Which is why no one is playing fire mage currently, right? Because they saw that everyone has been playing fire for the past two tiers so they nerfed it to the ground…right?
They nerf things when they’re obviously broken (like Mistweavers solo healing Mythic N’zoth with ridiculous haste and the infinite Enveloping Mist build)…not because a lot of people are playing a spec that performs well.
Honestly, the one sure gate that prevents that sort of behavior is time. Even a few hour grind every time they did it would kill the concept of covenant switching for hardcore raiders.
There wont be a single mmorpg that has multiple layers of complexity, systems and combinations that can be balanced to a good degree, you change one thing by 1% and something else jumps to 10%
That is the nature of MmoRPGS, Ion quite literally said because of this the game cant be ever truly balanced at high end, in addition he also said that there will ALWAYS be non skill factors in involved in your performance so tryhards who obsess over skill need to remember wow is not a high skillcap game, if they want full skill they should play overwatch.
What tryhards/lazy ppl do
Ftfy, I never do that, I play the game the way it is meant to be played, I find a spec and build I gravitate to and stick to it and perform well with it, with its advantages and disadvantages.
Yet I still manage to pug content just fine
WoW will never be balanced, anyone who takes it too seriously and obsesses over skill is simply wrong to play WoW, the game is about rpg elements, not l33t epeen contests and Ion confirmed it.
If you chose your covenant for fun and gameplay you have nothing to worry about, number changes dont change gameplay of an ability, it is still doing the same thing it did before.
And because balance changes are expected, meta slaves that jump to the meta covenant only to have it nerfed cant blame anyone but themselves.
M8 people were paying like 200k to change their azerite armor on the reforger, blizzard knows these people will go to EXTREME lengths to be optimal
The maximum tryhards rn plan on having 4 of each class.
blizz has never shown the ability to balance anything. tell you what. if blizz can get all specs to 15% over all for a raid tier, i wont complain about player power tools for the next expansion. heck i will accept 3 ST bosses in the same raid tier, at the 95th percent, whole tier minus 2 weeks.
ralph, dog, that is what classes and specs are for. sure you can swap to UH from frost but you wont be optimized for a month if your lucky. sure you can re roll FotM class, but you have to actually level the class and then gear for the content.
all these people that talk about RPG’s clearly dont play RPG’s, because in all RPG’s you instantly switch your gear when something better comes around. you change your party comp fluidly to suit what you feel your upcoming needs will be. and actually, suikoden is the perfect analog to wow because, you are not taking undergeared heroes in your party to go fight a boss. you are taking the best geared heroes with the most useful abilities to do boss fights and new zones.
the choice limits role playing. lets say things are generally balanced, no must pick for content teleports, AND nothing is going to change mid season. a huge percentage of the player base will still feel that they have to choose the best covenant for the content they want to do, not the covenant they enjoy the most.
the only reason there is a player base devided is because of blizzard choosing this hill to die on. the white knights are out in force. blizz and the white knights have convinced some people they may lose something they have never had and is quit intangible. their arguments dont hold up to scrutiny. the vast majority of the players that wont be effected by the covenant locking wont care if they are unlocked either.
that’s exactly why, they know they’ll torment themselves on it anyway
like people who kept buying respecs for azerite, and people who grinded hundreds of islands at a time
it’s not something they want to normalize
There’s no universal definition of fun, and punishing those people in group content because of the Covenant they chose just to stick it to the min/mixers when they told Blizz about the problems from the very beginning isn’t a wise decision.
They have said this about EVERY new system. Every dang time. At some point it becomes wiser to admit that the balance likely won’t be right immediately and make the impact of that less devastating.
my dude, even ion said that system was a mistake. when the majority get tired of this garbage system and start complaining it will be switched.
this is exactly like azerite and legion legendaries before. white knights and plebs who drink the coolaide agree with blizz pre patch, and then by .1 the blizzard apologies and “we are aware of x problem” start rolling out.
They wouldn’t be tryhards otherwise.
That is the crux of this. Tryhards need to get over themselves. They continue to be a cancer in this game because they perpetuate their toxic mindset that if something isn’t #1 it is literal garbage when the actual reality is that it (being gear, talents, a spec even) is good enough if given the chance.
The RPG elements have been long tossed aside in the name of e-sport competitive catering to the no lifers who think it is reasonable to spend millions of gold on a broken corruption effect. That is the problem. These tryhards keep finding ways to hyper optimize everything and suck the fun out of it for everyone else because the “requirements to be good” trickle down into all facets of the game and into the rest of the community.
The game would be so much better off if CE players were all gone off to WIldstar to live out their hardcore and exclusive content. Oh wait…that game died because, shocker, there wasn’t enough of them to keep things alive.
I hope Blizzard doesn’t cave on this and continues to push the tryhard mentality back a fair bit. They have ruled this game for far too long. The playerbase as a whole needs to get back into a mindset where it is acceptable and reasonable for a person to play a spec, even a “bad spec”, and still regularly get invited to do content they are appropriately geared for. It should be perfectly acceptable to wear gear with “utter garbage stats” and take talents “that are so bad”. What is the point of even having them when nobody picks them because some tryhard CE said the almighty sims said it does .01% less DPS thus it must forever be branded as utter garbage and all who dare use it be shunned from content forever.
I have no doubt that covenant abilities won’t be balanced against each other and on paper I wouldn’t care if it was easy to switch, but I am all about making life more unpleasant for tryhards if it means their grip on the game is loosened.
In the end I think Blizzard wants something similar. To start breaking the toxic mindset that has festered in the game that only the simmed min-max BIS or utter garbage is right when the reality is content can still be done by sub optimal specs if they are good enough.
No what we wanted is class differentiation and more talent viability not for semi permanent choices that are a pain to change.
Ion pretty much said being optimal at everything isnt how you are meant to play the game, if you cant play the game without being optimal at everything by changing builds then you probably shouldnt be playing WoW, lead Dev was clear.
Yeah the thing is you didnt listen WHY they believed the systems failed.
Meanwhile covenants have no RNG elements involved, you CHOOSE your advantages and disadvantages instead of needing RNG gods to bless you with the ones you want.
That is why covenants are pure RPG hallmark, you choose what you ll excel at, and you choose where you ll be sub optimal, and then you ll do all forms of content even when sub optimal.
The degenerate way of stacking 10 fire mages for example because they are fotm and roflstomping through content needs to be destroyed, blizzard balances the content around all specs being viable and healthy group comps instead of stacking fotm, because if they did based on fotm everyone else wouldnt be able to clear the raid.
So now you ll have a huge part of even the high end community being forced to be sub optimal in some content because they arent allowed to be optimal at everything.
The balance of the Covenants right now isn’t even close to call min/maxing ‘hyper-optimization.’ If there is a massive skew towards Venthyr then everyone will say they told you so.
“Let me talk about numbers while the devs REPEATEDLY say that numbers tuning will be the last things they do”
Also venthyr is already because Preach said “You gotta be trolling if you dont pick venthyr” even though we have yet to see broken skips in SL dungeons but tryhards took his comment to heart and now repeat it like parrots because they dont know how the game works so they depend on him to tell them how the game works but due to their ignorance they often dont even understand what he says.
I agree, if they are going to give us choice, whether it’s gear or covenant abilities, they need to stick to it and don’t pull the choice out from under us.
For DH right now Venth is top in literally every aspect of the game except maybe pvp for both havoc and veng in both class ability and utility ability. Which likely means it will stay that way until after heroic week then get hard nerfed. Blizz was actually planning to hotfix nerf EV mid prog but limit and method basically convinced them the boss was unkillable without it’s current state. This is why the EV nerf included a 5% reduction in Nzoth’s health that’s how giga busted that corruption was.
Then report those specific instances and back it up with evidence. Or don’t pick it if you think it is going to be so broken it can’t help but get nerfed later. Pick the next best or…and this will come as a big shock.
Pick the one you actually like regardless of what the “numbers” say. You want to be a Necrolord pally? Have at it. You want to be a forest nymph pally? Cool deal.
Stop letting power gains dictate your decision making.
I’m going to pick the one I like, which happens to be Venthyr, but if I get nerfed and my gameplay suffers because of it I’m going to complain about it.
I enjoy maximizing my ability in game that is what is enjoyable to me I like figuring out how to beat content. Why is that a bad thing? What significant positive purpose does locking covenants serve?
I’m not trying to be rude here but the content level you run isn’t going to care about what covenant you pick it won’t be an issue outside ce level mythics or pre 20 probably 25 by the end of the tier. What will annoy people is having 4 new spell options and only being able to use 1 without a significant grind.
No they don’t.