Rightly so, but it’s to a degree, no? Who decides when it gets severe enough to be sufficient?
One could make the same counter argument, “X can potentially be made into a RPG element” isn’t sufficient for the need of X.
You lost me there. Would it be better if I had said “something to be improved upon?”
Which didn’t really answer my original question. And I would argue if you had bought the expansion expecting to be locked to a covenant while at the same time expecting them to be balanced you were kidding yourself. One has to just read the description to see there is no way they can be balanced across all specs, roles, and game modes. Not even “remotely” possible.
Which begs the question, if 90% of a spec is of a certain covenant, does that really serve the purpose? What if I want to be a certain covenant for its ability but I RP-identify with another? Is it wise to force player to pick between the two? Oh the other hand, if covenant abilities weren’t locked, why wouldn’t that be a better way to do this? Also, classes already are serving the differential need.
I suppose I should’ve phrased my question better. What RPG game forces you to make a decision on character power without sufficient information that you cannot change later?
As to your examples, I don’t know how vanilla ret works, D2 is not a RPG game. How does D&D lock you into a choice again?
Right, but how do you create simulation that can even remotely resemble real scenarios? +15 M+? Mythic sire? Or even 2v2 or 3v3? Aren’t we just spending more resources to create a problem at that point? As a progressive MMO shouldn’t gameplay encourage players to learn and adapt and improve?
I fail to see what covenant abilities locking have to do with this. WoW wasn’t less of a MMO before SL, and it’s not more of a MMO now. If you want different roles to have different specializations, I wouldn’t be opposed to that, but everything has to have a place in all types of game mode, otherwise you are just locking players out.
As many suggested before, this is happening regardless. People are picking the most powerful covenant for their spec, and covenant abilities being locked makes it even worse. You are not only relying on Blizzard’s math to get a raid spot on your class, you are relying on their math to get a raid spot on your covenant too. How is this better?
I think we can agree that WoW encourages players to play all game mode and be competitive to a degree, PvP arguably more so than PvE. And if this is the case then players should have the freedom, should they choose to, to be prepared for what they are doing. I see some of your points, but not others. I guess ultimately it depends on where Blizzard wants to take the game.
Yes, what you want is antithetical to good MMO design. If everyone can build optimally for every content, then the content isn’t about player coordination (players can just respec to be optimal for anything) and must all be about the encounter design.
Basically it’s a bunch of people playing hard mini games within a fight where everyone dies if someone screws up. That’s WoW raiding right now. And it’s that way for a reason, a bad one. The more that the developers can assume the average party will have holes in their composition, the more forgivably they can tune encounters, which means the more social endgame gets, which means the more the game is about other people, and not a quasi bullet hell arcade disco game.
Well that’s the question. I think WoW has been too far in the “let everyone do everything” bucket for far too long and endgame has been suffering for it.
Obviously, which is why the RPG element point is just to say that the more of the game’s difficulty you put into the party composition, the less of the game’s difficulty you have to tune mechanically, requiring high levels of physical dexterity and sense perception to play optimally. Which means more people can be included in endgame, which fulfills the first M, in MMO design. That’s the argument. I really don’t care that something is just “called” an RPG element. SWTOR had branching dialogue trees and an elaborate story I was bored to tears with.
Well the question is if it is “objectively” something to be improved upon. Because objective means mind independent, i.e. there’s some math problem from heaven which is just tells you what you need to do. But this is disagreement about game design subjective to mental qualia. I like social games with easier raids where party comp is most the battle, other players like mindless character building where you just spec for the obvious thing in every situation and just do really intricate dance dance revolution fights with lots of interupts and crap flying everywhere. To each their own, but WoW peaked in Wrath and plummeted during Cata (those sub numbers are simple to find). It’s for a reason.
No the balance was far worse than covenants. The specs I enjoyed playing (Fury, Surv, BM) were all bottom of the barrel on DPS (even with optimal covenants) so the macro balancing was so bad that any talk of covenant balance was completely irrelevant from my perspective. They can’t even get classes to work correctly.
No. They should have tuned covenants way more drastically to make tradeoffs much more relevant. The problem is that covenant abilities make up so little of your damage that if a covenant ability is like 20% better than another in ST, you’re still going to pick an AoE because the opportunity cost is negligible given what you gain in M+, fights with adds, etc.
But this is an in practice argument which I agree with, not an in principle argument about free specs. Indeed suppose 100% of people all picked the same covenant for their class, then no one would care about swapping anyway because they’ve picked the obviously best covenant.
That’s the only argument in this whole thing I sympathize with. The matching if what skills go with what covenant is arbitrary really, so I don’t mind (and I’ve said in the past in this very thread) untethering the skill from the choice of covenant. What I care about is permanent specialization of a character, however that’s achieved.
No they aren’t. Because everyone expects classes to be tuned to have roughly the same tools. What’s the problem with survival hunters right now? Low ST. It’s not OK for Survival to be an AoE specialist spec, the people on the PTR want to fix Surv by buffing its ST. Make all the classes equal is the basic mantra. Equal things aren’t specialized, because there’s no comparative advantage.
Diablo 2 until WAY late in its development, Final Fantasy 1 (had to start a new game), lots of games still.
D2 is an ARPG.
Remember that’s not what you asked me. You just asked me which RPG’s force you to make decisions that affect character power without having sufficient information, as if the lack of foreknowledge was the issue. Now you’re shifting the criteria on me but evaluating my original answer according to criteria I wasn’t given.
No this is the fundamental disagreement. RPG’s as a genre are characterized by normative decisions in combat and in the interface giving players sufficient power in lieu of physical dexterity. There’s a difference between D&D and bullet hell games or fighting games. In D&D, you declare your character is going to throw a punch, roll a dice, and stuff happens. In Final Fantasy, you declare you character attacks a target and the game performs it. In Tekken, you have to push buttons in a proper sequence at the right time, and your physical dexterity is what determines whether your combo lands.
The more you put the difficulty of the game IN the game, the more it has to come down to physical dexterity, which ostracizes the exact kind of people that played RPG’s (even MMOs) instead of FPS games or MOBA games or fighting games. Wrath worked because it had the right balance of difficulty “in the interface” vs difficulty “in the encounter”. Hodir for example wasn’t a super difficult fight to perform physically, compared to dodging the lasers in Sire Denathrius for example (and that’s one fight compared to one mechanic in one fight!)
Because in practice the covenant abilities were tuned like garbage. But again that’s an in practice objection to an in principle argument. In principle the Venthyr hunter covenant should have been insanely strong ST damage such that failing to take it would be extremely noticeable on ST fights, making a meaningful choice between a hunter with a specialization in single target vs a hunter specialized in AoE. Is it sufficient? No. It starts with class design, but it’s a start.
Wow has been garbage since Cataclysm, where they pruned talent trees to an insane degree and made the game encounters exceptionally difficult to compensate. Mechanical difficulty replaced logistics, guilds died and the game bled subs.
Yep, agreed. TL;DR we just need to go back to Wrath when the game didn’t suck.
Again this is an in practice objection vs an in principle objection. In practice, Blizzard suck at their jobs (no matter which system we pick) and should probably all be replaced by people that can do basic math. In principle, I know so many people who thought they’d never raid during an older expansion but they rolled a shaman and got taken along literally just because they needed heroism. That’s a way you can make new players not a liability while they learn raids (see other thread about the learning curve for a new player in retail). Making specialized classes that you take because you need that specialist is an in principle good for bringing in a large player pool to endgame, even if Blizzard screwed up this version of it in practice.
Yeah I think that’s a problem. Because then mechanical finesse is king and RPG players have (had, since 2012) one fewer game to play in a shrinking genre of games that they could enjoy.
It can be good, like Wrath, or garbage like everything after Wrath (per the sub numbers). It’s Blizzard’s call.
Yeah but that’s not a choice. That’s literally just clicking the obvious set of buttons that make you prepared for everything you want to do. In fact you’d be prepared for everything you want to do if all talents were just made baseline and talents were abolished entirely too, right? Which means what you want is completely independent from whether or not you’re actually choosing something, nevermind choosing it meaningfully, i.e. with nontrivial opportunity cost.
People are pushed towards the math regardless. WoW’s progress is measured in “number go up”, and people are going to pick whichever option makes the number go up the best.
Which ultimately is the heart of why Covenants failed as a “meaningful choice”. Blizzard took the players desire for story, aesthetics and character power and said “pick one”.
For the vast majority of players, character power won every time.
If you unlocked Covenant swapping, it’d feel less spec/gameplay locking (Shamans and PvE v PvP Warriors and just Priests in general are some notable examples here) and if you disconnected the power from Covenants entirely (however that would look), you’d allow people to make the decision based entirely on which one they like the best.
As it stands now, with locked Covenants and all the power tied to them, it’s basically the worst of both worlds.
And this is why Covenants as they are are a bad idea.
When WoW progress is entirely number based, people are going to choose whatever is the best, regardless of anything else those Covenants swap and regardless of the level they play at.
Expecting players to embrace a choice between power and story/cosmetics would be like expecting Quake players to embrace hyper-realistic recoil.
True, which is why I don’t care about the story / cosmetic stuff (please, decouple that). What I want is power along different axes such that you have tradeoffs and opportunity cost in how your character plays.
Which ideally would increased significantly if the Ripcord were pulled.
There’s a lot of Covenant combinations out there that are perfectly fine, but the best one is just better/easier to use, and pulling the ripcord would allow people to play around with them.
Kyrian v NF Boomkin is a good example of that, where the Kyrian ability is pretty solid, but Convoke is just easier to use and better in more situations, so Kyrian is abandoned because of the inconvenience that switching Covenants has.
(Also true, it should be Power v Story v Cosmetics, but the dynamic is so uneven in favour of power that Story and Cosmetics kinda get lumped together a lot in these conversations).
Sorry I didn’t mean to say decouple story / cosmetics. I mean to say decouple power from those considerations. I empathize with the people whose ability is locked behind a covenant they hate and a story they don’t care about.
All I want is permanent character differentiation, i.e. I made a choice in the UI that makes my character better at X at the cost of Y, forever. I want to see player power shift more into choices made in the UI and less in terms of physical dexterity. However that shakes out, that’s fine.
In a multiplayer game, that’s not really a good idea for the exact same reasons (except more pronounced) that semi-permanent character differentiations is a bad idea.
At least not in any meaningful degree, because I’m assuming that racials don’t do this in a way that’s nearly as impactful in your eyes.
The community is too good at figuring out this game for a system like that to be anything more than “go X for PvP, Y for Raids, Z for M+”.
That’s why it has to be permanent, the idea is that in an MMO (of all things!) people should rely on each other to help them get through content in a complementary sense. If it’s not a complementary relationship then it’s just a “who’s pulling more numbers?” relationship which just breeds the exact toxicity and elitism that people are lamenting about now.
It is kinda baffling to me, that you think this would work out. You might think we would have a mixed bag of like a third of the player each choosing options A, B and C. But what the history of this game and covenants in particular have proven is that 98% of players would choose option B, because it is simply the best option in most cases and Blizzard balanced it badly. I mean, you seem to have thought that covenants would be well balanced when it was clear to pretty much everyone that this wouldnt be the case. This thread alone is full people stating this very clearly.
You wouldnt create a world, where people “complement”, but if the difficult Boss in a raid requires a certain build, everyone who made a different choise is just out.
Your ideas are ideas that work in a RPG, but not in a MMORPG.
This proves people at Blizzard shouldn’t have jobs, but it doesn’t prove that it’s not essential for good MMO design (as opposed to MOBA design for example).
I never thought the covenants were supposed to be balanced. If the covenants are balanced they’re worthless. They should be so radically and obviously best at a given role that taking anything else should hurt relatively in that content. I wouldn’t call that balanced in the same way that people want mages and warlocks to be balanced, say.
What happened was that Blizzard tried to make covenants too balanced, and so what happened is the differential between things like ST and AoE wasn’t large enough that in many cases people just went AoE for greater flexibility in content. Which defeats the entire purpose.
A difficult boss should require “some” of each build. You need a shaman for hero, you need AoE class from X, Y, Z for adds, you need some single target for burn phase, you need…
And because the boss is tuned to need party composition, and it can be balanced as if parties aren’t perfectly optimal, it can be tuned to be more forgiving (example the vast majority of raids in Wrath).
Except as we’ve seen with Covenants, the desirability for someone who has made the “wrong” choice (even if it’s correct for other aspects of the game) makes their desirability plummet for that content.
Functionally this wouldn’t do anything that Covenants also doesn’t do in regards to spec and content locking, it’d just be on a far worse scale since it’s permanent rather than simply hard to change like Covenants currently are.
I’m not sure if you’ve read some of the stats that have been posted in this thread, but eighty percent of Warlocks at all levels of play are Night Fae, simply because Night Fae is the best option. I don’t know why you’d expect this to pan out in any other way than how Covenants panned out where each spec is held in virtual monopoly by a single Covenant.
As for relying on people to get them through content, I’m not sure I understand your point on that one, since every form of end-game is already in group content.
Why would a permanent choice be any different than a semi-permanent one?
You’re trying to do what Blizzard did with Covenants and make people not care about the core progression loop of “numbers go up” in WoW.
Because the content is still tuned WAAAAY too high.
I predicted Nightfae would probably be best for warlocks on launch, so yay me. But yes this sounds like an issue where other covenants just weren’t made enticing enough, which is an in practice objection rather than an in principle objection.
Spec / covenant synergy is fine. If, say, a Survival hunter wanted Venthyr to boost their ST damage and make them more well rounded (assuming Venthyr wasn’t tuned like hot garbage) then that’s a natural synergy and so if all survival hunters were to pick Venthyr, it wouldn’t be shocking to me.
Yes the difference is relying on particular people fulfilling particular archetypes in a party. Imagine you need a shaman with heroism to down this raid boss. You can choose to tune the game around valuing people for what they play, or you can choose to tune the game around “how” people play. One is inclusive and incentivizes bringing more people in, getting more social networks, and helping new players into raid (even if only so you know a 3rd shaman in case your other two call in sick) and the other is by nature exclusionary since if you lack the physical finesse / dexterity / APM to measure up then you’re just not playing the game.
I don’t know what a “semi-permanent” choice is. Something is permanent or it isn’t, it’s an on off switch.
All the info about 9.1 seemed to hint that this is coming, and I would hope it’s the reward for getting to the end of ANOTHER 40 renown levels or something. You get flying way earlier so what else could it be?
i very much disagree with that. If you split the classes and specs into very specialised entities and make them mandatory to bring to a raid, you make it automatically more exclusionary. You cant bring your friend Jimmy, when you need a Venthyr shaman, but Jimmy unfortunately is a Necrolord Shaman. This is exclusionary, since you cant bring people due to merit of their performance, but because of their arbitrary disadvantages that they had to choose.
Now, if you want to say that the fights shouldnt be tuned so hard, that you can still bring Jimmy, even when he doesnt have the needed specialisation, then your whole argument falls apart because then those specialisations are worthless anyway.
What would be your ideal level of power difference? Because we’re got racials, which fit the description of what you’re asking for, but their power is so low that the difference between racials is for the most part a rounding error with the difference between the best racial for Warlocks being 1.9% overall and the difference between the best Alliance and best Horde racial being 0.09% (or 6 DPS).
Kyrian were actually predicted to be the best on launch, but Blizzard nerfed Pelagos at the 11th hour and the additional mobility that Soulshape gave Warlocks (a class that’s always struggled with it) and the ease of Soul Rot vs Scouring Tithe allowed NF to skirt over the edge.
It’s actually a good example of what I talked about a couple posts ago where if you unlocked Covenants, you’d see a lot more Kyrian Warlocks, since the difference is really, really small and mostly utility.
Again, this already exists.
The core problem comes down to not all utility being created equally. For example, Shamans bring Lust. But so do Mages. Mages also bring Intellect, Purges (Shamans do this too, but Spellsteal is usually better than just outright purging) and Mage food.
So before we even bring DPS into the picture, Mages already have a headstart on Shamans.
The bigger problem is that outside Mythic Raids, most group content is really small and thus incentivizes bringing classes with as much relevant utility as possible, like Druids, Hunters and Mages.
“Not technically permanent, but really annoying to change”. Most people will treat Covenants as a permanent choice, since it’s annoying to change, but it’s technically not.