Here’s a real example that happened this tier of what people are worried about. People told blizz on ptr that echoing void was insanely imbalanced and if it went live would be bis for all melee and tanks especially. Well blizz didn’t listen and it went live. People sighed and spent literally millions of gold buying boes with EV on them. Blizz realized hey blood dks are doing 60k plus dps because of EV we should take a look at that. They nerfed it by 50% the week after nzoth first died. So outside of like 3 guilds a ton of top 100 guilds had spent millions on corrupts that were now worthless and were still doing progress.
This is why we don’t trust blizz enough to have a system that can’t be easily swapped around because we expect those dreaded oh we messed up so we’re changing course to happen. Even after they have been warned about it for weeks it won’t change til live. Then after people have spent weeks grinding rep with venth blizz nerfs the tp to be a 20 min cd the second raid week aka mythic and wrecks the class abilities for good measure. We all move to probably night fae then they do it again until we make a circle and we can’t go back to venth without a massive grind.
We have also already seen how well balanced semi permanent choices can be. ion even alluded to it when talking with Preach about early legion. When choosing a spec in early legion you were basically locked into that spec both by the early ap grind and by legiondaries. Now what would happen if blizz was to decide a spec was undertuned but wait to buff it until a few days before the raid dropped? This actually happened in legion Frost Death Knight, Balance Druids, Ret Paladins, Warlocks, Arcane/Frost Mages, Elemental Shaman, and Fury Warrior received significant buffs 4 days before mythic EN unlocked at the same time Arms, Havoc and Sin Rogues were nerfed. Who is to say they won’t do something similar with covenants and then tune mythic with that change in mind.
We don’t trust blizz enough in terms of balance to have a choice of semi permanence and there is a pretty darn good reason for this since their latest attempts at balance in this vein are corruptions, essences, azerite, legiondaries all of which are completely unbalanced systems.
Everything except for covenant locking honestly looks great in SL but this one specific point of obstinacy has a lot of people including myself a bit worried. There is still time to fix this and make this expac god tier.
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Didn’t they state they want things to be better than others in certain scenarios. So that alone means they don’t want balance. They want one covenant to be better at AoE whereas another is better at single target.
Then when you lock into those, you’re better at those things. That is their goal isn’t it?
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Yes, and their goal sucks. After 6 years of this stuff, we need new people running WoW.
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This, that is how RPGs are meant to work, you make a character and gravitate towards a build and specialization you enjoy personally, or can be jack of all trades master of none if you like
You build your character, you have strengths and weaknesses and you go into the world with that character, and then it is up to the group to see how to use each person’s strengths to defeat challenges.
Blizzard doesnt want people to build their characters around encounters, they dont want for example everyone to change to fire mage for example to roflstomp through the raid.
That is why covenants cannot be changed, blizzard learned from azerite vendor that gold cost is not enough so the cost has to be even HIGHER, now people who try to change covenant again not only will they have to grind a quest, they ll have to start at 0 renown and have to grind to possibly 10 to unlock their soulbind passives etc.
Blizzard is quitely clearly stating that the way to play is to CHOOSE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES and do multiple forms of content some of which YOU WILL BE SUB OPTIMAL AND THAT IS FINE.
People need to learn the difference between optimal and viable, being optimal aint needed, being viable is what is required.
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For example, I ll be playing necrolord Spriest, their ability is AoE focused, that means I ll be optimal for m+ but sub optimal for pvp and any long single target fight from tyrannical m+ to many raid bosses.
But I will still be doing keys during tyrannical as well as raid as well as casual pvp, will I be sub optimal for some single target bosses like shadhar? Yes but I will be optimal for hivemind, but that is how you are supposed to play the game.
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15+ years says otherwise.
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After reading 100 threads on this, I’m pretty sure why they are worried. But another thread is fine I guess.
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SINGLE PLAYER rpgs.
Like I feel like the dev team have consistently forgotten the massively multiplayer online part with many of their recent decisions. Even Torghast (cool as it looks) reflects that. I won’t fault them for trying something different, but the concept is super roguelike ish and not MMORPGish at all.
Single player RPGs also have save scumming, mods that affect NPC behavior, and outright cheats available. Can we have those too? 
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I’m trying to articulate specific instances where this kind of rapid reversal has happened rather than going all in on attacking casuals like some others have chosen to do.
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I know, I read your post. Which is why I didn’t directly attack you for it, I just said I’ve read a lot recently on it and have formed my opinion so another thread on this won’t hurt I guess…
Not that I agree but so? Games change direction. What happened before isn’t relevant to what may happen next.
WoW didn’t used to have e-sport stuff and D3 endless scaling either but it changed to incorporate it.
The game sounds like it is getting better since we are going back to RPG instead of the GOGOGO E-sport mentality of change everything to be optimal for every single boss/dungeon even though rpgs are not meant to be played like that and Ion the LEAD DEV confirmed this. Which is why covenants are locked.
Rpgs are about character building, if you have 0 interesting in that I wonder why people evne bother playing, shadowlands sounds great to me and many others.
Some people on the high end who wont put the effort to level 4 of each can leave, I wont mind, I believe shadowlands will retain a far bigger % of casuals and rpg lovers than tryhards that will ragequit in the forums.
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That has nothing to do with what I said.
So you say you know Blizzard… Then its on you for falling into the same trap… Just pick the Covenant you like and don’t worry about min/maxing. I don’t feel sorry for “high end raiders” at all.
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Sure it does. You were saying 15 years of the game has said you’re not supposed to play the game the way Ralph thinks. My point is that doesn’t matter since Blizzard can decide to change how they want the game played so how it was is meaningless.
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Some people seem to be quite literally too addicted to ever leave and instead spend time complaining about how the game is ruined and how X change is gonna kill the game, yet WoW is still here.
Which is the smartest choice knowing very well balance changes will be coming.
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Because the core of the game hasn’t changed. Even with covenants, that hasn’t changed lol. Did you even read his post?
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hell no, I would be 
if night fae was meta
You know, the more I hear about people wanting to be able to change covenant to specialize for each individual raid encounter, the more I wonder if that is the sort of behavior Blizzard is right not to incentivize.
It may be standard now, but there’s a difference between ‘I’m going to Optimize my character for raids’ and ‘I’m going to change my spec for every single fight’.
It makes me wish we still had respec costs.
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It’s going to be amusing watching this entire crapshoot blow up in Blizzard’s faces. Right when they start to balance these things, and it will continue to happen post launch, people are going to flip.
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