"they want to try to save the system before throwing it out."

Like i get it, if in a single player game, or solo content where you could choose your own design, i’d all be into it, But stat and class rerolls exist for a reason. What if say the leveling build, you made while leveling in a game with irreversable talents was fun. Or in Adventurequest, you played a account for years with extremely expensive training, made a all rounder, and then found out that putting all your stat points in charisma in a 40 of everything level 100 to have a cute puppy and play everything but was mediocre at it all made you 5x weaker than all 100 strength pure. Then there’s systems like runescape which takes it even further and there’s no class at all but just gear and yet you get things like Dharoks, Builds where people risking their health as low as possible hit much harder. a very fun and rewarding mechanic and extremely thrill watching in pvp and dueling. There’s Tribridding, which is like basically swapping around three classes at once frost barraging people only to shoot a dragonfire bolt at them, proc and burn them with a deadly hit and then spec them in with a Armadyl godsword or ballista drop and kill them.

Runescape basically has a system where people can literally, LITERALLY, (and, quite often do), switch between entire builds instanteously swapping from mager to meleer to ranger with a click of all their gear in a single game tick. Far from restricting build choices, it’s created a whole slew of sections of pures making everything from 1 defence pures, 99 defence pures that kill you with poison and dragonfire, range pures, hybrids and tribrids and dharokers and obby maulers. Far from suffering by giving people every choice at once, people think over things a ton and even swap gear in combat.

Maybe you’re a main, have too much hp too much def? Go into dharoks and those hp levels turn into devastating damage. How about a quick and easy to raise pure, wreck people with damage, kill bots and questers but be easy prey to higher mains. But it’s far from dead from suffering from build choices even after all these years. Plus every time a new powerful item drops, even if it’s not bis for a main, it can always pop up in use for a pure. Tanky helm that just poisons enemies, put it on a pure. Weapon is heavy hitting and slow, outclassed but has a 60 str requirement instead of 60 att? Put it on a obby mauler and ko people. It hardly suffers from choices.

This is information that we don’t have. Likely we won’t have that information until after the first raid has been open for a few weeks.

Not the PvP vendors people were asking for. PvP vendors will only be available to players who earn conquest in rated PvP. That’s very much a minority as far as PvP goes.

They’re bringing all this up now because they know how badly it will be accepted by the playerbase. They’re thinking if the discussion goes on for a while longer than usual, players will come around.

They’re scapegoating min maxers to try to appeal to those who aren’t.

LOL. They had to cook the numbers to make it look good. It was the first expansion where prepurchases counted as “first day sales”.

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Is that what the game should be about? Pitting different demographics which devs have created by their development choices against each other to try to get the groups to hurt each other?

What has this game come to?

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Yup - they do see to consistently punish players that want to play the game from various aspects and in all of it’s forms.

And yes - rolling multiple versions of the same class would make sense as a way to work around the system. Similar to how Diablo 2 used to work.

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Oh please, what do you think the min-max gatekeeping base has been doing for years even beyond WoW. Blizzard comes out saying we are adding impactful character building choices and suddenly the world is ending.

Simulation and excessive minmaxing has destroyed any attempt to add choice and creativity. It is impossible to balance things perfectly and sims will single out the only build worth taking.

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They could still keep it in batches, or make the mobilities and flavor talents unique, just we need less hard coded things like racials and covenants, it’s like fantasy segregation and paladins vs shamans. No matter how interesting it might be to sometimes have fun competitive differences in a 1 shot game, 1000 hours of losing in korraks after 8 capping only to see your commander 0 towered at full 10% hp Alliance commander fighting a 1000% hp Horde 10x hp Drek is a miserable experience.

Putting twice the effort to get half as far feels terrible. “Seperate, but equal”, just has never been shown to work in practice. We already saw it, for lack of better comparison fantasy segregation. Groups are divided and you’re told that raiding would be “Separate, but equal”, but in practice it just gets even worse when people would Underfund or take taxes and money from both.

Use it to build Red luxury train seats, and give rags and leftovers with uncleaned vomit and mechagnomes to the other. It’s like paying 150$ (The price of a 6 month sub and expansion) for a cruise vacation ticket, only to hear that 79% of your money has been used making the horde storyline. When you try to go have fun, you find out all the volleyball players have left, or died of starvation. When you go to the buffet, you see them eating food while you’re starving. And you’re seeing people who put half the time in, who messily spill food all over it guzzling down. And then on the shore there’s a normal game where they don’t do the ‘seperate, but inherently inequal’ crap and you actually play a game by what skills or tricks you want to learn. Not fill out irl job applications for your hours of availablity, how much you can play wow a week, expected dkp points payment, firing policies, benching policies, race changing policies, and needing to spend hundreds of dollars to play a game you already thought you pay for uprooting years of community and memories and old guilds and friends… all to play a race you don’t even like for a damage boost and last remaining players.

Plus i’ve already seen dying games before, give it a couple years, if wow ever drops even further eventually even the horde will start poaching from itself to the last 500,000, last 200,000, and then there’ll be a point where the devs are literally making content for a single group of players with no fresh blood coming into the game that weren’t already there. 50% of people who could have been, will just see no opportunities and leave. When they pat themselves on the back, and go “If you don’t like it, leave”, the game wasn’t even that good being stuck in a dead end.

Just a big gap of nothing to do, no advancement, there’s absolutely nothing to do when the raid game ends at heroic. Not for a story choice, not for a plotline choice, but because you were telepathically supposed to know that they’d be starving you for a race choice and forcing people to play blank hyperpopulations as a gear in a cog, not close knit 10 man groups where everyone knew eachother or close knit guilds or servers.

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There are games that support that kind of character building, this is not one of them

We are heavily dependant on eachother to accomplish goals, despite people whining that “you don’t even have to socialize”, and there will be people who kick for being the wrong cov, the wrong sb, and the wrong legendaries.

This is a problem that will affect you because it is a massively multiplayer online role playing game. Your choices will be logged in your armory, and then raiderino, and you will be confronted with elitism that you can’t overcome, because you argued that we shouldn’t have an easy method of swapping to optimal layouts.

There is a middle ground for all of these systems, and arguing that there’s not a problem does not help us find it. We can make covenants meaningful, and also let you swap when you eventually and inevitably need to.

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I like the system as it currently is. Or, will be… lol

Then again I run alts. So this gives me my favorite Covenant for my main and then I can play around with the others on my alts if I wish to.

So for me, it’s win, win.

I do realize it’s not so good if you don’t run alts.

My suggestion for that is: Run your main though your “primary” Covenant. Then allow switching to others easier, but the “powers” you get stay within the Covenant.

So, what you get in Bastion stays in Bastion. You go to Ardenweald, ok what you get there, stays there. When you leave that specific covenant you drop off those covenant tied abilities/powers. And weapons/gear IF they are tied to the Covenant.

But when you go back you get them/can use them.

So you can’t use Ardenweald abilities/gear when in Bastion, you use Bastion stuff. Switch back to Ardenweald and you can’t use Bastion stuff, only Ardenweald…

Not sure if that’s feasible to program, but makes sense to play.

And, keeps players busy… lol

Though that will probably bring crying to the forums that there is too much to do. Versus now: Nothing to do. lol

I think it’s a no win scenario, but the above could… provide a bit of a middle ground.

No one makes you do more than 1 covenant. You choose to do more or not as you wish.

However, the key is gear and abilities tied to that covenant, And easier to switch covenants for those who want to do 1 main character but multiple covenants.

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There are TONS of options to bridge the gap - but the people that squeak the loudest to Blizzard Devs on Twitter, Reddit, and on here are the people that find more enjoyment out of the punishment and consequences that this kind of system imposes.

Our joy for having that negativity imposed on others would be impacted and removed. As long as we keep reinforcing these kinds of changes to Blizzard, they’ll keep reverting player-friendly systems.

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“Character building choices” is wonderful for people who only rp, not so good for people who actually play the content.

Freedom to choose what you want is fun. Having to make a choice that either feels bad gameplay wise or feels bad flavor wise with no way to have both feeling fun is not fun.

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Well said.

Changes like this continue to push me towards games like FFXIV that offer way more choice and freedom.

Somehow, they’re a successful MMO-RPG and they are flexible to the class/job level!

There’s no need to be this restrictive - especially when your game offers so many different ways to play it.

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I think the idea is kind’ve ridiculous. We already have factions and races that garner constant complaints of balance issues and bias. Adding yet another layer of this is a road I can’t believe Blizzard has decided to go down.

That being said I don’t really care because I’m not a min/max player. I play what I enjoy. I do believe the option to switch should be there though. It always has been since Aldor vs. Scryers. Just tie a lengthy rep grind to it all and call it a day.

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your attitude here is the true failure

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You didn’t listen to a word I said. Essences and Azerite are completely different to Covenants and Soulbinds.

You are given them the moment you enter your Covenant. Nothing needs to be earned. Like gear or the upgrades to your essences.

These abilities can literally just be granted to a player.

FFXIV has freedom but zero choices to make. You are always exactly the same as everyone else. Gear is nothing but stats, skills are all the same and materia is a shallow system where all you do is socket crit.

So yea its perfect cause you never need to worry about gimping yourself. The customization of WoW is one of the things I like. Anything that moves toward that is a plus for me.

Also don’t fool yourself into thinking FFXIV is balanced. Their forums are just as whiny as these with balance. You will find party finder omits less desirable classes from joining. And there is nothing that class can do cause the classes are static.

Well a blend of the two would be amazing, but for now I’d just be happy with the ability to switch covenant abilities for different content; like essences and talents - adding choices and player agency to the game, rather than reducing them.

Or just giving all abilities to all covenants, but changing the spell effects to match the respective theme.

Otherwise it just feels punishing people that want to play the game well- all for no actual benefit to the other side; aside from satisfying some need to be spiteful.

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That makes literally no sense. But I guess a fanboy cant see past the end of his own nose.

They are planning that if the system is a failure they can just scrap it. Something they did not do in BFA, they went down with a sinking ship cos they refused to acknowledge the water rushing in until too late.

Now I know that people like you who over invest in to their hobbies define themselves by the said hobby, in this case WoW, so when people attack the game it’s like an attack on you and you don’t have the tools at your disposal to deal with the valid criticism being leveled, so you dismiss it out of hand.

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for someone that told im the blind one, it is you that cant see the obvious; actually u know, you are just playing dumb probably but of course they CANNOT remove the system entirely.

i hate to break it to you, but i dont feel personally attacked by people that i found to be doing or speaking dumb stuff… you attitude is bad, first because you did not helped with anything just stating that something is bad and it doesnt work, you could not spend a minimal amount of time to even try to justify you though about it as also leading to a dumb suggestion that YOU KNOW they cant do.
not only that but your ammount of hope in anything its so substantially small that if devs took your oppinion seriously with the incredible ammount of support you´re giving them, they would probably get depressed in the process and just give up

Ah yes avoid the argument good job.

You do realise that Ion said they are planning for failure? They will remove the cost for swapping Covenants if they have to. Never said anything about removing it you weapons grade idiot.

Or are you just so far gone in defense of them that your language comprehension has gone out the door?

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yes i watched…2 times actually, i heard him very well, what he said was all about we telling what its not good now that is soon so they can fix stuff because they have time now compared to azerite in bfa.
And no, ION at least wanna try to make the game going to a path where even if NO ONES believes it can happen, IF it does happen then its better for the game, people like u would probably support the whole META SLAVE route by embracing it and makes systems around the meta slave stuff, but trying to make a system where choice is not just an illusion its like fighting evil in the world, you know its never gonna end but its not because you know its never gonna end that suddenly decide “whatever let them do it what they want, its never gonna end anyway”.
That system may not work, and if doesnt it is because it needed to be worked better, but I AM 100% IN FAVOR OF IT, “OH BUT THERE´S ALWAYS THE TOP CHOICE AND YOU´RE A META SLAVE OTHERWISE YOUR ISOLATED”, sure balancing stuff can be a nightmare, but I WILL NEVER EMBRACE THE META SLAVE SYSTEM, if there´s a very minor chance to fix it, then do it, im a not a coward and i want that vision that he talked about while he explained all of this to be a reality, I WANT THEM TO SUCCEED I GENUINALLY WANT THEM TO MAKE THAT VISION A REALITY
so no, im not interested im your “but its gonna fail anyway” crap, AM I CLEAR?