I was there in BC and it was just a no brain issue, I thought I was srcyers on my rogue and just found out I went aldor and knew it was for a few extra stats on a shoulder enchant and that was it
Oh wait, one was better than the other and I remember why, it had a non lethal fall getting leaving the platform for it - that was the choice.
It’s not an echo chamber, get your debate lord tactics off the forums. It’s tired and not useful
Yeah, exactly what I thought. You aren’t open for discussion, you just want it your way.
Getting back on topic, the whole point of having covenants is to force players to make meaningful choices and indirectly increase time played. Lots of people will try out all of the different covenants between alts and that’s a good thing. Couple that with some time-gating and it will make the content last longer. I’d rather have a slow’ish chug for a few months per patch per alt, than to get everything done on four alts in one month and then be bored because there was nothing left to do until the next patch or expansion.
As for the abilities, well they are likely going to be 5-15% of your overall damage, which is only going to be make or break for top 100 mythic guilds. Nobody else…
Actually, if their builds and sims end up on Icy Veins, then players like me will blindly mimic them as I have no interest in working out my own sims and I’m not a great player so a 5% bump in damage or survivability means a lot to me.
In short, yes, their build recommendations have a lot of influence in shaping the mix of class/spec and covenant.
In short a lot of players don’t want strength/weakness systems in their RPG.
It doesn’t really jive well with incredibly RPG based objectives like leaderboards, infinite scaling timed runs, and parses PvP.
It is what it is, but player skill can make for a faaaaaaaar wider margin than that. For example, a bad fire mage might pull 2/3 of what a good one will pull. 5% more dps, in current content, is the difference between doing 70k and 73.5k. There’s a ton more variance in dps than that on a per pull basis.
When you sim a character out, you are given a bell curve distribution for DPS. The number it reports is just the statistical average of that bell curve. For example, if you sim a T25 fire mage, it will show the bulk of the iterations in the 80-95k range, with an average of around 90k. +/-5k dps is +/-5.5% dps, meaning there’s a spread of around 11% when looking at the bulk of chart. And that’s with a PERFECT player aka a robot. That’s not factoring in “Ooops, I messed up my combustion this time!”
Now if you add in 5% more damage to that, you can see how it might get added to the lowball amount, or the stars and skill might align and you’ll actually put out some extra damage. People are blowing these covenant abilities waaaaay out of proportion, without having any real grasp of how DPS actually works.
I have always felt that when you reach max level with your covenant you should be able to raid other covenants for their abilities and gain the ability to swap them out with a minor change in the color of the spell effects.
This way the meaningful choice only hinders you for the first part of your rep grinding journey. After that you can rng your way into swapping for better abilities.
This creates a meaningful choice. But it doesn’t ruin your end game.
I did raid in Wrath and spent time with the Elitist Jerks site and hours with training dummies to get my mage’s damage up to snuff. I don’t raid any more and I have no interest in putting that much time into squeaking out another few percent in damage as I no longer find it fun or rewarding.
Now, I’m just going to Icy Veins and pretty much following their guidelines because it allows me to get on playing with some degree of maximizing my character.
The whole point is that those who say the small differences only matter to the top 1% are not seeing the influence they have on those of us who want a simple template so we can get on with the business of farming the things we enjoy. This isn’t an anti-anything post but rather a reminder on how the leading edge community reacts to choices matters far beyond just their peers.
The leading edge seems to ruin a lot of fun stuff for the rest of us on a daily basis. I would like torment free towers TYVM, and the ability to look at gear and know if it’s good without having to sim it. We basically lost ML because the leading edge wannabe’s couldn’t control themselves from playing god.
The amount of stuff we loose to leading edge people and their groupie’s is just sad.
That’s false.
We have strength and weaknesses in classes, specs and racials already. We even have strength and weaknesses to gear.
You’re asking for more when we already have a huge amount of it.
Racial have been gutted to nearly identical in power unless you are in the MDI and want to NE stack for 1 specific use.
Classes have been homogenized that most overlap in their effectiveness, there aren’t many that have much uniqueness at all.
And the talent system is built specifically so you can swap out a weak talent for a strong talent for any given situation.
All in the name of parses PvP.
A good example is a rogue, the archetype epitome of single target lockdown and kill, and Blizzard made them aoe gods lol.
I thought this section was pretty great.
I am one who would prefer if our covenant choice did impact our strengths/weaknesses and be relatively resistant to change. But most of what you suggest here would be fine for me.
I also want to say that while most of these issues will be unavoidable, the impact can be greatly lessened the more they manage to balance these abilities.
I think things like all Venthyr M+ teams will still happen, but that might be fine if all Necrolord M+ teams also happen as they try to leverage the shield for larger pulls, and other combinations as well. That sounds pretty cool if I’m being honest but the abilities need to be close to balanced for this to be possible.
I’m not trying to keep anyone from anything, I’m not a “garden variety control freak”, I’m just not convinced allowing people to swap covenants on the fly without consequence is the right idea. I think people SHOULD be able to change if they really want to, just not like, on every boss (lest it become mandatory for everyone to do so).
And I meant that I think we (the forums at least) are just going to argue about Covenants for the duration of the expansion, no matter what Blizzard does. And by argue I mean making long, angry posts about this topic. That and High Elves (eyeroll).
While I plan to enjoy SL no matter what, I find myself already looking forward to what comes after so we can stop being upset about this. Course then we’ll have something new to argue about…
The class design issue is way bigger.
If anything we shouldn’t need covenants to have classes feeling unique.
The main problem is:
Wod pruned too heavily
Legion reworked too heavily
BFA … destroyed what was left
Their decisions to not be able to stick with designs that work over just wanting new stuff to attract players is not sustainable for the game.
The talents row that are single target vs aoe are a new problem they made. Talents used to be more a playstyle choice than just aoe vs st.
This was mop talents, pretty much perfection.
It’s funny because when each talent row was based on flavors of similar style the complaints at the time was how it was dumb or unfair that players couldn’t choose to more specialize based on their playstyle and maybe sacrifice mobility for ST damage or a defensive for aoe and such.
Those types of requests and posts used to be fairly common, citing how it would increase variability in how players could build and customize their playstyle.
And “what works” is fairly vague. For example bringing back a lot of totems for shamans seems to be fairly highly requested, but I’m anxious to see if all the same posts that used to come up about how clunky they were, eating global cooldowns, limited range, inferior to other classes buff style, etc., all come back fairly soon after SL launch.
So all we can do of course is voice an opinion and see where the chips fall. I will continue to support class uniqueness, strengths and weaknesses, and variability in play style WAY before homogenization, balance, or worrying about how it makes a +53 dungeon too easy or hard or whatever.
And before MOP transformed talents into a MOBA style pick 1 of 3 they used to be the method of defining your spec.
That’s why we need better configuration options / agency as players. Some people want 1 button rotations and some don’t. Some want extreme mobility and others want extreme damage.
Whether you’re in the middle or at the extreme the game should have something for you. What has obviously not worked is having a designer work out “best of all worlds” specs that everyone dislikes to some extent.
Sort of I guess, but you can’t (shouldn’t?) have a class design where the simplest build also performs the best or very nearly the best. There is no payoff for playing a higher risk build then, it’s all risk and no/minimal reward.
Overall classes for sure need some uniqueness back in my opinion, and shadowlands probably isn’t going far enough. I would completely nuke the talent/honor talent system too but I can’t see that happening.
I mean… the real problem comes down to how challenging the top end of content actually is. Thus far wow has been quite firmly on the tracks of creating a top end of difficulty, which requires a relatively large amount of min/maxing to feasibly defeat. If they want to reduce the top end of difficulty, then sure… I have no problem with them covenant locking large portions of player power. But so long as killing the final bosses of each of the raids require 200-400 (or 600-800 in Uu’nat and KJ’s cases) pulls while having nearly perfectly optimized raid groups… No. No, I don’t think it’s a great idea.
You can’t really have a tightly tuned game with whacky out of balance covenants.
Personally, the casual in me thinks the whole system is pretty cool. The competitive player inside me is just… really not looking forward to having to choose which content I’m going to be optimal in, and which content I’m just going to have to suck it up all expansion and accept that I won’t be able to play it out to my full extent. That’s not really the type of choice that I personally like to make in this game.
Edit: Finally, we’ve been through this song and dance too many times at this point. Calling it now. Swappable covenants in 9.2/3.
There is a fair argument to be made about the top end difficulty.
But, it literally applies to 1-2 bosses of a raid tier. That’s it.
Mythic+ is infinitely scaling, no matter what happens eventually a cap is reached and it’s WAY past when rewards stop.
PvP obviously has nothing to do with NPC tuning.
Why should the design be based on 1-2 bosses?
And those bosses get multiple targeted nerfs along with months of power gains to help other guilds get them down. Maybe they are still way too hard despite the nerfs, that’s a fair argument. Maybe Blizzards wants to leave them fairly exclusive who knows. I just don’t see why 1-2 raid bosses of 1 difficulty should be a driver on these types of decisions when 99.9% of the players won’t even be part of it anyway.
Maybe Emerald Nightmare was a better difficulty after all.
I guess I’d say it’s because it’s those two bosses that most of the competitive community… actually cares about.
I’d also state, that while you’re correct you don’t need to super duper hardcore min/max for the other bosses at the end of the tier, the same cannot be said during progression at the start of the tier. At the start of EP, Ashvane was a hardwall for most guilds, while by the end… heck pugs were killing her.
So I wouldn’t say that that level of min/maxing is solely left to the final 2 bosses.
You know… I don’t know. The more I think about it… I’m not sure if you’re actually wrong on this.
Well it’s the thought that, nothing can be optimized for an indefinite system, so trying to balance the game around that particular–let’s say mechanic–is completely unrealistic.
Covenant Signature abilities would matter even less in that aspect. Sure Door of Shadows might save you a handful of times, but if you’re a Death Knight, it won’t really matter in the end.
