For sure about early in a tier vs later. And Ashvane specifically had 2(?) direct nerfs as well.
Think about it this way though. There primarily 3 methods of overcoming a boss.
Playing your class extremely well, getting the most out you possibly can ESPECIALLY in how your class responds with and handles mechanics. Minimizing incessant movement, proper cooldown timing, etc. Practice and pulls on a boss help to build this aspect. You can also apply this to guild strat/synergy as well.
Gear. Better gear is higher damage, faster fights, less healing needed, faster add kills, faster phases, more HP to survive, etc. Every action you take gets more effective with better gear. Mistakes are less punishing because of higher hp pulls and higher healing from healers.
I know mythic+ really throws a wrench in the gear pacing, but typically this is something that grows over a few weeks. When it’s week 2 and your raid has only has 3 total boss kills that’s a whole lot less gear than week 25 and 40 boss kills.
Class/spec strength vs a specific encounter. Despite a lot of homogenization (for better or worse) some classes and specs perform better than others in certain (most?) situations.
Now when it’s early in a tier number 2 is at its lowest. Player skill may still be pretty high, but applying it to a new boss can have its own learning curve as well. So number 3 and other min/max opportunities become much more important if the desire is to kill the boss quickly. As weeks go by number 1 and 2 grow and number 3 becomes less important (relative to 1 and 2). And at some point with enough gear and practice the fights become fairly trivial or farmable.
I was going to continue with more but I’ve kinda gone on a ramble to basically say until gear and practice catch up optimize the other aspects take some of the spot light. But with your experience level this isn’t stuff you don’t already know anyway.
As to being right about EM, per my kids I’m never right so probably not. Although I do wonder…
Seems to me that the players and Blizz are way overthinking this when the solution is so easy.
Make all the Covenants exactly the same.
Do that and all problems are solved.
Get rid of all these abilities and anything else that has any effect on gameplay and instead they grant just one thing… increase the Stat of your choice by x%.
Sure if you wanna have some sort of Tabard or other purely cosmetic thing that is different then fine but nothing important.
Easy.
You must have missed this part. It was at the beginning of the post.
I started off thinking the differences wouldn’t be that impactful. As discussions developed and arguments were refined, my opinion changed. Preach had a video that presented its ideas in a good, concise manner. Its content is digestible for many players who don’t understand why a certain POV dislikes the Covenant system.
You can still have that. I’d rather your choice be for RPG reasons, not performance.
Then you have the “meaningful choice fallacy” in a nutshell - you either don’t have a choice because you will always do what’s best for your friends/group/raid, or your choice is meaningless because Blizzard will not design content where having a specific Covenant actually matters.
/thread
This could work. Tuning mechanics is challenging which is why we try to discuss the merits of each suggestion.
Most covenants class and signature abilities are boring.
Door of Shadows is the only really interesting one IMO. Once that is nerfed the rest of the covenant signature abilities and class abilities are boring.
Blizz can tune the numbers all they want but people want to play their classes not these pseudo classes delivered via rental abilities.
But this isn’t fun… Just because they all do the same thing doesn’t mean it will be compelling.
Lots of high end players don’t think Torments will do what they are designed to do. Many are against it. It can be as simple as to stop handing out powerful rewards after a certain point.
Master Loot is almost never an issue in the top tier guilds. The only time it was an issue is when your leadership was bad. It definitely stopped “Reserve 20% of the items” groups/PUGs. This is why a huge number of players want Master Loot back for guild groups.
So the problem with the Legion legendaries wasn’t that there was some marginal min-max difference between them, it was that some were insanely good while others were basically garbage.
Oh, also, they were handed out randomly so while one person would get the optimal legendary for their class and spec, another player of the same class and spec would end up with the generic “all-purpose” legendary that might have been mildly useful in questing content.
Covenants could have meaningful choices, but only when the difference actually is marginal. Min-maxers will still pick the mathematically best option, but most of us will pick what we like best . . . again, assuming the difference is marginal. As soon as the difference is too great, then there is no choice to be made. It’s made for us. You see this in talent trees all the time.
Yes. Also, the fact you could level up and get a legendary on a fresh toon within 1 week, versus playing for 2-3 weeks after receiving your first legendary. You had players with literally 2-4 of the same class and spec because they got a crappy legendary as their first one. (Never mind the fact the system was bugged too. Some players got 4 in 2 weeks, where most players who got 1 never got a second, even after4 weeks.)
Pretty much, yeah. There is very little time investment needed to get a max level toon in Shadowlands as well. Running 4 of the same class could be viable, but it’s still stupid to think that’s currently the most optimal route.
Right. The pros and cons are just the same as mobility vs damage. The extremes of which are reached where the most mobile and simplest rotations do the least damage. The other side of that extreme is the least mobile and most complex rotations do the most damage.
I think the talent system needs to work like we’re talking. Where it covers the X/Y axis of accessibility and complexity.
Dear Nobleshield and OP,
Both well said. Totally agree with your points.
Basically we want meaningful choices then realize there is only one best choice among them, so no choice.
Blizz has a tough nut to crack and so far it is not cracking it, but there is still time!!!
Everyone has opinions. Like yours, most of those opinions are worth significantly less than other more informed opinions like the TC, Preach, and… well me.
Homogenization is just an edgy way for people like you to say “balanced”. Because it turns out, if things aren’t equal “aka, the same… aka homogenized” then it gasp isn’t balanced! So if something isn’t balanced, there will be a best pick that everyone flocks to. The idea that you have a choice is an illusion and you really need to stop giving into that delusion at the expense of the game.
Honestly I had the most fun in this game playing during MoP. An expansion that had such an abysmal selling pitch and concept by bringing pandas into the game that it became the first and only expansion I did not pre-order. I didn’t buy it until it was on sale for half off and when I did I wish I bought it earlier. Cause holy hell… every class was a blast to play.
Yet whiny crybabies like you cried WAAA EVERYTHING IS TOO HOMOGENIZED WAAAA and then we got WoD. Making classes into shells of their former selves. Putting everyone into such a bad state that we need “borrowed power” mechanics to make these stale classes semi-enjoyable to play with Legion’s artifacts and BFA’s azerite/essences/corruption.
Dude sorry but I don’t want to have myself gimped because I dare decided I want to play a different spec on my class. When two different covenants have abilities that cater to different specs best. Or god forbid maybe I want to PvP on my class and take a break from PvE and guess what, the pvp covenant is different from my pve covenant abilities. If you want choices go play Witcher 3, gtfo out WoW.
It’s a very easy nut to crack. Meaningful choices are only meaningful if people can make different choices and not be punished because they picked a suboptimal choice that makes them weaker at their class.
So the best way to make them would be to have them be narrative based. Aka, hey… I want to support THIS covenant because I support their goals and ideology!
Why wasn’t that enough? Why shoehorn player power into the choice?
Deciding which demon hunter I should follow in my legion class hall campaign felt great. I went with the one that ended up not killing Akama because he wasn’t a blind Illidan loyalist. We need more of this in the game.
Deciding on whether to backstab Saurfang and stay loyal to Sylvanas would have felt great if they actually followed through on it and made both paths viable like the DH campaign.
WoD could have made us pick a starting zone to make our garrison in as originally intended. That would have been a major choice that there’s no going back on.
Picking a covenant to follow is great, just don’t bribe me with player power and steal my narrative choice. Because where I once had 4 great choices now I have 1. Everyone is just going to wait and do what icyveins tells them to do.
Many would argue that the lack of player-power would maker the choice meaningless. This idea isn’t a “top players only” thing, so it’s not as easy as removing player-power from the equation. (I don’t disagree with your point, I’m just offering my perspective.)
I would agree with this point in general, however the covenant system seems to have a free way out of this issue, imo anyway.
They can untie both signature and class abilities off the “permanent” decision and still retain some player-power to give through soulbinds and conduits.
Which I would honestly be fine with, since I doubt they will make the abilities underwhelming and weak, otherwise why make them in the first place, right?
Define informed? Last I checked, just because you get on youtube and ramble about things, doesn’t make you an expert. Do any of them have degrees in math? Are any of them statisticians? Then don’t tell me they are the be-all-end-all when it comes to the numbers game. Do they realize that we still have six months before SL comes out?
Their job is to attract viewers and get them to watch most of their videos. To do so, they follow the same formulaic styles of doing so. Things like clickbait, scare-mongering, hype, etc etc go a long ways. Then you mix that in with the styles of presentation and find as many was to say the same things as many times as you possibly can. Take a topic that could be summed up in two minutes and drag it out to 20, but make it interesting enough that the sheep watching don’t realize they are being ASMR’d by the convoluted ramblings.
It was a terribly imbalanced mess… If you did any high level content, you’d know this.
No, homogenization is when you basically give carbon copies of the same ability to each covenant to where there are only visual differences between them. As for classes, homogenization is when you give things like hero/lust/etc to every class.
Two words: Button bloat. We needed some pruning and rent-a-powers to reduce that strain. Kits were getting way too bloated and rotations were becoming more and more convoluted. Legion worked fine and BFA worked fine other than the corruption system.
Just talent the player powers and have the Signature Abilities stand alone. People can keep whining about Door of Shadows, but its not going to make them any better than they are now. They just want an excuse when they do poorly.
Soulbinds and Conduits are going to be rather balanced (numbers are easy, mechanics are hard). You’d boil it down to a math equation and whatever gives you the best result is your pick. You sorta fall back to the same issue. Because of that, you really don’t have a meaningful choice in any situation.
The best idea, imo, would be to allow each Covenant to have strengths and weaknesses, but the mechanics are overlapping somewhat. Rather than 1 “good” choice with 3 “bad” choices, you get 2-3 “good” choices and 1-2 “bad” choices.
In this way, you can still having a meaningful choice, but the lines are very hard to figure out when it comes to “most optimal.” Technically, there is always a best choice, but sometimes alternatives are also viable picks – and making those alternatives is the goal.
This is a compromise I think everyone can relate to.
But honestly, I still want to have the abilities at least somewhat accessible. Speaking for myself as a Discipline Priest, I can already tell that I want to use more than 1 of these abilities in different contents. Really hope it ends up being easy to swap.