These aren’t even close to the same though. With the m+ gear lock, you just take the set you need most in. It doesn’t prevent you from using a different set in the next dungeon.
Covenants should not affect gameplay in any way. The devs need to understand that now, so we don’t have a bfa azerite situation all over again in shadowlands.
I was doing a world quest, by myself, on my hunter and had someone whisper me “Spitting Cobras bro”.
I enjoy azerite, and have to choose between AoE and ST all the time. It’s ok. Covenants are ok.
I saw someone give someone crap for playing a shadow priest in LBRS - like, what the hell?
That’s great, but they spent over half the expac trying to make it a good system after they were told in beta that it was bad.
I guess it was different for every class. Too bad they could never balance it properly. For my shaman and mage, every spec has to triple stack a specific trait, which is clearly best.
Not that anything in game makes this clear.
And balance is a big part of the problem with covenants. That and that it ties abilities and legendaries (which if legion legendaries were anything to go by…yikes), to aesthetics and questlines.
Oh God, that reminds me of my shadow priest when I was levelling him. It was a Wrath dungeon, can’t remember which, but I was 75+ because I had chosen my level 75 talent already.
Healer spent majority of the dungeon lambasting me for my talent choice. Not even in whispers, just out in the group chat. At one point the tank even said it didn’t matter and to chill but that healer just kept going and going.
It gets ridiculous.
Then we got essences, then we got corruption, you know how these ended balance wise right?
Then in Shadowlands we have covenants, a more ambitious system than this, im pretty sure you understand the concern and why people want blizz to pull the “everything swappable” button instead of believing in “we can balance them”.
More or less, yes.
There are certain behaviours which are damn-near impossible to keep under control if they aren’t stamped out early, and only become worse with time.
To point an example…
Min/maxing doesn’t stay confined to “competitive content”.
In fact, it has bled into literally every single facet of the game; you can’t even level up these days without being pushed into optimized playstyles. The need to speedrun EVERY SINGLE DUNGEON is a manifestation of the min/max attitude where it really doesn’t belong.
It’s so prolific and endemic that people don’t realize how normalized the min/max attitude has become in WoW, it’s effectively impossible to avoid. And thanks to systems like cross-realm and sharding, you can’t even escape to a backward server and avoid everyone.
We’ll have to see. They did a much better job with essences and corruptions. Maybe they’ve got it nailed down.
It’s just nonsense thrown around by people who expect others to play a game how they play it.
Character progression is a key part of an RPG, and min-maxing is a part of that many enjoy.
This is bait.
Did they though? Most classes have a clear BiS major essence, and some corruptions are ridiculously strong compared to some pretty much useless ones.
It is. It’s part of the archetypal “adventurer who braves a new land, and finds a legendary new sword to defeat the final boss” storyline.
Getting stronger is a core part of any game. The sense of reward is what motivates people to keep playing. And the immersion is what helps us forget reality for a brief moment of time.
But what happened with WoW with [x]forging is that it took aspects of that away. Suddenly you have gear gods that you have to pray to and getting new, seemingly more powerful gear had to take a backseat to using older gear that has a better corruption/trait to it. Things suddenly started feeling like “you need to run this for a chance to be blessed by the gear gods” which felt like a loot chest game design instead of just letting players farm for what they want to get to their end objective, and call it a day (which is actually healthy instead of getting people to go on an infinite grind).
Then now that aforementioned adventurer is lugging around the world with multiple sets of gear, going back to bosses they defeated for a better chance at the same gear, but with different conditions.
It’s weird and confusing. Like imagine Lord of the Rings where the ring is destroyed, but then instead of ending the chapter, Frodo suddenly has to destroy the ring a second time.
That’s a straight up lie.
VoP is so ridiculously broken for some classes with certain azerite picks that the gameplay is completely different.
That sort of wackiness is awesome in a season of Diablo 3, but not so much in a game like WoW where you spend a lot more time developing a character.
There is a slight difference in RPG, min-maxing as both kinda work in tandem naturally when you grow stronger.
Compare that to the people who literally cry wolf and want to have the devs design it to the way THEY want it.
This sounds suspiciously similar to how gear, stats, specs, and talents have also worked since…ever?