It would probably be a full swap when it happens (and they have said that is the backup plan).
So you won’t be able to mix and match covenant abilities or soul binds.
Exactly. It’s a free win for them. Idk why they are ignoring it. They have done the hard part in creating them all. Just need to unlock them all now and collect the money and goodwill the community will throw at them.
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I thought that was implied in me calling the systems bad.
I don’t actually disagree with Covenants being a selling point of the expansion. I just disagree with how they’re implemented. And I obviously disagree with the idea that making them bad simply “to change things up” is a ridiculous mentality to have.
I think that Blizzard making some of them ridiculously overpowered (and thus by extension, some of them ridiculously underpowered) undermines the entire concept of the system.
If it was purely story or cosmetic based and people chose what they liked, based on aesthetics, cosmetic rewards or story, the system would be far stronger as it would allow them to choose what faction they wanted based on any factor they want, not just “Venthyr have broken utility, so I pick Venthyr”.
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Shadowlands is an expansion without any sort of infinite grind systems to force you to engage with systems past the point of getting what loot you need out of them (Ion Hazzikostas has literally voiced concern about whether people will play Mythic+ without WF/TF). Shadowlands is also an expansion without new races or classes to automatically attract the casual player-base.
Without a massive, all-encompassing new system, for all intents and purposes… it would simply be Warlords of Draenor. It would be Warlords of Draenor. And there are people on this sub who claim they want Warlords of Draenor 2, but they’re lunatics. That’s the best way to drive the game into the ground.
You need, absolutely NEED, something you can put on the box that says “You haven’t played WoW in a while, but you absolutely need to try this never-before-attempted system”.
Island expeditions were “bad” but people didn’t quit the game over them. They grit their teeth and grinded. In fact, in many cases the WoW player-base seems to enjoy pain, at least the way they vote with their wallet. They will quit the game when they’ve finished the content and they’re happily contented, but they will stick around to spite the game if it presents an obstacle to them. Strange behavior, but Blizzard has taken notice. Only very recently, with the explosion of Classic subs, has Blizzard decided to opt for a more traditional Classic-like design philisophy (less loot, but loot is loot).
It really, really wouldn’t be. Challenge Modes vs Mythic+ give us mathematical proof that cosmetics are not interesting enough or enough of a motivator for players to stick around and engage in content and systems. They just don’t work, regardless of what people claim. Challenge Modes were an utter failure (even if those challenge mode skins were absolutely sick) whereas Mythic+ is one of Blizzard’s most impressive successes ever.
I didn’t say there should be a covenant system. I said I think the one they have atm seriously sucks. Enough that I cancelled my sub.
They can do covenants in a cool way without screwing with player power completely. Try this on for size.
Abilities get a graphical change for each covenant while being talents.
Each covenant has a unique story to play through that devalops over the whole expansion.
Open world raids of covenants happen where factions dissolve and you fight along covenant lines.
Thw further you get with one covenant the more transmog and mount options you unlock
That’s off the top of my head I’m sure they can do more with a whole team on it full time.
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Eh, soulbinds make talents impossible.
Best we’re going to get is “you can switch covenants once a day without penalty” or something.
They’d also have to redesign the talent system to fit 4 in.
They could do the talent like the pvp ones as their own group.
Not sure about soul binds tbh I haven’t looked at them enough to make an educated comment. From what I have seen most of them were not to do with the covenant abilities though were they?
A lot of the final ones right now say “when you use your venthyr covenant ability…”
I mean, as long as we get a choice of 4 very different abilities, I’m cool with whatever they do.
Ahk that’s a problem then. Personally I would still prefer they reworked that one to be something else than locking people in though.
Everyone knows they will eventually cave and have them swappable or something like you say I just wish they would do it now instead of pretending they are sticking to their guns.
No azerite vendor on launch because we want it to feel special. Azerite vendor comes in 8.1 and every raid boss drops it. By 8.3 the put everyone’s “bis” trait on every raid piece
No we will never do account wide essences. We think it’s important individual character progression. By 8.3 they release a new currency
Corruption is fully RNG with just a few coming from raid. A couple e of months later every vision drops corrupted and a few more months after that we get a vendor.
I didn’t play legion but from what I hear it was the same with legendaries.
Can’t we just jump to the bit where they say they got it wrong and fix it?
Imagine how much more stuff they could add in or fix if they didn’t waste all the time pretending they were going to balance covenant abilities.
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People say “what if they had just done that from the beginning!” but I think Blizz had their own plan for how things would play out and always had those changes set to go but they wanted progress up to that point to go a certain way.
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Island Expeditions weren’t bad, they were boring.
There’s a difference between the two. I’m not going to look back on grinding islands with the same fondness that I have for BoD for example, but I’m also not comparing them to stuff like Corruption, which actively is bad.
And Covenants aren’t going to be the system that keeps you there all expansion. That’s stuff like Torghast, as well as the usual Raids, Dungeons and PvP.
Slapping power onto that won’t change it. It’ll just end up like Essences where in X.2 or X.3, no-one will care about doing it except in how it makes alts tedious.
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+1.
I see similar logic when it comes to arguing about Pathfinder. Whenever Pathfinder Part 2 comes out, people say “This is the way it was always meant to be”. However, the entire point of Pathfinder is that it quite obviously was NOT intended to be there initially. The entire POINT of Pathinder is to prevent flying from being in the game at all initially, and then it can be dropped later, when the content has been consumed “correctly” for a period of time.
With corruption on a vendor, people are accelerating their ramp towards BIS much more quickly than previously. If Blizzard had gone with corruption vendors right away, what exactly would Blizzard have to dangle later in the content drought? People would have seen several full cycles of the corruption vendor and they’d have all their BIS loot, be done, and unsub.
Torghast is a big fat joke. It’s already been neutered, it’s essentially glorified world quests.
I literally already said that’s not enough.
I mean, it was enough for many years though.
WoW has been hemorrhaging subs for many years. WoW has only very, VERY recently stopped the bleeding. It was not enough. Not even close.
It’s going to hemorrage subs no matter what they do, it’s coming up on 16 years old in a market that is unfavorable to MMOs
As it was only the lucky ones got it. I did a key week 2 with a tank that had the echoing void trait and he did over 90k dps where the rest of the dps was doing like 50-60k. Purely based on his luck of getting multiple bis pieces with no way for anyone else to keep up.
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No? I mean that’s just factually untrue. Blizzard has seen their sub count more than double over the last year.
I’m not in any way saying that Corruptions were perfect. In many ways Covenants and Corruptions are polar opposites. Corruptions introduce an element of uncertainty via RNG. Covenants introduce an element of uncertainty based on player choice. Some Covenants will be better than others, but you will be choosing which Covenants you want rather than the chips arbitrarily falling where they may. We will likely go into the system without full information which Covenants will be best throughout the life of the expansion but you will make the choice anyways based on intuition or just what you think you’ll have the most fun with.
Later, once the expansion has started to age, Blizzard can open the system up and let people play with the options they missed. That doesn’t mean it was wrong to be locked initially. It’s like in a video game where you play through the game and then once you beat the game you get cheat codes that let you goof around all the tools in the toolbox. You would never say the game was “meant” to have cheat codes on.
Because of wow classic, not anything to do with retail, people came back for nostalgia
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You said there was nothing they could do. They did something, and it happened. Your premise is faulty.
Like, I understand what you’re trying to say, but your statement was simply not true. Given that, if they did one thing and found success, which they did, it is certainly opens the possibility that they could have done something else and found some level of success.
I just want to take a second and mention that FFXIV “died”. I’m sure there were people who said there was nothing they could do to save the game. Except that they did do something, they rebuilt the game and relaunched it and now it is WoW’s biggest competitor in the market.
It’s actually kind of sad the level of expectation from this community. People are perfectly content to just watch WoW slowly gurgle on its own blood and die as long as they get a couple neat raids before it goes out. People talk about expecting more out of Blizzard, but they actually have an extremely sad set of expectations. I personally dig that Ion Hazzikostas is attempting to do something ambitious and isn’t content to just put out a few raids and let the game slowly die.
I’m just here for raiding, why would I care about anything else? Most games do everything else better than wow, only thing wow has superior over any other games is their raids.
That said, SL as a whole looks great, I don’t care if they release it tomorrow in the state it’s in, I’d still enjoy it.