This expansion deserves everything it gets honestly. Ion probably wondering why people are quitting in droves while doubling down on covenant restrictions and keeping conduit energy after a staggering amount of backlash.
Like oh my god, conduit energy WHY man.
All we can hope is someone with passion and isn’t creatively bankrupt takes over soon and saves us. WoW deserves so much better.
I wrote this in another post but it belongs here also. Basically how different covenants are compared to azerite essences.
Imo Azerite essences (once acquired as I hated the acquisition part) was a much better system than covenants could ever be. With essences I had a bunch of abilities I could swap out and have fun with at command. Every day was a new adventure and I had choices as to how to tackle this new adventure
If I wanted to pvp, well I could freely swap to a pvp talent anywhere including the battle ground or arena.
If I wanted to do world quests, well lets go meme beam because it would help me destroy a bunch of mobs easily.
If I wanted to raid and kill big bad bosses well then there could be 1-3 options, all legitimate, that I could pick depending on my spec.
If I wanted to do mythic plus, I would pick an essence that would even out my groups dungeon dps. Like if I had a group that did mostly aoe damage on a fortified week I would pick a single target oriented Essence to help kill bosses faster.
My tanks and healer alts & friends also had fun. Even when raiding stopped we could still grind the other essence traits.
Covenant abilities are boring because we only get 1 ability that is going to last until the end of the expansion. Locking them behind covenants just makes the game less fun for me. I do not know about you but for me getting 1 new shiny thing vs 8+ is a huge difference.
I preferred the meaningful choice of having things and choosing what I want over you taking all the things and telling me I can only get one.
These days I have given up on the wow team and their take on the rpg genre. Every rpg I am playing now actually gives me all the things and tells me to figure it out myself but have fun. Only in wow do I get these silly limitations.
Oh come on now. You know they will let go of all restrictions!
honestly i’m going to agree here. ion means well but he’s so far out of touch with the playerbase it’s like hes designing a game for himself with his ideals disregarding what everyone else likes
just is like gross idk
Being right the whole time and watching them do nothing really sucks. They could have fixed this mess months ago. At this point I hope 9.1 is a complete failure and the next expansion features real change like cross faction pve and no more garbage borrowed power systems.
I think its time for him to go at this point. We are going on what five years of this kind of garbage. Not to mention the tone deaf changes we get each expansion.
Listen to him say stuff like “We know conduit energy isn’t perfect” then go ahead and do nothing about it basically sums up every Ion interview since BFA.
It’s a really frustrating song and dance.
The dude is a “mythic raider”, he has to know at this point that most of the bosses have wildly different comp requirements as far as healers and DPS go. So, if a mythic raid wanted to keep its core and have a healer or 2 multispec, they just can’t. Conduit energy is too restrictive, so you just drop healers for DPS and move on. And I realize most top end guilds already do this, but there are tons of guilds who would prefer to have healers multispec. Cndduit energy is garbage. Locked covenants are garbage.
This expansion is almost really good, if only the lens we viewed it through wasn’t so muddled, cracked and just…bad.
All he has to worry about is healing . Not sure if anyone on his mythic raid team does anything out side of mythic raids and possibly mythic keys . He probably has team members with different alts for certain boss fights to help carry him through so why should he care about us lowly peons.
Ion doesn’t do any extra content that would require conduit swapping, hence the whole argument people keep bringing up that it either impacts you harshly or it doesn’t.
Ion is extremely well and truly in the camp that probably the only reason he knows it exists is he green-lit the workaround to a problem they created.
I honestly think they create these problems so when the last patch is ready to come out , they can go see we listened.
Then bring out the next broken system to repeat the same process over again like they have been doing since LegIon.
Reposting this for anyone who missed it and posted it in the OP.
Warcraftlogs lets you filter by covenants.
For Mythic Sire:
Night fae:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/26#boss=2407&class=Druid&spec=Balance&covenant=3
Top 3 Parses:
Kyrian:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/26#boss=2407&class=Druid&spec=Balance&covenant=1
Top 3 Parses:
Venthyr:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/26#boss=2407&class=Druid&spec=Balance&covenant=2
Top 3 Parses:
Necrolord:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/26#boss=2407&class=Druid&spec=Balance&covenant=4
Top 3 Parses:
So, to summarise. Out of 3125 Kills of Mythic Sire, there are 8 Kyrian kills, 2 Venthyr, 3 Necrolord and 3112 Night Fae Logs.
TBH, Ions just the fall guy.
Like basically every Blizzard game follows the model of the players only knowing the existence of a couple devs, and the rest being completely anonymous. We only know Ion exists because after Ghostcrawler left, a new lightning rod for hate was needed.
The designs that modern WoW has chosen over the past few years reek of design by committee and metrics rather than actual gameplay.
Because I refuse to believe that Covenants as they were designed could have come from one vision, with how contradictory the design is. No way people weren’t like “we gotta add character power to Covenants because that boosts the engagement metric by 5.7%!”
And to counter the “oh but sweaty nerds are always gunna pick the best covenant, anyone not a mythic raider doesnt care about 1% difference” argument:
As of March 15th, WoWhead had 91.1% of all Balance Druids going Night Fae.
“Oh, but Druids are the nature covenant, of course they pick Night Fae, muh story, muh aesethetics”.
Prior to Nathria being released (Dec 7th), only 68.64% of Druids were Night Fae. Every single other Covenant saw a mass exodus of Druids as players realized that Convoke was balls to the wall OP at all levels of gameplay.
Warlocks saw a similar exodus as people as people realized that Covenants are actually significantly more than a rounding error in their DPS, and NF went from 57.37% of Aff Locks from Dec 7th to 79.8% as of 15th of March. And Warlocks probably have some of the least impactful Covenant abilities. (Though if the Aff changes go live as is, @ me when every lock goes Necrolord in 9.1)
I don’t know the BiS for every spec, but of all the specs I do know the BiS covenant for (Monk, Warlock, Druid), all three classes have seen the less popular covenants get abandoned in favour of the ones that are actually good.
The data shows that overwhelmingly at all levels of play, people pick what Covenant is strong, aesthetics or story be damned.
There is NO WAY afflock goes live as is. 33% damage per dot? Not a chance. Zero chance it goes live as is. As a potential afflock myself, I hope it doesn’t, because that will just open the gates to a massive wallop with the nerf bat.
There is a difference . Ghostcrawler was never head of the development team . He was just a lead systems designer . Ion on the other hand is the Game Director it is his job to set the direction of the game while he is in that position . The only people that have a say over him as for as WoW goes are the executive producer John Hight and Blizz president J.Allen Brack.
Oh of course it won’t. On the PTR people are getting almost 100k Sbolts with the new Conduit, Decimating Bolt and the Denathrius legendary.
But a guy can dream.
And Jeff Kaplan was in the same position for Overwatch.
Didn’t stop them from making garbage decisions that nobody asks for and only makes the game worse.
The fact that actual devs in WoW (and other Blizzard games) are virtually invisible compared to other companies can’t be anything but a deliberate strategy.
What happens when Ion steps down or gets reshuffled to Hearthstone or whatever is the equivalent of Blizzard jail? People celebrate that he’s gone and then blame whoever the new Ion is for whatever bad happens in the future, regardless of how much influence they have in any given decision.
Blockquote
You’re a boon to the community Timba, thanks for updating.
Blockquote[quote=“Awkward-frostmourne, post:11876, topic:617401, full:true”]
TBH, Ions just the fall guy.
Like basically every Blizzard game follows the model of the players only knowing the existence of a couple devs, and the rest being completely anonymous. We only know Ion exists because after Ghostcrawler left, a new lightning rod for hate was needed.
The designs that modern WoW has chosen over the past few years reek of design by committee and metrics rather than actual gameplay.
Because I refuse to believe that Covenants as they were designed could have come from one vision, with how contradictory the design is. No way people weren’t like “we gotta add character power to Covenants because that boosts the engagement metric by 5.7%!”
[/quote]
I agree, the customer base loss with similar revenue makes it feel like a systemic Blizzard problem rather than just a WOW one. Feel like the team is being stifled but could be wrong.
You’re a boon to the community Timba, thanks for updating
I agree the consumer base loss in the recent earnings with similar revenue makes it feel like a Blizzard problem, not just a WOW one, feel the team is probably stifled but could be wrong. Just love the game and want it to succeed
I feel the same. I’ve been raid logging for a while now and spend no more time than necessary to finish callings. I kept thinking back to BfA when I would spent hours WPvP on the Nazjatar bridge, or queue random BG with guidies, or do M+ for a laugh, or arenas, or mount/mog hunting, or achievements. I am doing none of those now, mostly because of covenant locking. And it just demoralizes me to the point I find little point in doing anything else in WoW besides raid (which I still find fun with guildies).