They get a cookie for adding in what should never have been removed in the first place for some asinine reason.
Regardless of how shadowlands or its questionable systems turns out, they already got your and many other fool’s money, thereby reducing their incentive to not make another trash BFA esque xpac.
And this is a step in the other direction instead of bending over to the zealous meta crowd. Bringing back rpg elements and character building. I get to pick what my character is better at. Loot being loot and not rng.
I fully support any change to harm the meta mentality instead of being a mindless sheep. I play games for fun my way. The woes of the elite players matter little to me.
If we pledge to a covenant, doesn’t that mean we fully commit to their cause? I get that people dislike the idea of being locked out of min/max abilities if they choose their favorite cosmetic, but how can it be considered a pledge if we’re using skills taught by another covenant?
It seems to go against the very idea of committing ourselves to a single group.
But… they listened.
How am I a “fool” or some kind of “filth?” You obviously gave them your money by playing Classic.
That’s not how it works. Do understand BFA was the best launch economically out of any expansion ever. It failed. You have a really childish view on this stuff.
Simple enough. Here’s my thought process as a casual that follows high end, but doesn’t do it himself.
First question:
Why wouldn’t you adjust the system for high end in the first place?
What do I mean?
I mean, each covenant will have it’s own abilities for each class. Some of those abilities will be better than others meaning if you are a raider and you are trying to min / max you will be forced to choose one over the one you may want and that’s just no fun for no one. Casuals in this case will just choose what they want anyways, so they aren’t really a factor IMO
How do you fix this?
Give another talent tree or something to allow you to choose one of the abilities and alter the look of said ability to fit the theme of the covenant you choose.
Ion said in the interview that it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for a Vampyr from Revendreath to throw a spear from the Kyrian ability. And he’s right in saying this, a way around that is to adjust the name and look of ability to fit around Revendreath or whatever other covenant you chose. But still gaining the functionality of the ability originally from the Kyrian.
This way those who need to min / max, can without limiting them to choosing a specific covenant and allowing to choose more from a cosmetic standpoint.
IMO doing this would hurt no one and benefit everyone and then it’s more of an art team problem than having to balance every ability to try to be similar in output, which is nearly improbable.
Ah, so you do understand why locking gameplay behind a hard to change choice is bad. Glad we’re on the same page.
It’s better than being locked into one of them because of a cosmetic choice, or locked into a terrible cosmetic choice because of one of them.
They aren’t, you can pick them whenever, which is what these covenant abilities should be.
This isn’t even mentioning legendaries. There are certain legendaries locked by covenants as well they have said. If they’re anything like legion legendaries they will be so unbalanced there will be a clear and obvious better covenant.
I have a bridge to sell you…
Thanks for being a part of pre order culture though. Love me some garbage games
That’s just it, though. Nothing they do can harm the meta mentality. It is so widespread and so adhered to by so many people that nothing that Blizzard does outside of removing all player choice (including talents and secondary stats) will ever get rid of the meta mindset at this point.
The only thing that’s going to happen is the meta mindset will become more prevalent, and the players that choose the “wrong” choice will be actively punished by the rest of the community for it, even though it really shouldn’t matter.
Do you have any rebuttal? Or are you just going to hide your lack of an argument behind insults? I made an educated purchase when I bought the expansion. It looked way better than BFA, and sought to fix a lot of the issues of the game.
Hahaha that’s rich and “educated” purchase. Enjoy your trash BFA 2 you and your kind deserve it. I’ll be here when covenants fall through and flop just to dunk on you some more.
This is a tough situation because of how some people play this game. Some people play this game primarily for character progression. They push mythic+ or they raid at a high level. Usually these players are playing with friends or with a guild. Even if one player in the group loves to play for RPG elements, if other players ask them to swap specs or skills in order to progress on content, they are kind of forced to do so. If you refuse to do so and others feel you are hindering progression, you will be replaced. Now this isn’t always the case but it happens often enough.
Now let’s talk about how Blizzard can try to please the millions of players that play this game.
They can keep the system as is. You pick your Covenant and they make it very time consuming to switch. This seems to be what a lot of players dislike (these are most likely the progression players and min maxers).
They can allow you to switch once you’ve earned some level of reputation with each Covenant. That gives players more reasons to play the game.
They can have you pick your main Covenant and if you want to switch to get other Covenant abilities, they can give you lesser version of those abilities. Kind of like the essence system where you have the major version of the skill and the minor version of the skill. They can even make you earn certain levels of reputation before being able to use these minor version of the other skills.
They can carry over the essence concept. You choose your Covenant but no player power is tied to it until you unlock each of the Covenant skills. This can be unlocked by gaining rep or using some other method that they come up with. Maybe give each of the Covenant skills ranks like they did with the essence system. That gives players something to work for. I would say that if they went this route, the community would want these to be unlocked account wide.
They can place a very long CD on switching Covenants once you’ve unlocked the ability to switch. You can switch but then can’t switch again for 12 hours or something like that. That introduces some strategy for players to mess around with while progressing.
Those are just some ideas that I have. Please keep the ideas coming. I love reading player suggestions, not complaints.
Come on Blizzard, you can pull this off!!
You haven’t “dunked” on me once. You don’t have an argument.
Ohh you’ve been dunked on. At the very least you bricked some free throws with all those stupid, poorly crafted shill arguments. I’d have more respect for you if you owned being a shill.
What shill arguments? You’re only proving my point more. You’re just insulting me and calling me a shill, despite how I’ve criticized the Covenant system.
Be honest. You don’t have respect for me because you’re throwing a tantrum, knowing that I’m right.
They are already punished for it. Taking a sub optimal build will result in less dps and get the hate from the meta crowd. Since nothing will change that why not throw a wrench into it?
As sad it is I would take some enjoyment out of the hardcore group suffering to make this choice.
I think they realize after the negative response to system bloat and the overwhelming success of classic that we don’t need something to shake up everything like they wanted covenants to do.
We don’t need warfronts, island expeditions, a mountain of intertwining war campaign quests, faction-specific landmasses, twenty different grindy progression systems, or to be locked into a suboptimal choice for months with a costly fee to grind to change. They have the ability to make classes more appealing and they are doing it, BFA had some flops but we know they can nail dungeons, we know M+ is great, we know art is awesome, we know zones can be awesome, we know they make the best raids, we know they can do great stuff.
We don’t need covenants to be some crazy game-changing mechanic to make shadowlands a great expansion.
I have no constructive criticism to give on covenants because I do not like the idea of tying abilities to glorified rep grinds. Stop externalizing abilities and talent points. Stop making these borrowed power systems that force you to grind for 2 years only to have it be useless later.
Sounds awfully like a shill to me. Based on what it appears you actually do in the game it appears as if Shadowlands may be designed with you in mind. LFR/minimal competency seems to be the target demographic with covenants and these other borrowed power gimmicks
How do I sound like a shill? Can you point out a specific instance? Perhaps a quote?
I’ve done like 2 LFR bosses. I’ve tried some Heroic but I don’t feel like looking for a guild until Shadowlands. You wanna know why there’s not much on my profile?
I’ll give you a hint.
BFA was a god-awful expansion that bored me to tears. I don’t feel like playing a game that I find boring. So I won’t play that game.
How does LFR relate to borrowed power?
Also, are you even trying to make an argument anymore?
Because it doesn’t actually throw a wrench into the meta mentality. It does nothing to even remotely harm the mentality at all - In fact, it actively bolsters the mentality. At the very least, Blizzard needs to allow us to actively change covenants whenever we want with no real cost or cooldown, to mitigate the effect this is going to have on people because the meta mentality exists.