it costs to respec out of a rested area, you gotta buy or make tomes
The biggest problem is that one can’t mix MMO with RPG.
Perhaps in the past it was different. The important thing was the journey and not the end of it. Perhaps the community was new and was still experimenting.
But now it is different.
There are 2 groups of people whose interests are in conflict.
The first is the RPG group. Those who want their character to be unique in their own way and that their decisions have weight in how they play.
With these decisions you are drawing a path.
You cannot have the ability to hide in the shadows and the ability to erase the shadows at the same time.
The other would be the MMO.
Players who want everything to be the same. There are no decisions to make. If there are 2 options and the numbers say one is bad then MOST people will only see one option.
No matter the history, no matter the appearance of the armor or the race, the only thing that matters is which ability is better.
Nothing else matters.
And that kills the options. There is no place for the ROL.
It is in eternal conflict with the RPG aspect.
I will never be part of the 1%. I don’t have the time or the ability to do it.
But at the same time I don’t want to consider myself bad or mediocre.
I guess I’ll stay somewhere in between where I can enjoy both of them a bit.
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Exactly, roflstomping through a raid cuz you stacked 10 mages simply shouldnt be a thing.
Which is why covenant locking is so genius, you are gonna force people to play right because there’s no other way, you are no longer able to change back and forth for each encounter because not only you have to do a quest but regrind renown from 0 which also locks your sloubinds
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I do agree with that. The GOGOGO stuff and Gear RNG > Skill has turned me off from endgame so hard that I went from mythic/heroic raiding before mythic existed to casual fishing and transmog farmer.
That being said, the balance between “character building” and being competitive for endgame has been a balance that WoW has had issues meeting since VANILLA and for them to walk right into the problem head first yet again with Covenants is hilarious when literally everyone can see all the problems it will bring right away.
The thing is, fixing it to just be cosmetics or overworld-only power or whatever would NOT affect the casuals and the RPers. The button mashing esports stuff mostly stays contained to instances anyway, doesn’t it? (And in SL, the Maw). So why take the choice away in an RPG where there is a special extra degree of pressure in a particular RPG genre that doesn’t exist in other types of RPGs?
This isn’t Divinity 2 where I can just cringe and load up an old save if I mess up a talent tree.
Sorry, I meant more like back in Classic and BC era, when if you kept respecing too frequently, the costs went from nominal to extremely painful.
You think you will be good at mplus with that set up? You clearly are not a beta player if you think that.
We want playable Pandarian. Pandas become playable. PANDAS SUCK WTFBBQPEEPEWPEW.
We want choice everything is to similar. Blizzard makes it so with SL covenants. NO TOO MUCH CHOICES ITS UNBALANCED WTF WE WANT ALL THE SAME WAAAAAAAA.
No wonder Blizzard doesn’t listen. It’s the community that cries wolf. Mind you I wouldn’t listen to the 1% player base that posts in the forums either.
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Man, and here I thought Ralph’s posts were full of idiotic hyperbole. You just took the cake, sir. My hats off to you.
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I think that this is a very false perception the wow community has.
The game, raids, m+ etc are balanced around characters being VIABLE, not optimal, if everyone is optimal they often roflstomp through the content.
But by forcing people to stick to a covenant they can no longer be optimal at everything so you get a far bigger percentage of the game doing content in a far more balanced and fair way.
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Interesting.
So what you’re saying is that people chasing the Flavor of the Month in a game with constant updates and balance changes have had to take these changes in stride for more than a single expansion? So the sky has already fallen, then?
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I don’t even raid anymore and the thought of WoW having a semi-permanent (i.e. at least annoying/time consuming to change from what I’ve read) choice that impacts end game gameplay is definitely kind of a head scratcher
AP seemed kind of in that vein in Legion but wasn’t a problem for me because I played Havoc DH and pretty much nothing else the whole time I was playing it 
they’re specifically rethinking conduit destruction to avoid that kind of annoyance, cause contrary to popular belief they don’t want people to suffer
Now, I haven’t played Beta, so take this into account, but it sounds like the penalty to change covenants back to your original is roughly a weeklong grind.
Assuming that week isn’t measured in hours, that seems pretty reasonable for anyone who isn’t looking to min-max every pull.
I thought that was because Mythic Raiders were planning to stockpile a ton of conduits to basically cheese the concept.
Good luck changing the ENTIRE COMMUNITY’S mind, then.
Look, again I’m not disagreeing with you. The problem is that the gatekeepers to content so to speak are not the devs, or even some random NPCs, but the players themselves. And they will care if you are suboptimal, because they’ve been flipping their spit ever since people have decided to experiment ever so slightly with the cookie cutter meta builds in Vanilla.
Know what happened to those people? Unless they were lucky enough to get into a good guild that was both serious about progression AND friendly and patient with builds that could cost them that 1% dps on a tight enrage race, they got to do all the RP they wanted. Alone. (Or in LFR, which is an insult to the entire genre and is basically a troll simulator).
TLDR Even if it’s a community created problem, it’s been around long enough that blizz should know better because the entire playerbase isn’t going to suddenly have an epiphany.
Probably longer, because firstly you need to do a quest, then grind that renown level back from 0.
If you were rank 15 renown, and all soulbinds unlock at lets say rank 10 renown, you have to regrind back to rank 10 renown which can possibly take a while at least based on their current design.
Blizzard LEARNED from the azerite reforger that gold cost isnt enough to stop people from trying to be tryhard optimal, so this time they leveled the stakes by quite a bit.
I could be mistaken, but I believe you get to keep your renown, soulbinds, etc. you just have to do something to get them back on their good side.
That is pretty much what they want to avoid, and they want conduits to be semi permanent so it wont be like essences, most likely timegate I would guess
I highly highly doubt it, I think they mentioned that you lose their faith so you have to regrind from the start.
And the reason I am pretty confident that wont happen is because they dont want azerite reforger 2.0, they want people to stay on their covenant and know that if the punishment isnt huge, people will keep changing.
like that is the goal of the team, to stop people from changing all the time in order to be optimal for each boss, dungeon etc
But this is not what people do. What people do and have always done in this game is say,“which mage spec has the best damage?”. Everyone’s response is “fire”. So they spec fire because they want to do as much damage as they can.
Then comes papa Blizzard who says hmmmm why are 90% of all mages fire? We don’t like this. We want variety! Nerf them so players pick something else!
This is what blizzard has always done in this game. If anything is optimal thats what people play. Thats why they strive for balance with nerfs.
Balance is the key here. They just don’t know how to do it.
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That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t address or change the inevitable knee-jerk nerfs that will happen after Blizzard can’t ignore that they screwed up anymore and leave everyone, whether they chose for power or fun, high and dry unless they change Covenants. This is the kind of design that people are getting tired of.
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