This WHOLE thing just reminds me of the fact that people have been able to want more alts to play and more alt-friendliness. If you're that concerned over one ability affecting your gameplay, then I'm SHOCKED that people have made it this far into the game on their own.Imagine back in the day with talent trees. I can't imagine how people think it's any different than that. Some are better for one thing, some are better for another. If people are complaining about a single ability from Covenants and swapping them, then people should hate talent trees too. Like the people who would reject someone for a single Covenant ability... imagine if that sort of mindset was like it back in the day. "Oh, you're a healer and you DON'T have this one particular talent filled up a certain way? Declined."That sort of thinking would cause anyone to hate the game and the playerbase. If someone is really that worried about a single ability affecting their gameplay, then I'd hate to see them pick a faction, race, class, or spec because the people worrying this much about it are sad.
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
I could make an entire paragraph on how you're twisting my words so hard that pretzel shops would be jealous of your technique, but i'm just gonna quote this part and let everyone make of it what they will.
I want to make a big post to make a point.I think this thing of permanent choice with consequences will be divisive regardless if it's tied to skills and player power. Some people like the idea of big choices and identity and enjoy the story and the role play aspecs, some people don't care about that at all and see games as a place to compete, to be the best, to be challenged and that's it. WoW is trying to be an RPG despite its huge player base.Preach's main concern, and mine as well, the one thing that could break this expansion is if these choices lead to meaningful differences in power, potentially making players regret their choices. I'm not convinced that's going to be the case. I think that way because the systems in Shadowlands were designed in a way to be easily adjustable, and they don't seem flawed in the way that Legion and BfA systems were. Legion was frustrating because the artifact weapons locked players into one spec and the super important legendary items were random drops. BfA was frustrating because azerite armor was confusing, unbalanced and most of the time didn't lead to customization or interesting choices, it was only something to be mathed out by simulations and then everyone had to research the right choices, that and also because of all the random titanforging. Lessons learned that lead to Shadowlands. So now our concerns are covenant abilities. Those are very easily adjustable. Legendaries? Well we can choose to craft what we want. The different soulbinds from different covenants? Easily adjustable. If anything, I think the choices of conduits and how you bind them are the biggest concern right now that could cause player frustration. But Ion ackownledged that make them break when you swap them is not the right way, they learned that from azerite. So it will depend how they decide to solve the conduit problem.If anyone wants to use the argument that balancing covenant abilities IS a concern, balancing has been a problem in EVERY expansion. In Legion I chose to play frost mage because I thought it was the most fun to play when I tested in pre-patch. A week after Legion launched I started feeling stupid for choosing frost because fire was just so much better and I had already commited hard to frost. I could visibly see all the mages in my mage tower walking around in a fire spec. But eventually they buffed frost and it felt good to play it. It wasn't a flaw with how frost was designed. In BfA I felt stupid wanting to play Elemental Shaman in the beginning, but at least in BfA I could easily swap to Enhancement. But eventually they buffed Elemental and it turned out great. The same thing WILL happen with covenant abilities. But it's not a problem with the design, it will just need tuning. If some specific abillity turns out too good by design, I'm confident they will change it.I like the direction that Shadowlands is going.Conduits are concerning, though.
They said the same thing about Legion as they did Shadowlands.And Legion was the best expansion we've ever had. :p It brought back wotlk levels of numbers, and people were riding that hype train for two years before BFA disappointed them.Love Preach, but I 100% disagree with him. I want a meaningful choice that gives me different abilities, soulbinds, mounts, pets, and armors. I think blizzard has nailed it, theoretically. I just hope they pay close attention to the power gaps and enclose them. Nerf the OP stuff, buff the underperforming. Kind of up to the beta testers to say, "This should be stronger/weaker" or "This doesn't feel right."If they just say, "Delete it all" or "give me all the things at once" or even "make covenants as easy to swap as talents", then they'll not only be denied those requests, but the actual issues will be unreported.
Like always we see a pattern here, people that want to be able to have meaningful choices, and people who want to have no choice to take. Strangely enough the "no choice" community is larger. Yes it allow everyone to be on the same page without any disparity but it lacks flavor in my opinion. As a good exemple, would you vote for an unique class and a unique race with no talent and no gear, just so that you don't have to take choices and for equality ?The game would not feel the same and would loose a great number of it's community. So I understand the devs point of the covenant, it is just another choice that you'll take, faction, race, class, covenant, spec, talents, gears.And yup some people will try to shun you because you are not min-maxed, but that is not the whole community and don't worry you'll be able to play the game plenty even without a meta class/covenant, if not that would mean that atm you cannot raid, do pvp, do mm+, if you are not a fire mage, a destro lock, a havoc dh, a mw monk or a blood dk. (and a night elf for mm+ or a troll for the raid+pvp)
Seeing as these people are fine with taking away the choices of others I vote we take away LFR from the game.Fair is fairI don't want that in the game, it hinders my experience.The same excuse that's being used to not allow people free choice on their covenants. It's not like it would benefit the vast majority of players or anything...nonono.
My problem is if I want to play around with the necrolord dk grip to simply have fun with it for a while I have to drop whatever other covenant I'm apart of. And as someone who is in the beta you seriously have to make 4 toons of each class to really get a feel for the spell and how to use it. And still for my main I'm uncertain what I will be picking.I think this is going to effect mythic raiders the least if it goes live like this, since they are the players willing to level four of each class they plan to play. Everyone else who dosent have that much dedication is the ones going to be feeling this. And I hesitate to call the spells and abilities an "rpg choice" sure the good ones are really good Kyrian paladin, night fae monk, necrolord Dk. But the others are simply a green hammer, a red mist, or a blue death and decay, that dosent scream meaningful to me. So far that's my feelings from beta testing.
Anyone that thinks this is going to go well has NEVER learned from history.They never get it right.Tying your spec to an artifact weapon and legendaries was TERRIBLE at Legion launchAzerite Armor was TERRIBLE at launch. Completely unbalanced traits, having to unlock the same &*!@ over and over again was TERRIBLEEssences were TERRIBLE for anyone playing an alt until they implemented Echoes of Nyalotha. Even now for returning players that haven't unlocked them, the system is still really badCorruptions have been nerfed 3000 times and is a complete unbalanced, broken MESSNow, what happens if you choose one covenant and it turns out to be either terribly overtuned or terribly undertuned, which requires Blizzard to have to do a round of balancing (as they ALWAYS do) which then makes the choice you made significantly different to what you had chosen? You can't just easily respec, you might have to ditch your choice altogether, undoing months of progression. That is not fun, no one wants to play the game that way