There’s this meme being perpetuated that not only do only 1% of the players care about being locked into covenants preventing them from playing their specs optimally, but that by punishing those 1%… the game gets better for everyone else.
It’s wrong on multiple fronts. Firstly and most importantly, the ability to change your specs and builds more freely to allow you to enjoy more areas of the game is not and never has been limited to the 1% of players. Far, far more than that play the game in the hopes of unlocking the power in their characters as best as they can. The top 1% of players are going to be least impacted by these restrictions because they will simply grind out more characters, more conduits, more whatever they need to to exceed in this game.
The second meme is this weird enjoyment people have knowing that they have to do this, as if their suffering will somehow make the game better for them. There’s an assumption that since these grinds might exist, and that to their delight they may be grueling for the few % that decide to grind them, that everyone will just forget about what’s good and all of a sudden min/maxers and hyper casuals are finally going to get along, hold hands, and blast through Mythic together.
That isn’t going to happen. People will not forget about metas because the overwhelming majority of people running raids, pushing dungeons, doing rated PVP, etc care about improving their character and playing them as optimally as is reasonable for them. And nobody SHOUDL forget about metas - if playing optimally is how they enjoy the game, that’s how they should play the game. There is a reason sights like RaidBots for simcraft, Bloodmallet, IcyVeins, etc get millions of hits. This philosophy of playing has never been reserved for the top 1%. Locking covenants is only going to restrict casuals from even more content. They won’t be able to bounce around casually and they will have a harder time getting into groups.
The people making the “2/4/9 heroic castle (no kyrian) need dps” jokes aren’t actually joking. That is going to happen. If you weren’t already playing a meta spec, if you weren’t already playing a meta build, and you aren’t already playing a meta covenant… you are in trouble. These restrictions are going to compound the issues many already have when struggling to find groups to play with. The existing meta isn’t going to go away and another new one is going to be slapped on top of it.
You might not think this to be true while you’re thinking of all the great immersive lore potential, but that immersive lore potential is going to mean absolutely nothing when we’re a year into the expansion and the “lore” becomes no more important to your immersion than when we picked Gonk or Paku in Zuldazar. It is just going to piss you off, and you will complain about it until they fix it in 9.2 or 9.3. if they don’t do it before-hand.
The game doesn’t change much for the 1%. It’s the people in the middle that are going to suffer. It isn’t really the people that never changed builds or specs to begin with, and it isn’t really the people that change builds and specs and grind out all the stuff to be able to do everything perfectly. It’s going to make all the people in the middle who more than likely make up a massive majority of the playerbase that are going to be most effected by this.
edit: I have no idea why this posted on this character, but it reminded me of AKNOR, YOU FOOL!!! and it gave me a laugh.
