Lol true but also Dark slash or nemesis etc. And that’s just DH. It’s easy to see where peoples balance doubt can come from
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I don’t know if I would call this being a more heavy RPG direction. Personally I would love to see a lot more rpg elements in the game but I don’t feel that those elements should impact a person’s dps, healing, or tanking abilities. Covenants should be equal across the board or as close to equal as possible. All abilities should have been the same at the base level with their visuals changed to thematically fit each race. Like shaman totems as a basic example. That way people would have been able to pick the group that best fits them from a RP standpoint.
By Blizzard doing it they way they are people are forced to choose based on performance and not RP. We can call people meta slaves or whatever but it boils down to being viable so people want to do harder content with them. WoW’s endgame content is largely group based or in the case of PvP performance based and not many people want to gimp themselves for RP.
I would like the ability to work on being renown with all the Covenants if I want to. To have a choice on who I work on for the day and the ability to change between them for whatever reason. This way people would not have to made a choice between performance and RP. It would work like the followers work in Nazjatar. You pick one and that is the only one you can work on until the daily reset.
Going in a more heavy RPG direction means giving players more choice. Not limiting the choices they have in order to create some false sense of meaning for the choice. If anything we should have quests that offer choices that give us meaning, with rewards that encourage us to do them again on different characters.
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yeah, of course people would have doubts. There’s stuff I just can’t plain take because it’s just a bad decision. Flame on is just too good to ignore. It’s nice that pheonix flames is base line but the spec still seems pretty broken and so do a lot of other specs. Arcane mage looks like such a niche spec, I personally feel Ret should have exorcism that generates HP with hammer of wrath, etc. Also not liking some of the choices for DH in SL so far. I’m ok with the defensive nerfs, probably will see a leech legendary or something. I’m tired of BoS on frost DK and then a ton of abilities on GCD for unholy, the list goes on.
There’s so many class issues people have that putting their faith in them balancing covenant abilities seem dodgy at best.
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I think the thing they should aim for is targeting casuals with the intent to turn them hardcore
However I feel like the people calling all the shots are money men and older dudes that work 50 hours a week with families
We need to get some nerds in that breathe WoW and aren’t distracted by women because every time they talk to them they get pepper sprayed
We’re on like WoW 4.0 at this point.
1.0 is Vanilla through Wrath.
2.0 is Cata/MoP.
3.0 is WoD and got canned.
4.0 is Legion/BFA.
Each of these eras house distinct design philosophies as far as system and class design goes.
I don’t think Shadowlands will be a new “era” either. They mostly reuse/polish ideas from Legion and give them a different spin. Its basically the “best-of” compilation of the current WoW era.
The next big paradigm shift is likely to happen in 10.0
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Wow, I was waiting to see what you were typing, that took like 15 minutes.
But I agree with your premise, while it’s nice to have some choice here, cosmetic and ability wise it’s still mostly on rails and quite possibly unbalanced like most other content, hopefully they surprise us in a later patch.
Big true on everything you said.
That’s spot on.
I tend to be a pretty slow typist at times because I like to think out my responses when I am trying to make a “serious” response. It can be easy for post to be misunderstood or confusing when they are long. Plus I also tend to read on other sites as well when posting on here >.<
I dunno, I’m trying to think of any big name RPGs that’ve come out recently that don’t have free or basically free respecs. And I’m drawing a big blank.
Also, I really don’t like the idea of tying cosmetics/story to player power. I mean, isn’t the whole point of transmog to remove that choice?
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I hate making typos myself, or saying the wrong thing and usually proof read everything right before or after I post it.
I couldn’t stop to read something else while typing though, I think I would lose my train of thought.
What’s funny is rpg reasons can be said for anything, they don’t have to make gameplay worse or link powers to choices.
So basicly what is being said is they have an artistic vision of this concept.
That doesn’t repose on logic.
While this can used for small games or niche games, they’re taking this kind of risk with wow. I’m not a high roller, I’ll skip.
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I’m hoping the next elder scrolls game is amazing, only another 10 years to find out!
It’s great that we’ll be able to swap between soulbinds on the fly.
Can you blame us after BfA? They’ve shown us repeatedly that they can’t balance complex systems.
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So, we should try to get them to hire young people not from california or new york? /s
On to the other part, I think it’s better to target the semi casuals, the ones who will actually play not log in then dip, since if you target semi casuals instead of hard core or casuals, it doesn’t feel TOO dumbed down on a lot of systems for the hard core, but also doesn’t feel too overwhelming for the casual crowd. so lessen the impact of the systems that the difference between high end and low end isn’t overwhelmingly large but different enough.
Yeah I think the biggest issue with them saying “Choice” and having these sorta “meta” % effects to abilities or things like a teleport also causes issues between people doing multiple forms of content. some may be good in AoE for m+, some are good in ST, others are good in PVP situations, but they’d be gimped in one form of content either way in comparison to them taking another covenant skill. Also, they could be bad when it’s great for 1 spec, but TRASH for another spec. Reminds me of legion where we had to focus on one spec.
I’ve wished for them doing thematics or spell customization for awhile. We got a tease of it in legion and unique mage tower stuff for druids or the green fel flame for warlocks, I want more of that. Have my classes be customized like glyphs but in line with the covenants. The fox form would be a arden only druid travel form and some others using some mobility skills, the giant star design kick thing too that monks get for other classes etc.
I just wonder if it’s too late for them to change all that.
Also, once you finish your “renown” you can swap freely and come back but just have to do the quest to “pledge” to them again however you keep your progress with them and everything you built up. still make it a choice, still RPG focused, but don’t lose progress that you worked towards.
I don’t even think these qualify as meaningful choice
To me a meaningful choice in a game is that moment in the Witcher 3 where you meet that nice witch lady and then breed with her
Soon after you work out she used you for some horrific plot and then you get the option to
A) kill her
B) take the thing you gave to her and ruin her plot
I remember staring at the screen like an idiot because I’d grown fond of this pixel woman and I didn’t like the fact that she’d betrayed me
I had to decide if the justice part in me warranted killing her and my connection I’d build over the span of half an hour
Needless to say I ended up cutting her head off but I felt somewhat dirty after it
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I like having more meaningful choice but I still think the covenant system isn’t really a good way of going about getting that.
That said the other half of this is that if Blizzard wants to do this, they need to be a lot more on top of balance than they traditionally have been.
Nobody wants to decide they like Kyrian only to be told “Sorry, Venthyr only because we want to skip mobs with the teleport”.
When you can’t easily re-make your choices it’s the kind of thing that can’t wait for the next major content patch. It needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
This is completely false
We lost specs, talents, profession perks all because of the meta ppl
The simple statement" I don’t want to be forced to a profession to stay relevant" . Today other than alchemy/herbalism all other profession more or else are useless. Spec Gladiator was lost because of “I do not want to be forced gear another spec to stay relevant” . These players do not encourage innovation, do not encourage having new class all because they don’t want to be forced to play another class to stay relevant .Notice the times I say “Forced” because that what they think they are *forced.
Infact the meta ppl ruined their own loot system because of their nbg exploit in cata to maximize tier set gain that caused PL . No matter how many warnings was given that it will take over ML the act of funneling loot to your group mates , the irresponsible trial exploit , incapable of policing themselves along with the time metrics provided for Argus legendary completely destroyed ML.
Speaking of Rng, you had these ppl say you had to farm benthic gear till you get the best stat and best perk else you suck. These guys are encouraging a casino type system since titan-forge became a thing.
Now we have an aoe cap coming along you know why? because some guy in some m+ like pulling all the mobs and killing it to improve their epeen score. So I ask why is a guy who is running mog runs getting punished for this ?
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That isn’t how that workssssss
Most of them were just bad game systems
Gladiator spec and other specs didn’t get removed for those reasons; if they ever got complainted about the intent wasn’t to remove them
The aoe changes have happen because at some point blizzard just decided to give everything aoe
Like blade flurry on rogues went from 2 targets to 2 million, as hard it is to admit that needed to get drawn back at some point
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