You cant have both! (Covenants)

Community General Discussion
141

You’re right this isn’t about need. This is about frustration. Frustration at completely pointless and arbitrary design decisions that will penalize players for:

  • Picking the aesthetic they desire
  • Going with what’s mathematically better and/or works better rotationally for them
  • Picking the choice that gets nerfed later making it completely useless

This, at least for me, was never about Need; this was about frustration with pointless design decisions that detract from FUN. At the end of the day Choices with consequences aren’t fun they are in many cases paralyzing. I personally have yet to see the loyalist storyline because of one line telling me zappy boy will remember my choice.

There is also the community, the community will always favor the meta out of laziness. They don’t care that your build can outperform the meta by 20% or that it works better for you. They care that you appear semi-competent and appear to have enough wherewithal to at least read a guide.

So at least for me… frustrating isn’t fun it’s just frustrating. I can spend my time doing many things, but getting frustrated by a bad design decision… doesn’t seem worthwhile.

So the assertion that this contention only holds for top 1%… I think that doesn’t hold true. I think that it will ultimately ruin the game for the completely casual too.

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142

I predict all content will be doable regardless of the Covenant you pick. Whether you choose to sacrifice fun for the “best” Covenant is a player choice.

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143

Why should we have to sacrifice fun? I’m being dead serious. This is a game, the game should be fun. So if we’re sacrificing fun… that seems a major anti-pattern in design.

144

And these people are clearly morons and like you said, lazy therefore nobody should listen to them, they are the same kind of bad player that tells themselves they can tell better players how to play the game while in reality they are just following a guide.

A perfect recent example was Scripe bursting out at some idiots telling him to use immolate during his Torghast run, Scripe as a person who knew his class knew that 1) He is already overcapping at shards due to million infernal anima power 2) immolate damage is irrelevant at higher torghast levels.

The bad players read a guide that told them “never let immolate fall or you are bad”, then they took this and started worshiping it and started attacking any heretics that might now worship the same.

Meanwhile people who care about their class and enjoy it would know when to use it and when it isnt as useful and when it isnt worth using, they are not bound by a guide.

And it might not be fun for you, but it is fun for me and many of us, because we like strong heavy choices and also loved the loyalist quest line because it meant it will matter character wise.

145

Except it didn’t. At all. So why ruin the game for a large chunk of people, that you’ve also insulted above, and hurt the ability of the devs to continue buy damaging subs? There are ways to make this work so you’re not using blood magic with kyrian wings. But punishing players that play different than you or calling them names is wildly inappropriate.

Frustrating players to the point of quitting is not fun, we saw this in BFA. If the devs continue down this path I can’t see the results being any different when people get punished, and yes it will be punishment, for making a choice with little to no information beforehand.

I cannot see any outcome where this design decision is good for the game long term. I can only see it hurting the game’s long term prospects and retention.

P.S: I don't care and won't respond about users in a twitch chat. They are IMO irrelevant to the discussion.
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146

What makes you think you are always the majority when everytime a covenant thread pops there’s a huge support from people asking to keep the current system so we get meaningful choice?

You would ruin the game for us by making it a talent change that can be done at any time

147

You’re assuming a lot here, and you’d be wrong. What I’ve actually proposed elsewhere was that if you want to change covenants: Fine, but you have to do it in person. So if you’re in the middle of raid… bring a mage and a warlock. You want to mix and match for a piece of content… NOPE, you can use one covenant at a time and cannot advance the others while you’re reping the current one.

Please don’t assume.

Either way… forcing an ideological purity is very unwise in my opinion.

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148

You predict everyone will be able to go infinitely in Torghast, finish Mythic Raid progression, and farm the highest M+ keys?

No. Players are capped by their character power, skill, and available time to dedicate to progression.

Given that skill and availability are not affected by Covenant choice, for every single player in the game, having a more effective Covenant ability will increase the level of success they can achieve and allow them to progress more quickly.

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149

Yes I can, I am going to have all 4, My first 4 characters will all go to different covenants.

150

All done by a tiny minority as most people dont mythic raid, most people dont do any m+ above 15-16 and most likely even 15s are unlikely for them.

Meanwhile you want a tiny minority who obsessively min maxes because they are going for world first to dictate what is good or not even though the average player that worship said min maxers doesnt understand why X class is good ro bad and instead creates a toxic environment where “x class not invited”.

The VAST VAST VAST MAJORITY of raiders or m+s dont need the most optimal build to succeed and that is a fact, they tell themselves they need it. If having a meta build is the only reason you are keeping your raid spot then you clearly mustnt be a very good player

151

It is ENTIRELY min/maxing if you’re choosing said ability for a damage output advantage. Now, if you liked what said ability did regardless of its damage output then that isn’t min/maxing, but if it’s solely for a numbers gain, which in 90% of the playerbase output, this is entirely accurate, then yes that is entirely min/maxing. In fact, that is what the definition of it is. You can literally good define:min/max and you’ll see.

Everyone should have weaknesses, everyone should have strengths. Players want the ability to be great at everything. I’m telling all of you, No, you should not be great at everything, at every aspect of the game whether you are a professional player or not, a casual or hardcore player. If this was the case, why have so many classes and specs? Why not just delete them all until there’s 3 classes. 1 that can only tank, 1 that can only heal and 1 that can only dps? So, no, you cannot have every piece of cake and eat it too. No, you cannot have ice cream, chocolate, vanilla, carrot and every other flavored cake at once and eat it too. If you choose to have an ice cream cake, you cannot also have a carrot cake, vanilla cake, strawberry cake, cheese cake all in the same cake. Pick your covenant, if you want to min/max then min/max inside of that covenant. Yes, I will tell the whole 99.9% of you that are spoiled and thinking “well, I won’t be taken to this dungeon if I’m in the covenant I want to be for raiding” Yes, choose your option.

Choose the area you want to be amazing at, then play your best at the others. Yes, you will be taken to dungeons while being optimized for raiding. Yes, you will be taken to raids while optimized for dungeons or PvP. Yes, you can entirely compete with the person who specializes in that PvP section covenant while you are not. People will be subbed out, it already happens now, and it happened in Legion, in WoD, in MoP, Cata, Wrath, BC, Vanilla. It will happen in Shadowlands too, and if you think covenants being easily swappable are going to save those mythic guilds who do this for the sake of min/maxing, guess again bucko. If your class isn’t the best for that fight and they’re going for min/maxing, it doesn’t matter what covenant you have, you’ll be swapped for a class that is better.

Min/Maxing is playing to any advantage you have, especially for a damage output. I strongly hate this option, but, be glad that they considered this because if it were up to me, I would be telling everyone “No, you pick, your character is there for good.” If you do not like this, leave. If every single hardcore raider left the game , while it would suck, but WoW would survive off of the casual playerbase. If every casual player left, WoW would probably die off.

152

If you wanna quit because of covenants, go for it bro. You and the others who literally cannot stand it. Bye, we will pack your bags for you. This design is good for the long term for casuals. What it is not good for, is for those who wish to min/max every single scenario/possibility with their character, which let’s face it. If there weren’t videos complaining about this, then this would never even crop up as an issue to most if not all of the casuals. It would literally be an issue for just the top end guilds and nothing more. What we seen in BFA was players quitting because blizz gave them the choice to govern themselves, which we clearly seen mythic raiders being literally unable to do.

If people said “I’m gonna stop now” and did, you were fine. However, players put this enormous strain on themselves. It is 100% a player driven thing for being a "completionist"in a system that doesn’t let you complete, and you should know it doesn’t let you complete it. If you cannot stop yourself, that’s not a blizz problem, it is a “you” problem. Yes, I’ve told that to players from Method before and others as well. Sorry, a junkie is entirely responsible for their own actions and nobody else is responsible for those actions besides the junkie. People wore themselves out and had to quit the game to get healthier.

153

The only choice that matters is if you want to pick the covenant you like more aethetically or mechanically for the content you enjoy most. There’s going to be 1 right answer to both questions for most people.

That’s a bad choice to have to make.

154

If I had to make a hard choice on that, guess what, i wouldn’t watch either. That kind of choice is stupid.

The value of covenants is their aesthetic and their end game story. Aesthetic and story should never be tied to gameplay in any multiplayer/constantly updated game. That’s a great way to lose players.

155

I like to pretend Starwars episodes 7-9 don’t exist anyways, so I’ll just take Harry Potter

156

No. Choosing a higher tiered ability is just common sense, you would need to absolutely not care about your character to not choose a 20% better ability.

Min-maxxing is race changing your entire raid roster on every different fight during BoD mythic progression because each different race provides a 0.001% marginal difference to your kill ability.

Min-maxxing is re-gemming and re-enchanting each peice of gear possible on each different mythic fight.

You have no idea what actual min-maxxers look like, because you have never seen what those crazy mofos do in a raid setting.

Choosing a better ability over a crappier ability? That’s just called “having a functioning brain”.

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157

You just proved my point. Yes, it is. A higher tiered ability, aka a DPS damage output. Yes, it’s common sense, but, yes, it is 100% still min/maxing.

If blizzard didn’t impose a 1 month period after each race change, do you think that World First raiders would not have been doing this? I’m 1000% certain they would be, if they had the money and blizzard let them do it, they would be going to this degree too. It’s quite stupid just how extreme this thing goes over a game. Granted, world first I guess would be a different story since I do not know if they would have sponsors for coming in 2nd over 1st or as many sponsors. I’m certain they would, but then again maybe not?

Yes, I understand fully well to the degree that people do this, and I find it to be an idiotic concept that, where there is no money involved like sponsorships or job, people would go to this extreme degree for this. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Play the game for fun, not for the numbers, is what makes sense to most of us. Enjoy the class/spec you chose, do the role you wanna do/play and enjoy the content without needing to worry about being kicked off the team or being swapped / subbed out. However, players that min/max often do not do this, as their happiness comes from numbers, which again doesn’t make sense to me. I know I enjoy competition amongst guildies and whatnot, but, you should not ever be first on every single boss in every single scenario.

Again, this is all part of min/maxing. It might be common sense to you or seem like it, but, to one degree or another it is actually min/maxing. Yes, we all do it, but when I talk about most min/maxers I do not mean those who do it casually or just every now and again. I mean those who go to the very extremes that they would be mad about a 0.5% dmg difference between races. They would be mad about the covenant system not giving them what they want despite this being an MMORPG where MMO means multiplayer and RPG being role playing, as in consequences matter, choices matter. The talent system alone makes it hard to believe this game is an RPG because you can literally swap talents on a whim, which goes against a lot of the old style of RPG elements and should honestly never have existed in games.

Yes, even in old DnD rules way back when, you could min/max, however min/maxing came at a cost of your ability to do things in other areas. You were not able to min/max every aspect of a game/campaign. You were, however, able to min/max a portion where the portion your character is good at is ridiculously awesome for that niche. Again, though, it was for that niche alone. Nobody could make a perfect character. That was the entire point!

And now there’s plenty of people who complain that their character cannot do everything at the same time? No. Your character should never be able to do everything at once unless you are in a single player game. The whole concept of MMO is playing with others. Yes, I know you do not wanna let down the other 19 people in your mythic raid. Are you going to because you cannot pull out 150% of your character’s potential? No. This game, the mythic raiding scene is more about doing mechanics properly than it is about reaching 100000 DPS per character in that group. Yes, there are some DPS checks, but are they the majority of the raid? No, they actually are not. They haven’t had a full DPS check raid since either Wrath or Cata, when they learned to not do that so much and just give us mechanics instead. Will it take longer? Yes, it will, but you will reach the end goal.

Yes, people do this enough too.

In most cases, the difference isn’t 20%. It’s 2%, at most, and most people get offended when you tell them 2% isn’t a big deal. In actual numbers, it really is not a big deal. The big deal can only be a big deal if your group wipes at a 1% or less wipe, which is far less common than people think or believe. Even if that ends up being the case, it isn’t because people didn’t pull out the character’s potential. It’s because someone messed up on mechanics and/or died. Literally everything attributed to this is because of mechanics and people messing up mechanics in one form or another.

158

Playing at my best and maximizing my potential is whats fun to me. “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”

Also even if the balance disparities did amount to a 2% performance difference (it doesn’t and almost never has) 12-15 people each doing 2% less (or more) damage over several minutes adds up to a lot of damage when you’re talking hard content.

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159

You know what else adds up? Doing mechanics properly. You know what else adds to performance on top of that? If you’re having a blast actually playing the character for the talents and everything you absolutely enjoy most and pulling the fun factor out. Yes, I said it, the fun factor. The one where you end up forgetting about time or how much of it passes, where you just lose yourself entirely in your character and that moment. That exists still, at least for me. 2% performance disparity will not mean your raid doesn’t make it unless your raid happens to have a lot of people dying. I think ion said it in an interview long time ago during an interview asking about raid designs. I believe they said they tune raids to be about raid output damage, not solo build heroes who wanna shine on those meters. I believe in that answer it was something about a MINIMUM raid dps output, and tuning them to be relatively low.

There’s also the fact that the raids get nerfed.

Your mythic raids get nerfed by: Weekly mythic+ chests giving upgrades, Mythic+ dungeons giving upgrades, PvP slots/chests giving upgrades, crafting upgrades, mythic raid nerfs to bosses. Like, there’s so much going for guilds to HELP them get passed bosses to one degree or another, it really does not take this much min/maxing unless the skill level of your raid players isn’t so awesome.

160

Except in this case it is with the way certain abilities are going to work, with current balancing measures. That’s why people are panicking so much. They don’t want to be playing 4 of the same class, one in each covenant so you can push that mythic boss that last 1%. But they will if this crap goes on.

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