for Torghast, my tanks will be prioritizing heavier defense than offense. But that kind of build doesn’t work for M+, because you’re actually hampering the group’s progress by not also contributing damage.
I think it’s totally fine for there to be things about the classes that offer choice and incentive to bring them. I liked back in wrath how a group might value a marksman hunter for trueshot aura over a beastmaster for the corehound’s mini-lust. That’s good design there, and is what you’re talking about. It’s when those same classes are branching out to different game modes, some of which didn’t even exist back then, that it becomes a problem. So the solution is either to make character builds flexible enough that you can change them for the environment you’re in, or to remove the extra environments to build in. The former I support, the later I oppose.
That is exactly what made Covenants sounds amazing to me, until they revealed they had power tied to them that was so vastly different mechanically and the choice was permanent. I want this Mage to go Necrolord. They fit so well thematically and ideologically to how this character is. However, this Mage also raids, and mathematically that means he’s going to have to go with the covenant that best fits with raiding so my group doesn’t have to make up the difference. And we’re talking a difference of at least 25%. Also doesn’t help the Necrolords have the weakest of soulbinds either. And I tend to have this guy dabble in PvP. Skill already being a huge disadvantage, I don’t need another compounding disadvantage added on top because I chose for RP reasons.
Absoultely!