Yes and there’s nothing wrong with being stronger in one situation as opposed to another. It’s the same reason why they tried to add strenths and weakness ’ back to classes, trying to get rid of the homogenization that made every class have an answer for every situation.
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I wouldn’t go to all the trouble, but I can imagine if someone really cared, they’d grab a group for M Ny’alotha and try out the covenant abilities there. Raids tend not to change too much. If any ability is too beneficial for a raid, something will get nerfed anyway, whether it’s the ability or the boss.
You can’t do quite so much with dungeons, since you can’t run them with all the affixes, but you’d get some idea how they’ll work in M+ too.
So, find some “friends” and try them out. You don’t have to go into an arena or RBG to do PvP. Make some groups and head over to STV. Jump in the arena and try them out in whatever format you want, 3v3, 15v15.
If you want to know which one will be on top at the end of the patch… wait until the end of the patch. Apparently you can grind to 2500 in a day, so you’d still have some time.
The explained all we needed to know at Blizzcon. Soulbinds were there. The abilities for mages were there. So too were the signatures. I don’t know what you’re going on about with saying “fleshed out and explained” when it was already pretty clearly described months prior.
Why should they be judged for thinking that way? Should I judge you for not doing that? Should we judge each other at all for the different ways we play?
Again, why do you keep making this a battle of two sides when it’s just people who want a good game we can all enjoy. Face it. You do not need cosmetic/power tie-in to enjoy this expansion. You just don’t.
I think you’re just taking his concerns about player agency in not being able to choose a covenant we love and identify with in favor of being closer to a meta build and blowing it a little out of proportions.
For me, it’s a choice between a thematically awesome paladin ability (night fae blessing) and an overall covenant motif (kyrian). I don’t care which one is more powerful, though the kyrian ability for paladins is lackluster in a raid setting, it’s not a game breaker.
But the cosmetic stuff, how I immerse with my character, that’s more interesting to me and it will largely be off limits throughout.
One huge factor that no one seems to be talking about is Dev time. The game has entered Beta and still this decision has not been finalized.
It does not matter if they go with Plan A (which majority including myself are not in favor of): Forcing covenant choice with player power tied to them or Plan B: Either allow covenant switching or unbind player power from it, they need to make a decision soon.
Current Plan - > Plan A : So much time and resources have been spent on covenants and abilities, and balancing them and this is not a one time process. They need to keep balancing over and over to even try this approach. So it be Beta + live entire 2 years. Dev time is not infinite. If they are spending all this time on this particular feature and decision something else is being sacrificed for it.
Plan B as well would require balancing but not to the extent of Plan A. That freed up dev time could be used to address other issues like actual class balance, customizations, bug fixes and new features.
As with any software, the cost of making changes almost doubles the further the decision is pushed down the line.
The dev team should be the one that knows this best. So either they know this and still want to stick to their ego/pride and want to win this argument or they never thought of this. In either case, in the world of software development this is a very bad practice. It’s a complete waste of resources.
Because it’s the design decision that’s been made for the game and many people are saying it’s a wrong decision. Wrong for who, because for many of us we like the consequences of this choice.
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Except it is because you are forced to being stronger in a certain situation and weaker in another. This shouldn’t, and has never been a choice you have to make.
Each expansion the game balance changes. They adjust numbers, and look at the skills we got and classes and such.
If Blizzard designs the game where players have a choice what type of skills they get, and how powerful they are. They will balance the content around that. It is not like BFA stats, and systems will be the same in shadowland. The content will be expanded on, and you won’t feel “weak” just because you focus on single target. Aoe fights you will just do less damange, but when that boss comes up. Bam your skills shine.
The devs is not going to be like. Hey lets add this rpg element system to the game and lets tune the dungeons/raids around bfa.
It’s a choice the moment you choose your class.
There’s a more nuanced position.
If you can break off the highest end of the game, then perhaps the OP position is accurate. Player skill should be the defining feature of success. You can see this in a lot of the things he talks about, for example things like borrowed power, rng, covenant class abilities and covenant powers. In fact the whole thing as a package could be fairly argued as his defining issue.
It also ties into an offhand comment he made about what he used to enjoy about raiding in vanilla: There were fewer systems. The focus of his playtime was exclusively raiding, alt raiding and just enjoying progression in that way. In a way then it could be reasonably argued that he’d like to strip back the busy work related to the sphere of the game he genuinely enjoys playing.
Is it doable? Perhaps it might be. Mythic and high end play may actually suit itself to increasing the challenge through stripping back the utility available to players. It doesnt always have to be multiplicative. For example, theres no reason at all that Blizzard may one day decide that to increase the challenge of a mythic dungeon or raid, they dont add more bells and whistles to the encounter itself, and instead decide to simply prevent all covenant perks or corruption perks be completely unusable in that encounter.
Its perhaps an inelegant solution, im only spitballing a direction of travel rather than a viable solution, but theres no reason why you couldnt increase the challenge of an encounter through limiting player options rather than adding more mechanics or greater dps checks.
Lets hypothesise this.
- Thematically: no covenant abilities in raids. No problem. No reason why the Jailor should allow covenant power to be useable in his domain.
- Structurally: The important thing is that the difficulty increases. Without access to borrowed power like soulbinds or covenant abilities, this places a clear barrier to success and increases the difficulty of the encounter.
- Balance: Without covenants and load outs, the game goes back to its core: Talents, gear and classes making balance less complex (i want to say easier, but not sure that’s the case given that class utility now jumps up).
- The grind: Firstly, caps at heroic level (or pre 10 MD lets say, arbitrarily). You still have to do it because you still need to jump those hoops at high level gameplay to progress into mythic, and having your bells and whistles will give you more success making the transition smoother. But you wont necessarily be needing one class for each covenant now. Sure, you could. But the demands of heroic versus progression mythic are significantly lower and you also have the entire remit of borrowed power (legendaries incl). at your fingertips to make that transition as smooth as possible.
Now, interestingly this solves all the issues of the covenant system being baked into the highest level of gameplay and the multiplying differences caused by the correct versus incorrect choice. But, it also means that you can still play the ‘normal’ game (lets call that super casual to heroic), in any way you like. The demands are significantly lower, and can always, over time, be overcome through power-creep.
Now imagine if youre preach in this game. The hardest content retains its challenge. But the softer game is still a fun place for just winding down, tinkering with playstyles, cosmetically playing around with your character and just enjoying the world game, the storyline, the covenant system and its general expansion features. It ties into the main part you enjoy to play, but not so rigidly than it will when the highest level encounters are built around notions like borrowed power and covenants.
On top of this, covenants are freed up from the very top end where they clearly do the most damage. Players who enjoy the system as a feature don’t have to worry that blizzard will ‘pull the rip cord’ and make that choice meaningless (and this ties into the point Ion made on the open meta actually compelling forced covenants/specs). We all get to have fun blowing up torghast on our army of alts. We get to steadily progress power through renown. And we just get to enjoy the overall theme of the expansion without it trying to do all things for all players. The more i think about it, the more this makes actual sense.
The playerbase radically split in WoD. Legion solved this by designing around the split and making sure that never again would players have nothing to do with tonnes of busywork in the world and multiple avenues of gearing. BfA tried to reintegrate the playerbase through a single meta-grind that annoyed almost everyone (not me, im super casual). Perhaps its time to more clearly demarcate the lines again in SLs. Give the absolute hardcore what they want (challenging encounters with a narrow band for success), but decouple it from the mainstream game as much as possible. That way everyone wins.
You already have enough consequence for choice without the covenant abilities.
i personally love the covenants. i love the idea of them, i love the progression of there systems as you get more involved with them that you earn more rewards and cool new things.
i just dont like player power tied to them. the covenant abilities should of * finally * been a new talent row. we havnt had a new talent since the start of WOD over 6 years ago. we have only had rented player power progression for over 2/3s of a decade.
and lets be clear here. blizzs handling of classes in this game is one of the absolute WORST things they do to this game. and to tie new abilities to something with permanence while also tying transmog and other reward systems to them feels bad before even playing shadowlands. i can imagine its only going to be worse when actually playing it.
i think in one of these preach clips he touched on the fact that Day 1 of shadowlands we will play about 2-3 hours of each zone finishing off each of the storylines. we get to max level and then have to make our fateful decisions. we have to make up a decision on 2-3 hours of gameplay for the following 2+ years. this isnt like the garrison where you could demolish a building if you say didnt like the stables or the engineering workshop. this is player power tied to a quick decision with 2 years of permanence to it. a building in a garrison isnt the same as how your class will function for the rest of an xpack. we werent locked into what building we chose at the start of WOD. but being locked into how our characters play ( by spec, let alone class if you multi roll/spec ) for 2 years is apparently fine by blizz.
most specs talent trees are already left to rot by blizzard. a whole bunch of specs only have 1 particular talent build. blizz should be focussing on the actual class/spec gameplay before even worrying about things like covenant abilities. they need to fix the base classes before throwing 17 new system on top of our classes and expect the chips to land perfectly. we have seen blizz fail at basic systems ( azerite, NLC, essences, corruption ) let alone dogpiling mulitple systems on from day one.
when pre-patch goes live and corruptions, essences, azerite all get turned off, some specs will be literally unplayable. shadow is a prime example here. the spec will cease to exist in this game. because inherently the entire spec is crippled in its base design.
we thought the Legion to BFA switch being turned off was bad. the BFA to Shadowlands switch is going to be horrendous with things like corruptions and essences disappearing. the game is going to be a clown fiesta for a month+. all because the base classes dont even work anymore.
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A class and a covenant are two completely different things. One of them is the vehicle you play the game in. The other is a thing that augments it. Not the same.
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We still knew that they’d exist, and pretty much the first concern was “what if I like Night Fae, but Venthyr is better?”
It’s not like the general concerns with Covenants have changed as we’ve learned more and more about them, if anything it’s only gotten deeper with the reveal of Soulbinds and Conduits going from “how is Blizzard going to balance this” to a more firm “Blizzard can’t balance this”.
Which is my point. The general leveling gameplay does not prepare you nearly adequately enough for whether a long-term decision is the right one.
But how do they balance a mythic boss fight around some folks having amazing mobility, that doesn’t come from class balance, against a group that doesn’t? Do the devs assume the fights can’t rely on the additional mobility of venthyr and night fae?
I’m not concerned with numbers, but more. Nuanced stuff. Like shadowmeld and venthyr’s teleport.
I do agree with you on aoe versus single target and how there will be hivemind fights and patchwerk fights, as there have always been.
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Like what? The only consequence is class. Talents can literally be swapped in between every trash pull. Soul binds can be swapped on the fly. Even the path down the soul binds can be changed.
to add to this.
and then venthyr is the ONLY choice to make and blizz carpet bomb it into uselessness with nerfs as they are prone to do.
cough * we just dont want players playing demo right now * cough.
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Maybe? Or it might be easier for people who have certain skills at certain phases and might be easier for other skills.
Who knows? Like a boss might have a phase where you are glad during that phase you have so and so skill. We will just have to wait and see.
It would be a serious balance problem if you could not do mythic without said skill. Blizzard would have to drop the ball pretty hard to let that happen.
Personally, I felt Ion would’ve had more success with this system by going the Legion approach and just assign each ability per spec and just changing the aesthetic based on covenant choice. From my recollection, the only 2 things people didn’t like about Legion were the Artifact power throttling and the Legion legendary randomness, which are both being addressed in SL. The reality of mmos is balance needs to be before choice otherwise people will just float towards the ‘artificial’ choice that gets them accepted.