I play a Rogue. Having max dps at every possible second is literally the entire point lol.
It will probably force some Mythic raiders to level multiples of the same class with different covenants so they can swap them out per encounter.
I don’t really have sympathy for that kind of play though.
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It all comes down to balance. If they can get it VERY close before end of Beta it will be mostly fine.
As this has never ever happened with the implementation of new systems, it’s reasonable to see this plan as kind of insane.
If their plan is to have it mostly balanced by 9.1 and polished by 9.3, which seems to follow historical trends, well, that would be terrible.
I like the design and philosophy. I’d like to see some big announcement about a new dedicated balance team, and an explanation as to how this time it’s going to get sorted before 9.1
As a BfA shaman who was essentially told, “we don’t have time to fix elemental till 8.1”… Well not very optimistic to say the least.
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Cutting edge raider and I still don’t care about semi-permanent choices because I’m going with the covenant that appeases me the most. If it turns out to be the worst or the best oh well.
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I’m happy for you that’s not something I can make myself do personally also I honestly just want to play around with all my new class abilities not just one.
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When you’re progressing, there’s such a thing as a “dps check” boss. When things are on farm, pushing your DPS numbers as high as you can is a way many people choose to avoid boredom/burnout from killing the same bosses for months.
I still don’t get why if I want to play all the endgame content Blizz offers me like PVP, M+ and raids, that I don’t even have the option to grind to have the best build possible for every content.
BFA I just had to put more time to farm different gear sets, trinkets, corruptions, etc.
In SL, I don’t even have that option since im locked in one covenant? really?
Yes and most people can reach that dps check without the optimal build.
And no, I am not gonna play an unfun meta build simply because someone doesnt get bored, the game exists so I have fun
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You literally play meta outside like one talent lol. Also I want to have fun to and part of that fun is playing with all my new abilities in actual content and atm I don’t get to.
So if you try out all four covenants and then decide you like the first one the most, you get punished for going back to it.
Overbloating is overbloating regardless of how we obtain the abilities.
Why is there always this insinuation that it has to be one or the other?
RNG doesn’t remove the choice though. If I have a piece that has Streaking Stars and Dawning Sun, it’s not RNG any more. There’s a choice there, though it’s not really a choice. What makes you think covenants are going to be different?
This is a strawman argument. No one wasn’t to be the best at everything, but some people would like to try to play both forms of content at an optimal level, and there’s honestly nothing wrong with that.
I disagree. Systems aren’t fun just because they exist. I’d also argue that many players enjoy classic. Even if I’m personally not one of those players, the fact remains that more systems doesn’t automatically make the game more fun to everyone.
Is your argument that the game can’t be an rpg without borrowed power? I’d argue the opposite. When I make a priest or a druid, I want to play a priest or a druid. Why would I want to play a game where I create a shell, and my artifact weapon/azerite armor/covenant is my character instead of my character being my character?
I actually think covenants are really cool, some of the abilities actually look awesome. The problem isn’t the existence of covenants in the slightest, it’s that they add restriction to the game for the sake of restriction, and people who don’t know any better eat it up as “meaningful choice”.
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Well I have researched all the abilities and will be trying them but I know I ll be going necrolord and already preparing builds, will I miss the memes of venthyr ability their cool parties? Absolutely.
But that is what meaningful choice means, you dont get to have everything, it is like playing vampire the masquarade but wanting to have the advantages of every single vampire type.
Not if the system is temporary, which is what borrowed power is meant to do
Because balance in any even semi complicated rpg is incredibly hard to achieve, why?
You change one thing by 1% and break something else for 4% which also affects another thing by 10%
And you do realize they dont just balance by 5min patchwork right? They have to balance everything to work on DIFFERENT scenarios.
Which is why mmorpg balance has historically being terrible, which is also why Ion repeated that this isnt overwatch or some ultra high skllcap balanced game.
If someone wants a balanced game, they dont play mmorpgs.
They do, because until i get my 3x desired trait I am at the mercy of RNG gods of what i ll use, similar to corruption pre vendor, someone gets lucky and gets full gushing wounds, someone gets avoidance and void ritual.
Covenants on the other hand are clear, you got what you chose, the information is there, you choose it, you instantly get everything and can make your builds, with some soulbind grind clearly.
More importantly like i said before, azerite just like covenants will be balanced for different situations, I wish my shadow word pain trait was strong single target but if it did, it would be broken for aoe therefore it will always be inferior to single target and I wont use it, some things are better than others.
Yet we have many people paying ridiculous sums of gold to azerite reforger, something like 200k cuz they wanted to be optimal at all situations.
That is why we call them tryhards and that is why Ion said the azerite reforger failed because it didnt deter people from changing to stick to one build.
That didnt work for the team, so now we go full locked covenants
Here’s an example, if you change everyone to heavy single target build for the single target boss, because blizzard doesnt balance around that being a requirement you easymode the fight, then these people change to aoe build for aoe fight to again trivialize the boss.
Now a group of 7 st 7aoe would have a far more balanced and fair and challenging encounter which is their goal.
Borrowed power exists to solve a problem and we wont be going back.
Plus each new expansion requires a new gimmick, if games dont try to reinvent themselves and we only had gear progression the game would have died due to being incredibly stale and boring.
Restriction exists so people stick to their build, you arent meant to be optimal at every scenario which is pretty much what Ion said in his latest interview.
You could do that in the past, but no more.
Here’s an example, if you change everyone to heavy single target build for the single target boss, because blizzard doesnt balance around that being a requirement you easymode the fight, then these people change to aoe build for aoe fight to again trivialize the boss.
I guarantee if you played your perfect single target build the bosses wouldnt just fall over, otherwise you wouldnt be 5/12M parsing green. Not sure why you are so hellbent on people having options on freely switching. I bet if you were locked into playing specs you wouldn’t like you would cry even more on these forums seeing as you are absolutely everywhere.
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Are you trying them in the beta, or with multiple characters? I ask because as is, you’re punished for merely doing this on a single character.
This is already true with classes. We don’t need covenants to make this true.
So ability bloat isn’t actually ability bloat if it goes away in two years?
I’m not arguing that this isn’t true, I’m arguing that adding layers on layers for the sake of having them makes it harder to get it right.
So you have access to the the 9.1 patch notes already? 9.2? 9.3? These patches are no doubt going to add things to the game that are going to either influence your covenant or be influenced by your covenant.
Or they wanted to be able to play their off spec 
You can call them whatever you want, if this was as big of a problem as you seem to think it was, why allow the choice at all?
Is your assumption that they don’t balance encounters around people playing their spec optimally?
Covenants aren’t designed to be a lever to balance bosses. Are you insane? If anything, if they used this design philosophy, fights would be made even more trivial by stacking players who have the optimal covenant setup, which more likely than not will happen.
If you break something and tape it together, it’s still broken.
New gimmicks don’t have to be directly tied to our characters. Torghast is an example.
You aren’t optimal in every scenario unless your class is severely overtuned, like Fire mage 
This isn’t something that requires covenants to fix, nor is it something that covenants are designed to fix.
The thing is though, the RPG group could have it that way even with easy respeccing of covenants. They can make the choice as a player to not change things. The problem only arises when they want to force their choice on others.
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I really will get over whatever happens, I just hope the weaker abilities maybe get the buff treatment rather than nerfing the one a lot of people already joined.
If you are picking purely for power purposes, I would rather them buff something e.g. like Necrolord Fleshcraft to give the 20% shield in half the time or maybe make the Kyrian Steward come back every 4 minutes instead of 5.
I am mainly looking for a different approach rather than flat out nerfing things. I am not asking for everyone to have an immunity, or everyone to have stealth, or everyone to do the same damage, but I would like to see some classes strengths stand out a lot more and Covenants should fall under that same umbrella.
The unfortunate truth is what Ion wants doesn’t matter. Heck, even the actual balance of abilities doesn’t matter. In the end the only thing that matters is community perception. It doesn’t matter if the difference between the best and worst covenant choice is <.05% if the people making groups only want to invite people with the “right” choice or if guilds are sitting players on a regular basis for having the “wrong” covenant. Ion can have the best of intentions here, but unless he has the ability to change the psychology of his player base on an absolutely massive scale, it does not matter.
How Covenants should have been done in my opinion:
The Covenant choice would not dictate anything directly to do with abilities, either passive or active. Rather than Covs have a soulbind, every class and spec will achieve access to a new set of abilities added to their talents when they hit 60 with say 6 abilities per spec of which they can choose 3 (1 pvp, 1 raid/mythic+ and 1 general gaming ability) per spec.
Covenants could interact with these abilities on a purely progressive way by increasing the benefit/power of the chosen abilities through Renown activities and/or Anima collection. Covenants would also provide cosmetic aspects, character benefits of some sort not related to combat (such as extra benefits for gathering or crafting or fishing or whatever other neat things they could come up with) along with titles, mounts, pets etc.
That way, players would still have a choice as to what beneficial abilities they receive dependant on their playstyle. While there wouldn’t be the huge number of potential abilities that are currently showing for the classes, at least players would gain specific useful talents that could be improved over time with increased gear levels, buffs, legendaries, etc.
I would much prefer this permanent increase into the talent tree system rather than another tacked on powerset that vanishes at the end of the expansion.
This isn’t just a concern to CE raiders. I’m still in the middle of Heroic raiding and the highest M+ I’ve done is a +9, and that wasn’t even this season. I’m in the middle of the player base and I’m way more than “a bit” worried.
Blizzard needs to eliminate the mechanical differences between Covenants so they are identical. We can then have a meaningful roleplaying choice regarding lore and aesthetics without that being inappropriately tied to locking ourselves out of certain types of content.
Then they should make all the Covenants identical mechanically, and people won’t have either the option or the need to change for each boss.
People on Alpha are people who basically play full time. It’s going to be closer to 40 hour weeks than casual 5 hour weeks.
No, I am watching videos, checking soulbinds, conduits and thinking of builds
We are going into circular arguments, like i said before, the more layers the more fun for people who enjoy rpgs and combinations, and classes arent deep enough and wont be deep enough because talents are not enough, even vanilla talents were not enough, and entire system on top of them on the other hand allows for far more interesting combinations.
Abillity bloat happens when you keep repeatedly adding abilities/talents every xpac, we dont have an ability bloat problem rn, but we would if we kept everything and shadowlands added covenants and soulbinds and then next expac it added even more
Without layers RPGs arent fun, I said it earlier but you need multiple systems to combo around things, a bare bone class is not enough, and dont go arguing about fixing classes baseline cuz that aint happening
You are right, likely the soulbinds get another passive or 2, if you are suggesting your entire playstyle will be changed and suddenly you ll want to stop playing your choice I would have to doubt, if you decide to play something else cuz the new cool passive fits your playstyle you would have more than enough time before the patch arrives to regrind to the new covenant since we know those things before patch alunch
If they wanted to play off spec they could, unless they plan on playing 1 spec for one dungeon, and then another for the next one and then back to the original spec for the 3rd one and then another spec for raid.
Because the devs understand that people might decide to change their build long term to something else, or that they played with something and they didnt like it after a while.
That is why change is always on the table, but since tryhards abuse that and try to be optimal for every situation the devs have to come with solutions to stop tryhards from changing to be optimal for boss 1 then boss 2 then change for boss 3 etc
It isnt an assumption, it is a fact.
If you balance a boss around everyone being the most optimal single target build then what happens to 90% of the guilds who both dont have everyone at optimal level and secondly they often dont perform the best either.
WoW ISNT BALANCED AROUND HIGH END, ion literally said so in the interview.