Wait...When Did People Start To Bitter To Shadowlands?

[Smallfruitbat]

He's mad because he can't be 100% optimal at all facets of the game every single encounter.

The point he was making is that traditionally cutting edge raid encounters are designed around players having access to certain abilities. Just look at the clusterfuck surrounding Nyalotha. The top guilds were spending millions of gold, clearing out the AH for corruptions in order to beat the Mythic encounters. That is the world he plays in. The vast majority of us, if we get to stand in front of Mythic N'Zoth will over gear the encounter (and still struggle).

I can understand his frustration when a few % of a DPS upgrade is the difference between beating the boss and failing.

Personally, I'm excited for Shadowlands. It feels like its going to be a proper RPG again.

[Vakir]

The point he was making is that traditionally cutting edge raid encounters are designed around players having access to certain abilities.

It's not just that. It's Covenant Abilities by not just class but also by spec and also by activity. Certain abilities are just dogshit for certain specs or certain avenues of play. And that's regardless of number tuning. Primordial Wave was a given example - your Lava Burst chaining to a second target is great for Elemental, but your Lightning Bolt chaining to a second target as Enhance is way, way weaker. To say nothing of the Necrolord Mage ability...no matter what the numbers are, Arcane Blast hitting multiples is not the same thing as Frostbolt or Fireball doing it. This doesn't affect the top 1% exclusively. It does affect them the most, though. But then again, everything does, so whatever.

[oplawlz]

He's mad because he can't be 100% optimal at all facets of the game every single encounter.

I mean this is 100% what the drama is about. Personally I like the idea that you choose something you're really good at and the other guy who chose something else is better at that other thing. It gives more raiders a chance to distinguish themselves in a group.

[Accendor]

He has been nothing but negative the last 2 videos he put out.

And no. I have been waiting for power behind real choices for years. As have many others.

2 of 30 videos are negative, clearly he is a paragon of toxicity.

[Echocho]

I mean this is 100% what the drama is about. Personally I like the idea that you choose something you're really good at and the other guy who chose something else is better at that other thing. It gives more raiders a chance to distinguish themselves in a group.

If you go back a decade or more in time that's what inspired people to roll alts. Back when classes had definitive strengths and weaknesses, before homogenization and flexibility started to erode it all.
You saw someone who could do something that you couldn't do and you wanted to check it out. Sometimes you quit before you got there, sometimes it wasn't as awesome that it seemed and sometimes it resulted in you switching your main. People didn't complain about that, if anything it was exciting and gave you a reason to play the game more.

[RobertMugabe]

Making covenant only active in the open world along with soul binds fixes it.

I completely disagree. This would only make the covenants (the MAIN feature of this expac) so useless to a point, that they might as well remove it and have nothing else in its place. Adding so much stuff just to make world quests easier is really just a bad idea.

- - - Updated - - -

If you go back a decade or more in time that's what inspired people to roll alts. Back when classes had definitive strengths and weaknesses, before homogenization and flexibility started to erode it all.
You saw someone who could do something that you couldn't do and you wanted to check it out. Sometimes you quit before you got there, sometimes it wasn't as awesome that it seemed and sometimes it resulted in you switching your main. People didn't complain about that, if anything it was exciting and gave you a reason to play the game more.

Yeah but now you're being "incentivized" to reroll the same class/race combo 4 times. Honestly, your argument is weak.

[Pury]

All meaningless buzzwords Blizzard use, like "RPG with meaningful choice", are not true and don't work in reality, but casuals don't see it and trust blindly.
When other players try to break this illusion, casuals get mad and play their favorite "you are toxic elitist and create drama for clicks!" - card.
(How delusional and butthurt one must be to tell something like this about Preach, 90% of his SL videos are positive, lol).

We have seen this already so many times. It will be an Azerite armour all over again.
"This is shit!" - scream experienced players.
"Blizzard said it is good, so fuck off, toxic elitist, stop trying to take away our fun! " - scream casuals back.
Game goes live and everybody can mess around with the thing...
Suddenly casuals realise: "Damn, this is actually shit. I had a different picture of it in my head, based on Blizzard's words, but in reality the thing is completely different."
Casuals finally start to speak up too and after a couple of patches blizzard change the thing for the better.
Unfortunately, heavy damage was already done and all we can do now is hope next expansion will be better.
Vicious cycle ends and starts again.

What if this time we don't just trust Blizzard's words about "RPG with meaningful choices"? They didn't earn our trust, quite the opposite.
Maybe we will manage to break the cycle this time?

P.S.: If you want an RPG, you should try Divinity: Original Sin 1&2. I've spend hundreds hours playing, this great games will really scratch your RPG itch.

[iosdeveloper]

There will be cookie-cutter covenant builds that you'll have on your characters.
What's so bad about it?)

[Echocho]

P.S.: If you want an RPG, you should try Divinity: Original Sin 1&2. I've spend hundreds hours playing, this great games will really scratch your RPG itch.

I don't think telling people to go play other games is the solution here.

[Saltysquidoon]

It's because players like to play what is considered the highest power rather than what is more fun for them personally even though the power difference is minuscule.

I don't think those words mean what you think they mean

That's ignoring the 'minuscule amount' from the disparity between the covenant abilities themselves

That's ignoring when you add together those 'minuscule' amounts and then times them by 20 people all of a sudden they aren't seeming so minuscule.

- - - Updated - - -

There will be cookie-cutter covenant builds that you'll have on your characters.
What's so bad about it?)

Because when Unholy is shit I can play frost, If the necrolords start out strong but become shit I can go fuck myself?

It's almost like it's a compounding issue that makes existing balance problems worse.

[Blackmist]

Raiders and other people who actually care about playing properly have been shitting on it since day one, because Covenants are a moronic fucking grindgate.

It only suits two people. Those who don't care about knowing how to get the most from their characters, and those with infinite time to level 4 fucking characters of each class you play and getting them one covenant each for all the different shit.

Oh look though, you can save time by buying a levelled character. How fucking convenient. Milk me more, Daddy.

[Phyrexia-KulTiras]

What i'm suprised at is how many people are salty, eventhough they haven't played the alpha themselves.

People are such sheep. Dont think, just follow the flock...

[Saltysquidoon]

What i'm suprised at is how many people are salty, eventhough they haven't played the alpha themselves.

People are such sheep. Dont think, just follow the flock...

I haven't swallowed sodium azide and yet somehow I have always known it is bad for me.

What an uncritical sheep I must be for daring to believe I can compare preexisting knowledge and experience to a new situation without having to first drink the poison.

[Starfals]

While i like MANY of the ideas (and improvements) behind/inside the Shadowlands, i also don't dig the expansion and i'm almost 0 % excited by it. I was dying to play Cata (yes CATA!),Pandaria,WoD(yes WOD!),Legion and BFA. This is the first expansion I literally don't care about. The story/lore is weird.. going to the realm of the dead.. and then there are angel people, fairies... and fake dreadlords..meh.. I know people might get bored of the same undead focused zones so they went for the color theme park idea again.. but this time it annoys me. It is called the shadowlands.. the realm of the dead.

After how they handle Nzod, i kind of got tired of WoW and Blizzard. We will see if i even get to play it, there are far too many new and cool games coming out anyways. Gotta take a break once every 15 years i guess. But really, as cool as everything in the shadowland looks, i sure wish it was in 4 other different expansions (divided) and not stacked into one. It just doesn't fit for me...

P.s. The lore bothers me.. so much more that BFA looks like the best expansion in comparison (imho)

[MrPsychic]

You have to be vocal with the feedback as Blizzard has not been a great listener lately. I personally also see problems in the systems because how Blizzard sees it and think players will use it is often very different from the reality.

I just don't really think we need 4 systems with separate progressions to keep us engaged with the game, and if Blizz thinks we do, then it's just wrong and the resources spent to designing such systems, could be spent elsewhere.

[Harbour]

What i'm suprised at is how many people are salty, eventhough they haven't played the alpha themselves.

People are such sheep. Dont think, just follow the flock...

Dude, i saw that Covenants were problematic back in Blizzcon, when they announced that there will be class specific abilities that ARENT univerasl (i.e. optimal just for one or two categories (M+, Raiding, PvP, Tanking, Healin, DPS) and that you CANT effectively swap around without creating a new character.

You DONT need to play the game to see that the design will limit an activities your character will be able to be effective in. It can even limit the amount of specs you can effectively use (such as Necrolord Shaman, that is fine for Elem and Resto, but if you would want to respec Enhance, you would be far from even a suboptimal in every possible activity).

It was a retarded concept from the beginning and the problem is not that people started to wake up now massively. The problem is people didnt start to backlash right from the very Blizzcon time, so Blizzard could have think "Hmmm, people hate it so much. Maybe we can revert it while we have half a year before an alpha".

The "Wait for you can actually play the game before analyzing" mentality is so strong amongs WoW community its scary, because it is good only in certain situations, and you CANT just pretend you CANT analyze the info we had since Blizzcon untill you push some buttons. When you have an info, you CAN analyze and you CAN see the glaring problems way before alpha time. WoW players must change that mentality and start using their brain or Blizzard will continue to shove their bad systems every next expansion.

[ClassicPeon]

He's a drama content creator. He shits on the game nonstop, this is how he makes money after all.

Thats just not true.

He has been praising the shit out of shadowlands but the last week he made 2 vidoes talking about covenants from an endgame pov and how it currentlly sucks for them. Thats all. He is still praising the shit out of shadowlands

[Sinfelle]

OK let me put some context into these concerns. It really boils down to how Blizzard balances things. It's not this 1-5% power difference that some are throwing around. It's actually much greater than that, and it's multiplied by each raid member, and then multiplied again be the soulbinds. So then those same people counter that argument that Blizzard can balance those abilities numerically. That doesn't solve the mechanical nature of these abilities. For a simple example, lets say there's a boss that requires moderate movement (which the majority of bosses in WoW do): two players do the EXACT same damage with their abilities, but Player A is a Demon Hunter and Player B is a Death Knight. The Demon Hunter should always do more damage because they can get back on the boss faster, even though they do they exact same amount of damage. That is an example of a mechanical advantage. That's where a lot of the imbalance players are complaining about stems from. No one is bitching about the numerical values right now because that would just be dumb.

Now where this becomes a bigger problem potentially is with encounter balancing. Up until Shadowlands, Blizzard has had a pretty straight path of tuning the encounters to a template. X amount of players, with X item level, with loosely X composition should be able to defeat the encounter with proper execution. Now with the introduction to Shadowlands, the power difference between a completely optimized group and the worst optimized group (strictly speaking in terms of covenants and soulbinds) is going to be exponential. So has does Blizzard balance the encounter to that? Do they tune it towards the top end, maybe not completely optimized but pretty close? If they do that, the groups at the bottom will never defeat the encounter even with proper play and gear. So do they tailor it towards the bottom end? Well then the boss will just get destroyed by the optimized groups and that's not fun at all.

I for one like the IDEA of picking one ability tied to a covenant, but I know it just doesn't work/fit into THIS game. The balancing will just completely fuck up the game. Your friends may not invite you because it's just a fact that you will not time your key or down a boss if they bring your gimp covenant character. Or the balance will be so under-tuned that there's no challenge, everything is easy, so what's the point and where's the fun?

[Ludvig]

I was very positive towards SL at first, but now I'm kinda feeling the legion and bfa "systems approach" where systems is just jammed into the freaking game to try and fix deliberately hollow classes/specs (instead of just having good class design to begin with). I'll try the pre-patch because enhancement/elemental shamans seem to be going back in the right direction, but if they don't already feel good without any of these covenants/legendaries/whatever, I guess I'll wait for TBC or something and play other games.

I will say that the new customizations look great and I like being able to change from male to female and back, but gameplay matters for me above all else.

[HailToTheKing]

Preach was right about the Legion Legendaries.

Preach was right about Azerite armor.

Preach will be right about covenants.

You don't have to like the bloke, but he knows what he is talking about. Blizzard has a 0% track record with these things.