Have you been playing the alpha a bunch? I’m mostly concerned that for someone who enjoys holy and prot paladining I’ll be in a position of not having as much fun. I love my alts (I have like 4 paladins) but only one that I actively reach achievements on so I’d like to be able to keep her going into the next xpac after catching up on missed content. And healers need the ability to be able to swap into their dps spec as they level, quest, etc. Have you been able to find a way to successfully do both?
Cyouskin use to be the OG Balance druid writer for the Dreamgrove Druid Discord. He was one of the first on the Alpha forums for Druids to make feedback posts.
It’s been said many times… covenants favor some specs/abilities over others.
So you will undoubtedly end up with a BiS raid, pvp, and/or M+ for your class and spec.
And while you may argue “its too early to tell” (true) … historically they have never ever been able to balance this. Ever.
So in the same way that “its too early to tell” … the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
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Wait till Shadowlands beta comes out in a few days. more players having access to it can identify more efficiently what is and isn’t an issue.
like sure its imbalanced but if its designed around having all 4 in a group being optimal (not required, optimal) then it could cancel out the problems in a similar way that classic did. covenants cover each other’s weaknesses.
I have a huge problem with this system. Its early and we haven’t seen it but it looks bad.
When i play this game its mostly mythic+, whether its pushing up higher keys or just farming easy 15s to help people out. That’s where I spend thr majority of my time. That being said, the current gearing design requires me to do raidiing in some form or another to get rhe best available equipment for mythic+. In most cases you are going to have entirrly different sets of gear between raid and mythic+(and not to mention most of us change things about our build in raid on an encounter by encounter basis).
What this system implies is that if I want to perform well in both of those game modes, I am going to have to spend time each week farming the exact same conduits I’ve already obtained over and over potentially all expansion. This is bad design.
Look at feral druids on classic. Do you think they have fun running gnomer dozens of times a week so they can bring multiple copies of a weapon to a raid? No. Absolutely not.
So much this
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A lot. I helped a lot of streamers get into groups so we could get content to the community at large. Shortage of people healing, people sitting in Torghast and doing nothing else… queue times are rough. In terms of hours played, I think I’ve reached 100 hours on Alpha, and I’ve been inactive for a month.
The only things that are locked and not swappable per spec are Potency Conduits, and your Covenant of choice. Assuming you know which Covenant you want to play, you have 2 options: (1) Play multiple toons, differently. (2) Multiple routes in each Soubind for the occasion, giving priority to a spec.
Let’s assume you won’t swap Soulbinds either. You can have a “primary tree” and a “secondary tree.” You might favor a utility route (Finesse Conduits) for your healing spec. You could also favor a DPS spec using a Potency route (more damage, spec specific).
If you’re a Demon Hunter, you basically couldn’t care less and you’ll be fine. Druids will definitely have some tough choices to make, unless things change. For everyone else (3 specs), you’ll want to favor your primary gameplay. If you push Progression Raiding to the limit, then you don’t need to focus on Mythic+ just yet. Because you don’t need +30 keys, you only need +15 (using BFA as an example).
If you want to focus on being the best at everything, this system doesn’t support it to the most extreme level of gameplay.
Honestly, you’ll have no issues playing multiple roles. The differences only matter to the people pushing for records. There the notion for trickle down effects, but how many players actually pushed 4+ split runs for the first week? The differences really don’t matter, and it’s not something ruining your enjoyment of the game for.
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Okay now I’m understanding more, thank you for taking the time to explain the whole picture. I’m completely fine making sure my tank spec is my primary focus and then adding gear as needed for other stuff. I have no plans on quitting my day job and becoming a mythic world’s first so as part of the 99% I’ll stop worrying that my sky is falling.
I thought it was a fun way to spend a Sunday with a 6 pack of beer. A lot of people told me I wasn’t having fun though, steathing past mobs to pick off a bonus boss. Odd.
The expansion where you had to level up a different weapon for each SPEC was alt friendly?
OP. I still have no idea what they mean.
I think they mean they don’t think shadowlands is going to be friendly for alts
Yeah clearly they do but like 99% of other whiners there’s 0 context or explanation as to why.
Picking the best option is your choice though. That is the choice you are making. Not everyone will make that choice. Many will choose what seems the most fun.
Ion told you. Time and time again
The Shadowlands isn’t a friendly place. especially the maw.
That’s true no matter what… even if covenants are scrapped entirely, you’re still going to pick the best option. In fact, “pick” is a misnomer, there’s no choice involved. You do what the sims tell you to do. The computer “decides”, and I can’t envision any set of changes to the game that would bring real, meaningful choice as long as perfect optimization is the paramount goal with everything else being a vastly distant second.
Sounds like a good expansion to skip, then. I prefer expansions where it feels like a place one could live, not a hostile place where you don’t belong.
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This argument that only the top x% benefit from doing as well as they can is nonsensical; every player has a barrier at which point the totality of their inputs is not enough to meet the requirements of the content that they are engaging with.
It’s not about “being the best at everything”, it’s about being the best that you can at your level. As far as I can see, the conduit system’s “choices” exist only to punish people for playing multiple specs. It’s essentially like going back to a time when gear only had int or str or agi, only you can’t pick up multiple gear sets for each spec; you’re just stuck. It’s not a “tough choice” to lock yourself to healing, spell damage, melee damage… it’s a choice that forces one of your specs to be better than another, period. There’s no “choice” in it that is meaningful for playing any given spec. It’s not a gameplay choice; it’s an administrative one. It might as well just read “which specs do you want to be arbitrarily the strongest on your character for the rest of the expansion?”
There’s no “choice” here for pure dps classes. There’s not even a lot of “choice” for 2-spec classes, most of them can happily pick the dps option and it will be useful for the tank and healer choices too. It’s only a “choice” on hybrids that have specs with different focuses that can’t overlap. It’s functionally a hybrid tax applied to all but one of your specs as a druid/paladin/monk/shaman. “You’re playing a hybrid, choose which specs will be weaker”.
Blizzard has tried this on every expansion for the last 3 in some form or another, and every time there has been push-back. They know we don’t want it. What they are doing is simply prideful. In WoD they reinstated a cost for spec-swapping, punishing those who want to be flexible. After endless complaining and feedback, they gave up and left spec-swapping free while creating tomes for talent swapping; perfectly fine. In Legion they made us level a different weapon for every spec. It was extremely frustrating, but atleast it was possible. They eventually caved and the weapons all leveled up mostly side by side. In BfA they introduced an increasing cost for respeccing azerite armour, ostensibly so people wouldn’t feel compelled to respec it between bosses. The actual effect was that swapping specs regularly was extremely expensive in the early days before multiple gear-sets were acquired.
They need to stop. They need to move on. Accept that people want to be flexible, people don’t identify with a specific spec, but with the class as a whole, and that people don’t want to quest on their healer or queue on their DPS.
Grow up Blizzard, become flexible in your thinking, swallow your pride. Players want to play multiple specs.
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Outside of trying to find goofy ways to kill raid bosses, it actually seems pretty dead, but ok.
Sick frost mage omg by the way