I don’t think that’s true at all. When you’re choosing your class, you’re making a compromise between aesthetics and function.
I like Stagger conceptually. That’s my biggest draw to Monk. I also really want to swing those badass warglaives around and trickle-heal through chunks of souls I cleave off of my opponents.
Mechanically, I want to Monk. In most other ways, I want to DH. I main Monk, because that’s how my priorities line up. It’s still a compromise.
They shouldn’t pull the ripcord before making other, more appropriate changes. The ripcord is the last thing they should do. Other changes to tune them should be made first. Please understand that there are 2 sides to this argument, and I don’t want that ripcord pulled. I like the way covenants seem to be shaping up & I want to see more of things like it, no it’s not perfect, things will never be, but I think this is a good direction for the game that I want to play be going in.
The ripcord is what they gave us, not necesserly what we want.
But no I don’t think adding more systems/borrowed power systems is the way to go.
Making great content and great class design baseline should be #1 issue.
Gameplay should always be first.
I’m a software developer myself. I would absolutely be all for experimentation, but long before it hits Alpha / Beta. Instead, I’d prefer before they wrote a line of code, they present the idea and have a discussion. That way, there is no throwaway work, and it can be iterated on long before it catches on / deadlines are set. This discussion about covenants, what should be meaningful, etc. could have been hashed out long before the journey began. Am I saying everyone will agree? Not at all. But if things like Azerite Armor, Corruption, etc. would have been presented ahead of time, not only would they have been able to identify the issues ahead of time, the fixes they put in could have been in place before hand. I used to work for a company (Note the used to) who pushed out releases with a list of workarounds until we could go back and fix them. Not surprisingly, the end users were never thrilled when we had a release. However, the company I work for now instead churns out quality releases because we put in the work ahead of time before committing to anything to get their feedback and iterate over it until we know it’s what they want, and both sides are happier in the end.
If you have faith in Blizzard balancing this, after this Beta for Azeroth of an expansion all the way to the end with the abomination of Corruption, you’re more blind than I could ever be.
I don’t see how you players can have so much faith in a developer after proven failure after failure after failure. If it was any other developer, the communities would be lighting the place on fire.
Blizzard players are amazing.
Oh yeah, why don’t we let players change classes whenever they want as well, after all not all classes are the best at everything all the time, right? Or even better make classes cosmetic only, that way we don’t have to balance anything ever again…
Never gonna happen, the covenant abilities are just too different.
I’ll use the example I have used in other threads.
Priest:
Disc priest gets a covenant ability for Night Fae that allows them to pump the main resource into a class.
This ability’s effectiveness will be completely tied to the person you are empowering, and it will enable some broken interactions.
For example, a DK getting spammed by a Night Fae priest can have double the duration on their Breath of Sindragosa. This is massive, most raid encounters favor healers contributing DPS, and none of the other covenant abilities compare with this.
Additionally, since it is completely used to empower an ally, every raid team will want their priests to be Night Fae. If you are a boomkin, for example, and you have the choice of 2 priests of equal skill, one who provides slightly more HPS, and one who pumps you full of astral power during your celestial alignment, you are going to pick the Night Fae priest 10 times out of 10.
This is the core of the problem. It’s not about “balancing” the abilities between 3-4% of each other in terms of throughput, its that the abilities themselves don’t even offer the same form of power. If one ability is giving you healing, and the other is giving you damage, how do you balance that?
It seems to me people wont give them a chance, people hear something that they dont like the sound of, immediately start rallying against it, and we end up with something that wasn’t originally intended.
I hear this a lot, but it never wound up being true for me. If I farmed a second set, it wasn’t “ten minutes”, and it always wound up being a much lesser set than my best. Even if you don’t, I’m sure a lot of people can sympathize that I didn’t want to use those crappy sets. I’m not exactly great at gold farming, and those gold costs got to hurting fast. My experience was that I got to pick one spec to invest in for BFA. I didn’t mind it too much, and Shadowlands seems even less restrictive to me.
I do not like borrowed power systems, I’ve said it multiple times, but I dont think the removal of the ‘power’ part of that equation is the way to go. Give us more permanent power. Make artifacts & covenants fundamental to the game moving forward, but that will never happen.
Because if I had that little faith in a developer, I’m not going to play their game. Trust me, I’m not far off now.
They can’t do that, so what they need to do is make classes really good and make those systems just sprinkles on top. We don’t need full class reworks each expansion because they add new systems that are like an arm and leg of your class.
Have there not been several instances of high end guilds stacking a roster with whatever is the best DPS.
Anyways my point to him on balance was just getting rid of it and buffing/nerfing everything on a whim isn’t a good plan. I don’t want my rogue to be the best DPS one month with utility to add to being the worst DPS with the only advantage being I can pick a lock to skip a M+ trash pack.
They brought that on themselves with WOD, Legion, and BFA. They can undo it, but it’s going to take some consistent wins.
A players class is not the same as a borrowed power that we get for an expansion 4Head
Ok, so change it. Focus on this specific scenario and find solutions for it, don’t just #pulltheripcord like people are suggesting.
pull the ripcord is Ion solution, fyi. It’s easier to band behind a single idea than to explain what we all want differently.
Oh yeah one is not ok and the other is because of arbitrary label, got it.
It’s like this for every class, I just used priest as an example.
You can’t balance the abilities when one gives ST damage, one gives AoE, one gives healing, and another gives utility.
what do you consider covenants then?