I don’t plan on ever swapping covenants, I’ve pretty much got them templated to specific classes I play. If other people swap though, I really really really don’t care. They said there will be penalties for doing so, sounds like you can either get all the perks or min/max, maybe not so much both.
Sounds fair to me, I get what I want and others get what they want. Doesn’t harm my gameplay in the slightest until or unless people start telling me to switch in order to run with them. Will not be doing that.
From a guy who has played many many DnD groups over the years … that’s not an advanced class. It’s what DnD would call a “kit” at best. Which was maybe 1-2 flavor abilities and one genuine ability.
So yeah … not an advanced class, or even a sub-class. Just a couple of extra powers.
The soulbinds may qualify it as an actual class. But certainly not an advanced class by any stretch of the word.
Just because it bugs me you think I was calling the covenant a advanced class. I need to correct you. That comment if you read was stating Specializations was not sub classes, but more along the lines of advanced classes. I almost want to say I recall Blizzard saying that themselves when they introduced them in the current iteration back in Cataclysm? I think it was. Although looking that far back. Its really hard to remember what Media was calling it, and what Blizzard was. It’s all a blur to me.
This idea pretty much eliminates the entire sales pitch behind Covenants. They are supposed to be individual entities unto themselves. They or their respective benefits are not meant to be like a spec-change. This is all another case of people wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Maybe considering going over to Classic where things are more simplified.
Considering there “reasoning” behind said sales pitch was pretty daft, then yeah that’s kind of the point.
And them thinking they could balance something like that or not have players want to be able to swap like nearly everything else in this game is. Major yikes and shows Blizzard’s ignorance towards there own player base.
More of a pie person myself tbh. But I do like cake.
And those who want a “choice that matters” should maybe consider playing some singleplayer rpgs instead of doing something ridiculously stupid to an MMO.
I guess I should be a bit more specific, the main issue I have with the entire idea of “A choice that matters” is that abilities are tied to it.
In a game where those abilities can be nerfed or buffed in a hotfix / patch. It is far too risky and just plain dumb to tie them to a permanent choice.
I have no qualms with choices that matter that do not involve abilities. Like I had no issues with covenants being a permanent choice because, I thought it would primarily just be a cosmetic thing. But with the abilities being tied to them as well, it simply ruins the entire system.
Covenants will have no meaning in two years time. Were you pissed that players wanted more Artifact Knowledge because they had to choose between which talents they unlocked? Were you cheering for the idea that you could only pick a single Artifact for the entire expansion?
The people booing the Covenant system just want to have fun with something that appears, at the surface, to just be four new talents locked behind a long, tedious grind. It’s like being stuck using Bladestorm for the rest of your life because it’s just too much of a hassle to try out Ravager.
I honestly don’t get this whole argument of ‘if it’s gone next expansion, it’s not meaningful.’
I used to live in a series of rented apartments. I’ll never go back to any of them. But for the years that I did live in them, having each of them as a home was pretty darn meaningful, even without a sense of ownership.
When WoW is eventually over, or I’m done with it, and I look back at the crazy number of hours /played, I’m going to value how I spent my time teaming up with friends for both progression and fun and also exploring the dev’s creations. I definitely won’t have any use for the spreadsheets, nor for the mounts, acheivements, gear, etc. sitting in an abandoned data file.
So, I guess when people ask what a “meaningful choice” is to me, I’d base my answer on what I got out of the time spent. In that context, min/maxing seems like a part of the way I play that is ultimately fairly inconsequential as to whether I could do so perfectly.
The only reason Blizzard is screwing us between Covenants is to deliberately string out our playtime.
If you want true optimization then you better have multiple toons ready cause they’ll have that nerf bat ready to smash apart the meta once we’re a month or two in.
I almost exclusively see casual players advocating for Covenants to be locked-in, It’s hard for you to understand why this is such a huge problem for high-end raiding and Mythic+.
Some of the best Covenants for raiding are not the best for Mythic+, why should players be forced to special in one and not other? This isn’t the same as gearing or picking talents, you’re straight up gimped in other aspects of this game for a single choice. A lot of these Covenants are either pure single target or an AoE/Cleave ability, it’s pretty rare for one to be universally useful.
On top of this you run into a similar issue to Legion but sadly in a much worse way, not only do you have to pick a Covenant for Raiding or Mythic+ but you have to consider the spec you’ll be playing as for a lot of classes each of their specs will benefit differently from each covenant. This is needless frustration the top players have to deal with and it can be easily avoided.
The casual players will not be tempted or in some cases forced to swap Covenants to stay competitive if theirs is nerfed or ends up falling behind in later patches. You cannot just simply say, “Just pick what you want, play what you like.”, this just isn’t going to work and if you’ve ever raided even at least semi-hardcore this would be blatantly obvious.
The best solution would be to make Covenants difficult to level but once you’ve ‘exalted’ one you’re able to spend time to level up another, maybe make the consecutive ones take more time. This whole ‘old timey RPG’ logic does not make sense for what WoW has been for over a decade now.
Actually you do this. When you are creating your char, you are choosing a class that will give you a set of abilities that will lock you for the rest of the game. I’ve been playing the same games you did and I cannot remember if I had any big decision besides my class. The only I can remember for sure was Skyrim where I had to choose between be a vampire or a werewolf, and even there I could change it. But as matter of fact, WoW isn’t a single-player RPG it’s an MMORPG, your entire experience will change because to progress you depend on other people.
I’ve been playing RPG my entire life since D&D and there’s a law me and my friends: If the people are not having fun and the dungeon master cannot change their narrative, he is a bad dungeon master. Blizzard is being the worst dungeon master I ever meet for the three last expansions.
No, people already know they will be behind by choosing a different class, you can check the ranks on the internet, if what you are saying was true you would never see another class besides mage.
Covenants are just giving you other choices, are you going to be WORST than people with the same class? Are you going to be WORST than people with the same spec?
Blizzard is not able to balance what we have today in this game, they should know their limitations and try to control the damage by letting people change it as many times they want. Also, allowing people to really feel the gameplay not by only watching the YouTubers. It means FUN.
