"Forced" or "Mandatory" covenants

[Fatbeaverlol]

This person wins the prize. Covenants are straight trash.

Yep... i can agree on that.

[Specialka]

But what is a best covenant for raiding? You'll have movement fights, you'll have ST fights, you'll have AoE/cleave fights, you'll have fights with DoT's applied to you, you'll have fights that require to use defensives, and so one. One could easily "need" all 4 for one raid. So really where does it end? I really haven't seen any evidence that one ability will make anyone so unoptimal in other areas that they won't be taken, or can't achieve high levels of competition all around. It might be a bit harder, or take a bit longer, but it certainly better than having everything just be a loadout as was mentioned earlier, and feel a bit more like an RPG.

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Do you not see that others want meaningful decisions?

For those that want meaningful decisions, do they switch talents or specs ?

[Thenatural]

I don't think it's as big of a deal as people are making it out to be, I think if the community turns inteself inside out over it they will change it by 9.1. This isn't a situation like BFA where everyone hated everything, people seem to like a lot of SL content, just not covenants at the moment.

Remember before BFA everyone hated every single spec, they hated Islands, they hate warmode, they hated warfronts, they hated half of the dungeons, it was a mess.

I really would like to have the player power detatched from my covenant choice but if it's not for a while and it's all we have to worry about, I think we're looking to be in good shape going forward.

[Sluvs]

Tbf, 50g in vanilla was a lot of money. And just the fact that was incovenient was enough of a barrier to make the choice matter a little. Today choice you do not have to make a choice, at all. But yeah, even back then choice mattering was not a huuuuge theme.

[Krakan]

But what is a best covenant for raiding? You'll have movement fights, you'll have ST fights, you'll have AoE/cleave fights, you'll have fights with DoT's applied to you, you'll have fights that require to use defensives, and so one. One could easily "need" all 4 for one raid. So really where does it end? I really haven't seen any evidence that one ability will make anyone so unoptimal in other areas that they won't be taken, or can't achieve high levels of competition all around. It might be a bit harder, or take a bit longer, but it certainly better than having everything just be a loadout as was mentioned earlier, and feel a bit more like an RPG.

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Do you not see that others want meaningful decisions?

Single target damage is king of raiding. Whatever covenant offers that for dps specs will be the requirement .

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Tbf, 50g in vanilla was a lot of money. And just the fact that was incovenient was enough of a barrier to make the choice matter a little. Today choice you do not have to make a choice, at all. But yeah, even back then choice mattering was not a huuuuge theme.

It was a hour of farming less if you played the ah...

[Yuujin]

Gameplay wise, they should not try to please lfr hero or non competitive players.

You mean the majority of the playerbase? Why keep them happy.

[Specialka]

You mean the majority of the playerbase? Why keep them happy.

They just need to add more WQs and more worthless activities like warfront and islands expeditions to keep them happy.

[SirBeef]

For those that want meaningful decisions, do they switch talents or specs ?

This is just the equivalent of yet you participate in society. Not every choice has to be meaningful. Obviously that change took away a big set of meaningful choice. I'd rather have it be the way it but with an escalating cost, so that you don't just change on the fly. But just because one likes meaningful choice doesn't mean they all need to be.

[Krakan]

This is just the equivalent of yet you participate in society. Not every choice has to be meaningful. Obviously that change took away a big set of meaningful choice. I'd rather have it be the way it but with an escalating cost, so that you don't just change on the fly. But just because one likes meaningful choice doesn't mean they all need to be.

You can just say the people who enjoy the idea never change talents and essences anyways. No need to try and whataboutism it.

[taishar68]

They just need to add more WQs and more worthless activities like warfront and islands expeditions to keep them happy.

I bet you’d find a lot of players who disliked Warfronts and Islands, and that might have a lot to do with why BfA was barren for long periods of time. Being casual does not mean you’re ok with bad gameplay.

[Echocho]

It was a hour of farming less if you played the ah...

Epic mount in 20 hours, yeah that doesn't sound made up at all.

[Soluna]

Or change a guild to the one who values players that are capable of performing rotation, doing mechanics and not dying while enjoying faster progression that method-wannabees. Yep, choice matters, and it starts with class because that is far more important than covenants.

Oh, and what do you do when you are in a guild of longtime friends that you like to play with, shoot for high progression, and it ends up with you and someone else playing a subpar class (say a ret paladin, that is consistently one of the worst specs to bring to a raid), and both you and your friend can play really well, but venthyr covenant movement utility is vital for an endboss, but your bastion steward isn't.

Do you quit the guild? Do you stay and miss out on progression and the first kill? The whole situation isn't just a simple black and white scenario. Maybe think things through before talking.

[Krakan]

Epic mount in 20 hours, yeah that doesn't sound made up at all.

I mean I bought mine at level cap... there are hundreds of guides right now on youtube to make 50-100g a hour. Hell even farming in felwood accomplishes that.

[kaminaris]

High end content is literally tuned around making the most mathematically optimal choices. This is both confirmed by Blizzard and continues to be their M.O. for bleeding edge content, but sometimes even just below that.

Which is fine, but game shouldn't be catered to high end players. Nor should be designed around top 0.1% players in mind.

This isn't an issue of "Method wannabes," it's literally how the game functions. And even then, if you wanna PUG, all the same issues. If you feel shitty about underperforming as a personal issue, all the same, but you're still stuck if you don't like the aesthetic, story, or flavor of the Covenant you chose that is "optimal."

Decoupling player power from choice fixes all of these issues. It does nothing to harm YOUR enjoyment. It does plenty to affect people who aren't you.

Of course it is. I could do a lot more dps by scumbagging - hence WCL has began to cut down trash dps on nzoth and other bosses where you can scumbag.

If you feel bad about "underperforming" while doing proper mechanics and not dying then maybe you just aren't as good as you thought you would be?
And underperforming compared to what?
Other classes? That is going to be unbalanced as it has been in all wow expansions
Other players in raid? That is situational and also depends on role, what you have to do and luck.
Top parses? Git good.

Only bad players blame their dps on gear.

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Oh, and what do you do when you are in a guild of longtime friends that you like to play with, shoot for high progression, and it ends up with you and someone else playing a subpar class (say a ret paladin, that is consistently one of the worst specs to bring to a raid), and both you and your friend can play really well, but venthyr covenant movement utility is vital for an endboss, but your bastion steward isn't.

Do you quit the guild? Do you stay and miss out on progression and the first kill? The whole situation isn't just a simple black and white scenario. Maybe think things through before talking.

Again, nothing is vital. Raid bosses won't be designed around covenant abilities in mind. IF you are good, you will be able to handle it. I thought about it longer than you.

So let me reverse question. Now guilds are doing mythic nzoth with 10 immunity classes, you happen to play the one that doesn't have immunity. Does that mean they would bench you even if you perform top notch and always do mechanics properly? No, and if they do, they are crippling their progress to get one guy that has immunity but is measurably worse than you.

[Krakan]

Which is fine, but game shouldn't be catered to high end players. Nor should be designed around top 0.1% players in mind.



Of course it is. I could do a lot more dps by scumbagging - hence WCL has began to cut down trash dps on nzoth and other bosses where you can scumbag.

If you feel bad about "underperforming" while doing proper mechanics and not dying then maybe you just aren't as good as you thought you would be?
And underperforming compared to what?
Other classes? That is going to be unbalanced as it has been in all wow expansions
Other players in raid? That is situational and also depends on role, what you have to do and luck.
Top parses? Git good.

Only bad players blame their dps on gear.

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Again, nothing is vital. Raid bosses won't be designed around covenant abilities in mind. IF you are good, you will be able to handle it. I thought about it longer than you.

So let me reverse question. Now guilds are doing mythic nzoth with 10 immunity classes, you happen to play the one that doesn't have immunity. Does that mean they would bench you even if you perform top notch and always do mechanics properly? No, and if they do, they are crippling their progress to get one guy that has immunity but is measurably worse than you.

It isn't the 1% .

As early as normals pugs deny non optimal specs. This notion that wow doesn't thrive on conformity baffles me.

At no point except maybe very,very early on in vanilla did this free spirit mentality exist.

Your gonna google your BiS covenant and soulbinds and that will be that. I'm tired of pretending this isnt going to be the case for the massive majority of players.

I want proof that raid bosses will not be designed around covenants being BiS per spec. FFS n'zoth was balanced around having almost full BiS corruption to the point you had to spend tens of millions of gold to even compete in the top 50.

[Echocho]

It isn't the 1% .

As early as normals pugs deny non optimal specs. This notion that wow doesn't thrive on conformity baffles me.

At no point except maybe very,very early on in vanilla did this free spirit mentality exist.

Your gonna google your BiS covenant and soulbinds and that will be that. I'm tired of pretending this isnt going to be the case for the massive majority of players.

I want proof that raid bosses will not be designed around covenants being BiS per spec. FFS n'zoth was balanced around having almost full BiS corruption to the point you had to spend tens of millions of gold to even compete in the top 50.

It is the 1%, or less than that really but it's easier to type 1%. So you're wrong, sorry.

[kaminaris]

It isn't the 1% .

As early as normals pugs deny non optimal specs. This notion that wow doesn't thrive on conformity baffles me.

At no point except maybe very,very early on in vanilla did this free spirit mentality exist.

Your gonna google your BiS covenant and soulbinds and that will be that. I'm tired of pretending this isnt going to be the case for the massive majority of players.

I want proof that raid bosses will not be designed around covenants being BiS per spec. FFS n'zoth was balanced around having almost full BiS corruption to the point you had to spend tens of millions of gold to even compete in the top 50.

It is less than 1%. Technically, the only ones that it will truly matter is less than 0.1%.

I had no issues getting +20 in time with complete pug previous season as totally off meta demo lock.

And nzoth wasn't balanced around almost full bis corruptions since top guilds downed him in some super garbage gear and mediocre corruptions.
BiS corruption is like available only recently. You have no clue what are you talking about.

[LorDC]

This is just the equivalent of yet you participate in society. Not every choice has to be meaningful. Obviously that change took away a big set of meaningful choice. I'd rather have it be the way it but with an escalating cost, so that you don't just change on the fly. But just because one likes meaningful choice doesn't mean they all need to be.

a) You post implies that "meaningful choics" is not really that important.
b) It automatically raises the question: why specifically covenant abilities should be that meaningful choice?

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It is less than 1%. Technically, the only ones that it will truly matter is less than 0.1%.

Actually, if you try to think about it for more than a minute you will realize two facts:
1) Balance does not really matter for top 1% (or top 0.1%). Why? Because on one hand they will always play what's best no matter how time-consuming it is. And on the other hand they have skill to compensate for balance deficiencies.
2) Balance matters for much wider "middle-of-the-pack" audience. Because on one hand they don't have time or patience for time-consuming activities. And on the other hand they don't have the skill to compensate for playing non-optimal setups.

It's not some kind of "elitist" or "try-hard" attitude, it's normal human behavior. If you can't jump over the wall you don't go to athletics trainer, you bring ladder. If riding a taxi or public transport costs the same you chose taxi. If you need power socket fixed you get electrician not a plumber.

[Tacos87]

I just hope that the choices will be fairly equal or so diverse that they can all be useful in come places and hence it doesn't really matter what you pick.

I've dabbled a bit in mythic raiding but for the most part of the game since vanilla I've raided mid or low-tier. I've been a lot of "shit" guild, done a lot of pugging and so on and trickle-down elitism really, really is a thing.

It didn't used to be as bad but I've felt a steady increase since about Legion. Even in guild that can only dream of clearing half the raid on mythic before the tier ends you have a hard time to get recruited without top logs and optimal specs. In pugs it's hard to get in without an ilvl that basically means you have no business still running that content anyway. I'm not saying it's like this 100% of the time, but it sure as hell is more common.

Worst to me seems to be the really low end mythic guilds, top 5k+ that probably won't get CE. Their demands on recruits are like on par with top 100 guilds, it's stupid.

In my experience there used to be more room in a guild to evolve and get better with time, mold your members into better players as a team, now it's just replace with someone with higher ilvl or better logs.

[Vakir]

Which is fine, but game shouldn't be catered to high end players. Nor should be designed around top 0.1% players in mind.

It is, though. They've confirmed that tuning - TUNING, not catering - at high levels is based around maximized efficiency. Look up a few interviews about Mythic raiding. It's reality. I'm not saying that the high end players matter more or their money/tokens are more valuable or that every game decision needs to be built around them. I'm saying that the content is designed with intent to be tuned around players picking the "best" options. Blizzard knows how their meta works and will work. Ion Hazzikostas raided with EJ for fucking years and still does. They're not fucking stupid, they're malicious. More on that below.

If you feel bad about "underperforming" while doing proper mechanics and not dying then maybe you just aren't as good as you thought you would be?
And underperforming compared to what?
Other classes? That is going to be unbalanced as it has been in all wow expansions
Other players in raid? That is situational and also depends on role, what you have to do and luck.
Top parses? Git good.

If you can do more, you are underperforming. Even if you're great. Even top parses for certain classes are doing less than middling parses for other classes. You're conflating "underperforming" with someone who is legitimately not performing well, and that's just not true.

Only bad players blame their dps on gear.

Ignoring that gear upgrades are exponential...for the most part, I agree. That's why we're not talking about gear. We're talking about core abilities, which are a totally different thing. Glad we clarified that again for ya.

Again, nothing is vital. Raid bosses won't be designed around covenant abilities in mind. IF you are good, you will be able to handle it. I thought about it longer than you.

Trusting anything Blizzard does in terms of their overall design philosophy insofar as trusting their ability to balance these things correctly is perhaps the biggest "Sure, Jan..." imaginable.

Blizzard knows that generally high end raiders will log on, raid, and log off and lose interest if they can tackle challenges too quickly. This is why for that high end group, they deliberately tune things to extend it longer for the whales, and in this case, that means designing this deliberately - to fuck around with both numbers to make people swap late into the tier, and to make people feel compelled to grind for extra Conduits. This is knowing full well this will be what happens. This is also knowing that players will either be happy as pigs in shit playing what's weak while being LFR heroes or will probably play the meta regardless of whether they need to and still feel stifled.

Then comes 9.1.5 or whenever where they "learn" from the experience and tweak it, just in time for people to be interested in playing around with abilities they should have had access to from the beginning.

If it wasn't for attunements artificially inflating game time and Blizzard being marginally less corporate back in 2007, these insipid cunts would've probably locked new class abilities in TBC behind Aldors/Scryers picks. Because choice, you guys!

So let me reverse question. Now guilds are doing mythic nzoth with 10 immunity classes, you happen to play the one that doesn't have immunity. Does that mean they would bench you even if you perform top notch and always do mechanics properly? No, and if they do, they are crippling their progress to get one guy that has immunity but is measurably worse than you.

Not directed at me, but still a really silly question. What about immunity classes that perform equally well? Well then you're just shit out of luck, aren't you? You're operating under the assumption that having these advantages means some kind of disadvantage in play, but they don't. Many classes with immunities are flat out fucking rockstars even relative to ones that don't. You're assuming that players with better tools won't also play as well as ones that don't. And you're assuming that someone is "bad" even if they're doing...literally the best they can but still are playing a less attractive tool kit.

So if we apply that logic to Covenant abilities, someone that has the vastly superior Door of Shadows or even Soulshape is going to kick the shit out of someone who picked their stupid owl potion if they perform equally, at least in most settings. The only way to fix that is to vastly undertune every single Venthyr and Night Fae class ability to compensate for the signature ones being better...or homogenize the shit out of what could be interesting abilities to "balance" them. To the point where you might as well not have choices.

But you still didn't answer a very basic question: Who does it HARM to allow these abilities to be swappable? And no, Little Timmy having a sad for 3 seconds because his blue fairy Death and Decay isn't 100% special to his bark-plate set is not actually an issue, because Little Timmy is going to enjoy himself immediately after when the next Pet Dungeon comes out or something.

They have 50 other kinds of keys they can jingle in the face of the playerbase to make Covenants distinct without wasting everyone's fucking time.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...ovenant/553508

Look at the poll results, read the conversation going on, and look at how heavily liked and co-signed posts that are heavily against this shit are.

"But the forums don't reflect the entire---"

Yeah, I fucking know. But if you aren't vocal enough to give feedback, you aren't passionate enough for the change to negatively impact you anyway.