In my opinion, the best way to break the idea of “most optimal choice” is to have some homogenization across the abilities. The idea is that you’ll have a “best choice” and “acceptable” choices. You can still have a “bad choice”, but there will be situations were a “bad choice” can become an “acceptable” choice.
Even if freely swapping wasn’t a thing, this extra flexibility reduces the impact of a “bad choice” for the situation. Because of that flexibility, the lines are blurred between right and wrong. There’s less of a chance your personal choice will seriously hinder your performance.
I don’t see why people treat a decision like this differently from class or race selection.
For the cutting edge World First groups of players it’s certainly not an uncommon practice to swap classes (or races) between different Raid bosses, M+ dungeons, and Rated PvP comps.
But for your run-of-the-mill player they don’t engage is such extreme min/maxing of the game. I don’t foresee the average player making an attempt to run the best class, race, spec, and covenant combo for every situation they find themselves in.
If you think Venthyr is S tier and Necrolords B tier good for you. Choose what you want and someone else will make a different choice. It’s how we have people playing all manner of classes and specs in all kinds of content.
Homogenizing the choices just leads us further down the road of “Why do we even have choices?”.
Considering my love for the talents that completely flip your spec around like Gladiator Stance or Surrender to Madness, I think I’d enjoy homogenization less even if that makes it easier to balance.
Though I also think there is less leniency for sub-optimal builds if the cost to swap is literally nothing. If switching things around isn’t something you can do on a whim every 15 minutes, then getting that 100% optimal group is going to be difficult for most players and they’ll be more willing to take something that is close enough.
Which I don’t think they need to homogenize to get them close enough for most of the playerbase. They just need to change their approach in how they design things.
They would especially need to offer mixed types of encounters within the same content that you can’t just switch specs between each fight.
It shouldn’t be as simple as “We’re going to take constant damage, so pick up the damage reduction talent”. There should be many variables and any one choice should only be a partial solution.
I look to Path of Exile here as I think though PoE is ARPG and WoW is so-called MMORPG there are worthy conversations about itemization.
PoE’s approach is we do not design classes but rather abilities and we put those abilities in a ranking order where you’ll have access to some but not all. They ultimately leave it up to the player and it’s largely itemization that determines the build.
WoW historically has been the opposite. You could find something that would slightly alter your class but classes were largely concrete with itemization flexing a little of that concrete one way or another.
So now we have this ARPG push into WoW (no doubting it) and we see more and more they want classes to have more flexible identities through gear. We saw it with Legiondaries and we’re seeing it with Azerite gear. I’ve personally called for a base+ component system that would work a lot like a very flexible affix crafting system in an ARPG. So we all I think want something more flexible than what a developer thinks say, a Warlock should be.
There are many ways to get there but not all of them are equal. For one I really do not like rental power. If something gets in the game it’s my opinion it should always be there. Not for 2 years but permanently. At least long enough that it dies of being forgotten long before it gets removed. That also presents challenges but many of them addressable. Such as expansion-themed ability changes that you pick. You don’t get an unlimited number, like PoE does it. You can choose a shadowbolt theme from Shadowlands, a chaos bolt theme from Legion, a corruption theme from BFA, etc, etc.
So it’s a direction worth considering but the signature abilities aren’t really worth the trouble. In PoE it’d be like a new league offers 4 new hotkey options with 3 of them being something other than a damage multiplier to your 6 link. We can’t even pretend that’s a choice.
The choice is nothing like that of a class or race…
Many of these abilities are CLEARLY built with one aspect of Wow’s content in mind. Be it PvE raids, PvE Dungeons, PvP, etc. Some of these will create large disparities for those who have certain abilities.
I enjoy doing both PvP and PvE. Why should I be at a disadvantage in one?
I don’t see why people treated talents, legendaries, Azerite, or corruptions as something where you had to have the thing that sims best either. But they did, and do, and Blizzard would be fools to just hope that it stops in SL.
Minmaxing is the problem, but Blizzard doesn’t actually have a solution to it. Any system can have the choice squeezed out of it by minmaxing. But you can’t make a game with no systems at all, at least not one more interesting than Pong.
Unless you’re going for world first, the variance in power from one covenant to another is not going to be important.
If you care about the most power no matter what then you’ll pick based on that. If you want to RP and pick based on theme and feeling, go for it and you’ll still be able to handle the raids fine.
Yes and no. When you’re giving unique effects to everyone, that results in a system we see right now. When you’re giving unique effects to a few abilities and mixing them up, you create flexibility. It reduces the likelihood that some abilities are clearly more desirable than others. For example, if you were a serious player, there is no way you wouldn’t pick Venthyr. However, if the range on the teleport and Ngiht Fae’s Blink were about even, you can argue that Night Fae is better in combat, while Venthyr is better out of combat.
It’s not that one choice is all that matters, it’s that you have 2-3 decent options. It makes your personal choice matter less on performance, and eases the strain of having to pick a Covenant that is optimal. In this sense, your choice is meaningful to your preferences, but still allows room for optimization.
This is strictly for non-damaging abilities. Tuning isn’t that hard to do on Class Abilities, but it’s tough to compare Signature Abilities where a 20-50% HP shield is compared to a Teleport that potentially saves you a 1-3min headache.
While true that the variance should not be important, there are those that look at the meta (what comes to be from the world firsts) and treat it as the be all, end all. This is the reason we have some that make groups like “no ‘class’”. Most of the ones against making covenants easily changeable are the ones that want to stick it to the “meta or get out” crowd.
In some ways it is the extreme of “if you don’t play to win, don’t play at all” attitude. The funny thing is, there are those that, while they make the meta, know when the meta is one of the worst things to do because, while making the meta, they actually learned their class, talents, etc and some meta followers might try to tell these people how to play.
Personally, I’d rather have the gameplay systems freely swappable without having to do a covenant change. Imo, covenant identity is important, but so is freedom of choice gameplay wise.
Honestly the whole Venthyr vs Night Fae thing sounds like part of the problem is that they were very similar abilities to begin with. They’re both offering the player teleport spells, but one is clearly superior to the other.
It seems like the solution here shouldn’t be to try to make them more alike but to make it so two Covenants aren’t having very similar signature abilities.
As a general philosophy though, I think they should strive to make our choices about our utility more unique but offer a wide range of scenarios in any given content so that no one utility rises above the others as the one “correct” choice to make.
Which it may be worth limiting the ability to change the choices just a little bit. I don’t think people should feel overly restricted from going “It’s raid night, so I’m going to switch to covenant X”.
However I don’t think it should be commonplace to go “Well I want to switch for Covenant X for this boss before switching to Covenant Y for the next boss”.
I know it’s outside of the scope of a discussion about Covenants, but I would argue talents should be like that too.
Being able to hyper specialize into individual fights really pushes the “If you aren’t top tier, you’re trash tier” mentality that people are talking about being so worried about.
I just don’t agree. I like the idea of a Kyrian Warlock being a fundamentally different creature than a Necrolord Warlock, with a different playstyle and a different aesthetic. I like that we have to make a tough choice and that that choice represents true allegience to a certain group. Making covenants swappable nilly-willy at any rest area and reducing them to little more than a talent tree would ruin that feel, in my eyes.
Well OP. I’m certainly concerned about this, but somewhat less concerned than about changes to our class that may return Druid to the vanilla state of resto being the only viable spec. Have you been following Druid class changes?
The issue is that players are not a binary choice of “caring about performance” or “caring about RP”. It’s entirely possible (and I’d even argue pretty likely, considering the type of game this is) that a player would care both about RP and performance.
I’m a well above average player that cares about their performance. I’ve also been playing my paladin for over a decade and would rather not join a literal scourge covenant if I could avoid it. It’s not strange, and I’m certain I’m not alone.
The covenant system will never work because it is purely binary. Player power can never be put on a scale along side RP values.
