Well, he claims that they (the developers) are not listening to them out of spite, though it seems they stopped due to Mythic theorycrafters being completely one dimensional.
So yea, he’s arguing for arguments sake.
They didn’t when Ghostcrawler was around, and It’s pretty obvious that the days people celebrate specs being the most fun to play is when he was around and this feedback forum was active.
there you go again, explaining the situation!
Yes, do they have to? no.
Are they? yes.
Wowranks is for all people, not just tracking +18 and mythic raiding.
I’m pretty sure he’s talking about you, you’re misquoting and straight up making things up in your replies.
You quite literally didn’t even know this was a thing until i posted it. I’m pretty sure that shows quite obviously how poorly equipped you are for this discussion.
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If it is unknown. Activision Blizz is ran not by the developers, but shareholders. Their primary focus is to keep those subs running, which is why the ripcord will never happen. 
Those tweets are a big yikes. Yikes from the person tweeting I mean, not Blizzard.
Theorycrafters are NOT part of the game design team. They are a data-source to provide information to Blizzard, which Blizzard devs will act upon if they so choose. When theorycrafters start dictating game design, it isn’t a wonder why Blizzard would shut those posts down and make it clear who is making the decisions. And no, asserting that you are in charge when you are in charge isn’t being a “man child”. What’s childish is running to twitter and stirring up drama because the devs won’t do exactly what you do.
Give your feedback, and then Blizzard will decide what to do with it. That’s just how it is. You give your feedback for how you feel, and maybe what you think, but dictating what must be done is what is extremely childish.
It seems weird to complain about this when people loved tier sets back in the day. The cosmetic being tied to the power contextualized the cosmetic. Having full tier 3 wandering around town, you knew what they meant. It wasn’t just a cute outfit, but it said something about the person wearing it.
Same with Covenants. You see a guy in a Venthyr mog, and you know that guy is a Venthyr, and he’s going to be able to do Venthyr-things.
Also, you know people have rolled and played classes that aren’t not S-tier because they like that specific class, right? Not everyone chases optimal power all the time. If the gap is big enough it will motivate less hardcore players to reroll, and you see that in classes where the gap between the first best Covenant and the second best Covenant are large, but in classes where 1st and 2nd are small, for instance Shaman with Necrolord vs Venthyr, you see plenty of people making off-meta picks, just like they do with classes.
This idea that people will always play the 100% most optimal setup is simply wrong. It is wrong. Wrong. There is a balancing point where many people will choose alternate options if the choices are “close enough”. Covenants are at the moment just a balancing issue, not something somehow fundamentally wrong or something we’ve never seen before.
Blizzard can make Covenants work. And considering how stale the game was getting, I think it is worth doing something fresh and new. Shadowlands was the biggest expansion launch in close to a decade, people were obviously hyped about this system.
Who actually wears Covenant xmogs.
And the idea that I need to loot at someones transmog to figure out their capabilities is pretty dumb. I can already guess with 90% certainty what Covenant someone will be based purely on their spec.
And you’re associating people liking tier sets with liking tier sets before transmogrification existed.
Sure they did. But even for classes that aren’t S tier they overwhelmingly pick what Covenant is the strongest.
Just look at Demonology Warlocks. Over the months Venthyr and Kyrian Demo locks have only gotten less and less popular as people realized that those Covenants are bad, and switched to either Night Fae for the ability to flex to Affliction, or Necrolord if they wanted to stay purely Demo.
I’ve never stated that. Like I actually said nothing like that.
The term I used is “vast majority”.
Which in most cases is accurate. When you have 4 options to choose from, I don’t see how 80% of Affliction Warlocks being Night Fae could be construed as anything but the vast majority. That means that all the other three Covenants (for Aff locks) when put together make up a quarter of NF’s Aff locks population.
And Affliction isn’t even the most polarized choice.
Neither Venthyr or Necrolord are off-meta for Shaman though. Venthyr is best for Enhancement and Necro best for Ele/Resto.
You see a lot of Venthyr Ele/Resto shamans, because they play Enhancement too.
You see a lot of Necro Enhancement, because they play Resto or Ele too.
But that’s a pretty weird example to use because 74% of Ele Shamans are Necro, 78% of Enhancement are Venthyr and 67% of Resto Shamans are Necro.
And this isn’t even at a hardcore level. I could point to the numbers being much more dire than that at a hardcore level where 82% of Shamans who’ve killed Mythic Denathrius are Necrolord and literally ZERO Kyrian or Night Fae Resto Shamans have done so.
For Warlocks, there have been zero kills on M Sire for Aff Locks on anything but Night Fae, and it’s not like Aff Locks are a niche spec, they’re the 4th most popular spec to have killed the boss.
How do you expect a system that was solved for the vast majority of specs before the expansion launched and handicaps Blizzards ability to balance them, to keep the game fresh?
Like I stated earlier, 80% of Affliction Warlocks are Night Fae. Do you know how the share that Night Fae had before Nathria and M+ launched? 57%.
Which means that the population of non-Night Fae Warlocks has literally halved since Nathria launched. People as a whole will not embrace off-meta Covenants. Not when there’s such a huge cost involved in playing them.
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What about Heroic Sire?
And how many Warlocks had their first kill on Mythic Sire as Demonology rather than Aff?
Content on that level that, that only the highest min-maxxers are clearing… are being cleared by min-maxxers. I’m not sure how you bringing this up does anything to advance your argument. Yes, some people play as the S-Tier class (Warlock), and many, many of those playing that most powerful class for a given raid at the highest levels are going to make choices that support the most amount of power, because they’ve literally already chosen to swap to a character in the pursuit of power.
But if you look at lower bosses, I’m sure you’ll find a number of people who have killed Heroic Sire with off-meta choices.
Doesn’t that prove my point though? It’s a balancing issue. You almost never see Night Fae Frost Mages or Venthyr Fire Mages because the balance situation for those Covenant choices is less optimal, so much so that people don’t want to play them, whereas Venthyr and Necrolord abilities for Shaman are close enough that people are completely and totally fine playing off-spec with “less optimal” Covenant choices. It’s purely a balance issue.
I mean it kept the game fresh from the stagnant class design situation prior to Shadowlands. It’s boring playing the game character with the exact same rotation and abilities for years at a time - just like Hearthstone introduces new cards to spice things up, Covenants spice up the class design space and bring back a lost element of character building (even if I think Conduits are a failure because they’re too boring).
I used Mythic Sire as an example of the hardcore but sure.
There are 11,751 parses of Affliction Warlocks over the past 2 weeks on Heroic Sure. Of those 11,751 parses, 10,734 or 91.3% of them were done as Night Fae.
Probably zero lmao.
Lemme just quote myself.
I used those numbers to act as a contrast.
If 100% of Mythic kills on Sire (for Aff) are done as Night Fae, and 91% of Heroic kills are done as Night Fae, and 80% of Warlocks across all levels of content are Night Fae, then that’s pretty solid evidence that it’s not just the sweaty neckbeards who are picking Covenants based on power.
I mean sure they technically exist.
But even on Heroic there is 12 Boomkins for every Feral, 21 MM Hunters for every SV Hunter and 11 Outlaw Rogues for every Sub Rogue and so on.
Even for levels of content where the meta doesn’t matter, people overwhelmingly choose to follow it.
Except for classes where the balance actually isn’t too far out, I can point to Affliction Warlocks where Kyrian is actually neck and neck with Night Fae, with less than a 1% difference in their theoretical output.
Yet again, Night Fae are 80% of the population and Kyrians are 9.5%.
Even if you perfectly tuned Covenants, not all abilities are created equal and classes would still overwhelmingly trend towards those who provide more useful abilities in general, like Soulshape for Warlocks since the class needs mobility much more than it needs an owl potion.
Shadowlands is shaping up to be as stagnant as every other expansion prior to it though.
The only difference is is that Blizzard are terrified of actually nerfing Covenants so they have to gut everything else if those Covenants are OP, as evidenced by the balance nerfs.
Pulling the ripcord would spice up class design more because it would allow Blizzard to actually nerf OP Covenants (hi Convoke) and allow you to play Covenants that aren’t just generically good. Like if Druids weren’t stuck with Convoke because switching to other Covenants were a PITA, you’d see a crapton of different strategies emerging, like going Kyrian for fights and to enable specs where 1 minute burst windows are gigantic, or playing stuff like Adaptive Swarm on a fight like Mythic Council where DoTS and HoTS are king.
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It’s simple to see why, too. Character power has a direct, tangible effect on your game experience. You simply cannot accomplish certain things in this game without a certain level of character power, and there’s no getting around that. If you have so little HP that enemies are one-shotting you, or your raid group keeps hitting enrage timers, the clearest path forward is attaining more character power.
By comparison, aesthetics’ impact on your game experience is entire abstract. The game is more enjoyable when you can choose your aesthetics, but it has no direct impact on your ability to progress.
We can sigh and push forward without our ideal aesthetic, even if it’s not as fun, but character power is non-negotiable to playing the game past a certain point.
And transmog did literally nothing to take that away from the people who wanted to wear the actual look of their gear, it just gave everyone for whom that wasn’t a meaningful thing the ability to choose what is meaningful to them in their gear’s appearance. Judgement is a great looking set that a lot of people love. It’s never been an appropriate look for any paladin I’ve ever played. Covenants are the same. The meaning should be a personal choice of preference, not dictated by what the optimal powers are.
Not even remotely the same thing. Classes are a permanent aspect of our characters that encompass 90% of what our character is capable of. We accept going into class choice that we will be limited by this choice, and that its power is going to fluctuate over time, because as a permanent aspect it’s going to be around long enough to go through a lot of permutations. We choose classes based on what we want to play over what’s most powerful because we know that their longevity means that what’s most powerful is subject to change anyway, and we still vehemently argue with Blizzard when our classes and preferred specs are rendered underpowered or changed in ways we don’t enjoy. We identify with our class and even with our spec deeply because those things are very core aspects of our characters that we chose knowing and accepting what we were signing up for from the very start.
Covenants are a temporary system we’re being asked to tack onto our characters in some cases 16+ years and 120 levels after we made our class choices. They don’t represent remotely near as much meaning as our class, are a choice forced on us in the 11th hour, and aren’t going to be around long enough to be worth getting invested in as a major aspect of our characters’ identities.
[quote=“Sentenza-alexstrasza, post:12408, topic:617401”]
Blizzard can make Covenants work.[/quote]
Maybe they can. But is it worth it? Covenants are a temporary system tied to a single expansion. How much of that expansion is going to be left by the time they get Covenants close enough in power that every class legitimately has equally valid choices amongst them all? This has been the trend with every expansion since Legion now. They dream up some new expansion-defining system, slap it in the game over player protests that it’s not going to work out the way the devs say it will, and then the devs spend the rest of the expansion trying to make that system work when the players turn out to be right, while also adding more systems players tell them we don’t want, only to finally get the systems to a point of bearability in the final patch, just in time to throw it all out the window and start over with another new system.
Maybe Blizzard can make Covenants work. But that’s a big maybe, and it’ll come at the expense of development time on everything else, only to be abandoned like every other temporary system a year or so from now.
Yes, I’m sure the system that these forums were packed to the brim with people telling Blizzard we didn’t want is what drew all those people in, and not the fact that we’ve all been stuck at home starved for anything else to do for the last year.
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… you realize this is not a good argument AGAINST Covenants, right? If spec balance is a larger dumpster-fire than Covenant balance, and we accept classes and specs as being a core staple of World of Warcraft and are “okay” with such imbalance, then you don’t really have good ammunition against Covenants as far as pulling the ripcord, because it isn’t as though we acknowledge complaints about removing specs from the game. As long as people can feel comfortable making choices, then it is fine - again, it is simply a matter of balance not being tight enough, not some kind of fundamental issue with Covenants that justifies pulling the rip-cord.
The character and class you choose to play for an expansion is temporary too. If you choose to “re-up” with the same character each expansion that’s your choice, but you’re more than able to switch between expansions during the content droughts and be raid-ready next expansion.
There are other video games to play. Why WoW? I think it is fair to say that people were hyped for Shadowlands because of what it offered.
Most people aren’t okay with imbalanced classes when the disparity is a high percentage. We see spec complaints all the time. It’s why were always seeing patch notes with class/spec changes.
What baffles me is, if they are always trying to balance classes/specs and have a hard enough time achieving this, why would you add even more layers of complication onto this?
It’s like trying to put an trial run jet engine in the back of your car that’s got a major recall and hoping that the 2 unfinished things together will maniacally fix eachother instead of kill you in a crash lol
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If you’re putting a jet engine on your car, you’re not worried about being safe, you’re worried about having fun. When your life is stale and boring enough that you consider strapping a rocket to your car, maybe safety is not really your #1 concern? Many people stopped driving this car entirely, and considering the car is more popular with the jet engine than it has been in the last 8 years, maybe the jet engine was the right choice, even if grandpa who enjoys old reliable is upset with it.
Imbalance is not death. For something people consume for fun, the death of it is lack of fun. Imbalance is secondary to fun, and is only actually relevant if it ends up costing more fun than the fun-adding-thing added in total.
It is a good argument against locking covenants because it proves that people would be willing to try playing underperforming builds if it means not being handcuffed and locked into them. If we had freedom I guarantee more people would be trying out the other covenant abilities because there is no fear of being locked into a bad choice for multiple weeks.
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Because of the restrictions.
If players could freely swap covenants and conduits, tons and tons of casuals would feel safe to run a non-meta setup. But if there’s even a small chance they ever want to help out an m+group or raid team, they’ll feel like they need to pick the meta covenant to be able to give those groups their best.
The restrictions literally took any sense of meaning away from a players choice m
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Oh yes, I knew putting that analogy in would end up with some sort of “non sequitur” argument. You’re never going to find a perfect analogy.
Doesn’t matter if it’s life or death or not. The idea of an analogy is one of comparison to a certain degree.
Nitpick on it if you like, many already agree with the acessment.
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It’s not non sequitur at all. I’m literally taking your analogy, and extending it naturally to show that it actually supports my point and not your point.
We shall agree to disagree
No, not really. We have overall data that indicates people value fun over balance (see: WoD). This isn’t really a “agree to disagree” type of scenario. You’re just wrong.
No actually, you’re twisting my post to fit your narritive. It was one depicting an object needed fixing being affixed with another item that has not been fully tested and pointing out that it is adding additional layers of complication making balancing more impossible.
But hey, twist every little thing the way you want. Timberslice has already provided more than enough data on why people pick what they do. That’s not what I’m here for.
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You’re assuming that matters. A 25/25/25/25 split is not the goal. People freaked out over Ion’s comment that Blizzard intentionally made Demonology Warlocks bad in WoD because they viewed the spec as unfun for too many people to play… but Ion was 100% correct. What matters at the end of the day isn’t whether the system is perfect, but whether people are having fun. If you move people away from unfun towards fun, it doesn’t really matter if the solution was less elegant.
If you’re flying at 300 MPH people aren’t going to care if the seats aren’t leather. The rocket can fix the balance situation by making it so fun that it doesn’t matter if the balance isn’t perfect.
I would argue that Blizzard, having superior metrics, choosing to double down on Covenants, putting another rocket onto the car, is more than likely evidence that the first rocket was effective in doing what they wanted it to do.
Again, you’re unfortunately too attached on the analogy I made up on the spot. The rocket wasn’t there to imply a fun factor.
Detach yourself for the actual objects and focus on what I made the analogy for. Either way, I said my piece. Go have the last word like you want.
Toodles.
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