Yes. Because they didn’t have the time to replace it.
A large problem is that the developers will never be able to change, nerf, or buff the covenants once players have chosen their covenant. Could you imagine you took the ‘top’ choice covenant only to have them redo the abilities later and find out your choice is now the ‘wrong’ one?
They better get the balance correct from the very beginning. Or else offer free switches whenever they adjust the covenant abilities.
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This exactly should be how we proceed. History has shown people will got to great lengths to get cosmetic rewards and mounts. That’s all Covenants need to be, flavor.
Let the actual character power/progression come from a set of universal talents/buffs that we pick. Then everybody can disagree on what’s best from an equal set, while using the flavor you personally like best regardless of performance.
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I wish I actually got something special for the covenant I first pick; incentivizing me to stay with it.
But I guess sticking it to all the try-hards trying to play the game well will have to do.
Just seems weird that the benefit to me is a negative to someone else. So much for a sense of community.
Because we have all seen where their bad idea’s lead. So better to just make it cosmetic now, then playing for two years of “meh”.
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Now I haven’t looked much at covenant abilities myself, and given all the class changes we’re likely to see, as well as the game itself changing from a bfa meta to a shadowlands meta, its incredibly hard to tell whats going to be a good covenant or a bad one for any class or spec. That being said, I think the best way to balance it all out is to make it so the covenants all have at least one powerful utility that is impactful in most forms of content. Like say having a dps shaman choose between a burst mobility option, a stronger defensive cd, additional group healing, or a stronger crowd control option. In many situations, you can argue for almost any of these being good options for a player with personal preference being the main deciding factor.
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You say it’s not about min/maxing yet you use the word “disadvantage” in the sense that not min/maxing puts you at a disadvantage. These powers won’t be so strong you can’t overcome the difference. If you like to do all 3, you won’t underperform.
Highly doubtful - if you look at the abilities; especially for people that select one for raid tanking, but like to pvp as dps/heals - the difference will be quite substantial.
The demon hunter ability that ignores LoS is ridiculously good in PvP, but not nearly as useful as the others for PvE, as another example.
This is a big reason why people like Ralph and myself love the system - it punishes players that want to be good at the game in various ways.
Feel free to make a suggestion about the balancing, then. Now’s the time to experiment and see what might be too good or too weak. That said, if you’re a DH, you won’t underperform regardless of the covenant you pick, but your choice will impact what your hero’s strengths and weaknesses will be. You won’t be peak at everything. Ion described that as intentional as an RPG.
It’s akin to choosing a class, which also has strengths and weaknesses. You can’t just borrow from other classes whenever you encounter something that your class is weak at dealing with. Although covenants are a much lesser version of this.
No I dont. This is an rpg.
You are making a choice as to what you want. Player agency and choice are apart of the gaming genre.
Do you reroll race, class and spec to fotm? Professions? Will there be a best for each for of content? Yes. Will it be more meaningful than the dozen other facets that determine output? No.
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You clearly don’t remember how they handled legion legendary balancing. If classes were that unbalanced, yes, people would reroll.
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Making it cosmetic only would be the best route and I like the idea of keeping story choices in that realm going forward.
For what we have now and the path of least resistance approach being necessary I’d say just make the abilities active in the world and disable them everywhere else.
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Yes the will. Players will always look for the scapegoat for why they are bad and take the easy way out.
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So, there’s another way they could create more compelling choices. They could have them actually worth competitively using or offer niches that aren’t directly put on a meter like say, “This ability gives me say 6503 dps, but this other option gives me 6305 dps and 25% of the damage it does as healing through procs, this would help me in survivalbility, but oh, this one would give me armor!”
Instead with corruption and latest balance it’s like.
“This infinite stars gives people who rolled it 30k dps just for logging in, and this Woeful mind lets me self damage myself for 10k a second for 12% avoidance to hurt myself 900% more to take 12% less! Pogchamp. And this other one, is just flat out terrible and never worth equipping, thanks game!”
It’s like they treat alternative gameplay styles as a woeful choice. If anything, it’ll stale up content faster from a player perspective. From a player perspective, it’s ‘what choice’, you pick one talent, you’re locked into you, you can’t even explore the others. The gameplay ‘choice’ is rolling 4 of your same class. It’s like saying multispec being removed for support to try and bottleneck unviable pvp tanks to only play one spec in terms of game design. No one wants wow tanks in pvp being unkillable turtles who can’t cap anything but delay objectives for 30 minutes, not even tanks, but we want offspecs in order to play our pvp specs to play the game when our necrotic tanking essence, sphere of suppression is tied to the content we are deliberately not meant to play. Some group content roles just aren’t designed for solo play, offering more gameplay choices doesn’t restrict it, it enhances it. Sure you might go “But players might pick the best choice”, but that’s half the fun, figuring out what the best choice is, playing with talents, or figuring out things like “this is the best pvp talent choice”, “this trait is the best PVE”, “this spec, while being -200 dps, adds in 1000 self healing per second i can use to solo and quest in”, and ofc self healing and mitigration. Aren’t the skip abilities already interesting enough?
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It is unfortunate that the devs have elected to die on a hill of cosmetic options while letting stats and data rain down freely.
One would imagine the finer course would be…
“Umm sure you can look like whatever you want buuut if you want to calculate the exact optimal strategy through our content, that’s not gonna happen.”
But instead they have opted for:
“Yeah, we made all this content, but here is all the data you need to make most of it irrelevant. However, we will go to bloody war with lame kittens before we give you the purely cosmetic thing that you have wanted for years on end. Never! NEVER!”
If only the designers had the vaguest idea what they were doing. Its been so long since someone in blizz development made as good decision, I don’t think they would know one if someone wrote one down for them.
…
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For hunters: Resonating Arrow - Fire a resonating arrow to the target location and fill the area with echoing anima. The effect causes your attacks to ignore line of sight to enemies in the area, and you have an increased critical strike chance against them.
This is massive. Unless its reworked, not having it in arena would be a massive disadvantage. This has nothing to do with min/maxing.
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Frankly, I don’t see the point in trying to “save” a system that’s so severely flawed on a fundamental level. That’s a lot of effort and wasted time for something that will never work.
It’s a lot more efficient to just make good systems from the start instead of trying to constantly iterate on the one you happened to throw the dart at this time. It’s a tough decision to make, but sometimes retreat is the correct answer.
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Well I been reading this article today. It seems a bit intense tbh.
I know everyone has been going off about the covenant system. Just this added more concern for me. While of course the main priority should be how this would affect gameplay and it very much will.
I just wanted to take my time out to express concerns about having to be soulbound to some type of NPC. That I really really don’t want to be soulbound to. Like… the owl in Bastion for example or Theotar. I know I shouldn’t single them out and they will end up being OP or something. Still this would really damper this whole soulbind experience to me. If one had much better perks than the other. Or do all these guys share the same tree? I don’t know. It’s kinda vague in this article…
I was actually half interested in having this type of companion soulbind thing going on. I think they have done companions in other games. Maybe not to the extent they get a tree that affects your gameplay but still… It’s something I haven’t really experienced before. So I was half interested, but then it’s like at what cost…
Another small complaint is a lot of these guys are not very appealing. You think they would try a little better. Some look ok but still… I don’t see all the options tho.
They seem kinda generic. I wouldn’t have minded ones that were actually more appealing. Guys could’ve got some nice female npcs too. I wouldn’t have cared. Then you could’ve given an option of generic funny or cutsie ones.
They aren’t going to do that though. They framed it as “trying to save the system before throwing it out”. Your proposal does not jibe with their statement.
Did adding an account-wide factor to essences fix the issues? Not for the many people who had already left.
They’re going to go with this. The only time to change it would be right now.
Once again, you clearly don’t remember how balanced legion legendaries were/are.
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