Dungeon design that doesn’t give you 300% of the required trash.
Boom, easy.
Ever notice why shroud/skips werent a big issue in legion mythic+?
In BfA they made it a game of “how do I skip the hard packs” for dungeons.
Or just make it a travel not a port.
They’re good 50% and bad 50% of the time when it comes to expansions. That’s pretty good balance!
50% is an F
Hopefully Shadowlands ends up being the first 50%.
I think the Covenant signature abilities are impossible to balance, fundamentally, as presented.
I think the Covenant class abilities are extremely unlikely to be balanced, especially if you enjoy fulfilling different roles on a character, or participating in different forms of content (some are clearly more useful in PvP vs PvE etc).
I think the signature abilities should either be freely swappable, or outright trashed (it’s going to be pretty weird with everyone having teleport for two years, and then suddenly not in the next expansion). Class abilities should be freely swappable.
It’s just too much to balance. Let us ‘unlock’ the different covenant abilities during our questing, and ‘activate’ them the way we do talents, or at a ‘forge’ thing in Oribos, or whatever.
For the RPG elements— I think conduits and soulbinds cover a lot of this, as far as meaningful choices. Meaningful, but not game-breaking. Nice little flavor, along with transmog sets and such. Your vampire buddy, giving you some minor combat ‘stuff.’
At exalted with your covenant, maybe you unlock a ‘skin’ for all your covenant abilities, e.g. exalted with Night Fae, you can now choose to make your Abomination Limb ‘major covenant ability’ look like a grasping vine, or whatever. I still have my cool ability, but I get to feel like a druid with it now. Bastion exalted gives your Fleshcraft shield a radiant glow instead, etc.
Basically, I want RPG/flavor choices, not huge power swings. Or I’m just going to only play classes that I like thematically in Venthyr (or whatever ends up being the ‘correct choice’), which feels very restrictive off the bat.
In American grading systems, sure. But 50% percentile is middle of the pack.
You’re just twisting my words at this point.
You don’t have a choice with covenants, if anything you’re imposed one because you can’t switch how YOU want.
rabble, rabble rabble.
No because you can’t make a valid argument.
You didn’t make one yet that made sense.
Nothing says they won’t do this even if they’re swapable.
Trash, trash, trash puts mechagon soundbyte here
Which is what exactly the problem here? Lot of big hyperbole for no end argument.
On what we can see in the beta/alpha.
With what we can see we already see the big imbalance, yes they can change them and fix them. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about what we see right now.
People can min/max even if not world first, that how we get our fun. You get your fun another way and that’s fine. It’s just funny now how a lot of people think that trying your best in a video game should be seen as the evil.
I’d be pretty disappointed if I were just middle of the pack. Not really something anyone should aspire to be.
I hope one day I grow up to create an average middle of the pack game
Yo is Durtyd still in Promethean?
Not to take away from the convo, just realized what guild you are in.
I don’t think there’s any solution that wont get them some backlash at this point, but what I’d like to see is two things.
First off, ease up on the restrictions a little bit. After years of having a convenience, I get that it feels bad to suddenly have it yanked away, so let’s not go too harsh here. Let’s just start out with it not being easy to respec for each and every boss fight in a raid, but you can still switch when you go between raids, dungeons, PvP, etc.
Secondly, choices need to be about trade offs and this requires that the content be designed to reinforce that. Having Venthyr’s teleport should leave you feeling a bit weaker somewhere else in the dungeon because you don’t have the Necrolord’s shield(somewhere you can’t just teleport your way past to ignore it).
Not everything needs to be good in every situation, but every choice should have moments where you’re really feeling like you wish you had taken it if you didn’t, and moments where you’re really glad you did take it if you picked it.
Though it shouldn’t feel impossible just because you don’t have the “right choice” for the moment, it should just be a bit harder with the trade-off that your choice will make something else easier on your group.
Overall I think it’s better for the game and it lets you design more interesting content like I described above(which affects all of us, regardless of level of play).
I get that people will naturally say more player freedom is a good thing, but at the end of the day no game is about 100% player freedom. Rules and restrictions are important even in a RPG where we should have a lot of choices to build our characters in different ways.
The confusion might be because the restriction itself isn’t the interesting choice. It’s what allows for the interesting choices to happen and have impact on the game.
Which of course if Blizzard messes up that second half, it’s not really going to matter.
Just make the perks non-combat based. Change visuals on spells to be thematic to the covenant, give us a unique and engaging story, cosmetics, pets, and companion NPCs, etc. Why even include things that need to be balanced around combat? Those things are never balanced and some joyless player figures out the BiS and all the sheep proclaim it as gospel.
Why keep feeding into that negativity, when it makes so many players miserable? It’s like Blizzard wants to keep making the same mistakes over and over.
Not sure, tbh. I havent been keeping up with them too much. He did replace me when I couldnt play. It’s been years though. For example, I remember Gromnak being quiet yet competitive, now he’s known for his epic Infinite Stars rage.
I’ve moved on from Prom, but I’m still involved with WoW behind the scenes. I don’t play my druid atm, but I do have multiple 120s. You don’t stop being friendly with people at this level though – given you didn’t have a falling out, it’s on par with seeing high school friends at a restaurant or supermarket.
True. But we are just joking around with the 50% stuff. No one here wants WoW to be a bad game, they want it to succeed.
Huh, a green thread? thats rare
Right on brother. If you ever happen to see Durty around tell him I said hey. We used to BS about druid things back in WoD when my guild was on Stormreaver.
Of course nobody wants it to be a bad game. Just saying a large portion of the current community are part of the problem as to why it is in the current state it is in.
I’ll always be an advocate of designing the game for the top 10-20% of players and having the game and gameplay speak for itself. Not a fan of all the catch up mechanics and convoluted systems that invalidate and disincentivize time investment.
They are there purely to make players who are either incapable of or choose not to participate in more difficult content.
Obviously I get the fun part of wanting new shiny abilities and other stuff in a new expansion, it’s a way to get players back. And it will significantly shine less if they tone them down or make them work only in world content let’s say or out of combat.
I get it also that some players want to give them the chance, I’m just less optimist with Wod and BFA.
Yes that’s my thinking of how they should try to balance classes, but so far with BFA that’s not what we’ve seen. Adding covenants to the mix for me will not end well. The worse is probably m+, they haven’t managed to make some classes (yes not even just specs) relevant in M+ for the whole expansion.
I’ve never seen them as something that invalidates our time investment. We got those features sooner than others and got to play with them for longer - that’s what we got for our time investment early on.
I’ve also seen them as a means for new players to get brought up to speed so that they could engage in current content where the bulk of the players exist.
This allows the player pool to remain healthy.
It makes me not want to play until the last couple of weeks knowing I can easily achieve what others spent countless hours to achieve in 1/100th of the time and effort
An admitted pirate OP makes a bunch of yammering about alpha content. Ftfy op
That’s definitely one way to approach it.
But others enjoy playing the game when it first comes out.
In either case - the population is hustlin and bustlin so that groups can be formed and the game can be played.