Originally Posted by
Tojara
The interview completely sucked and Ion basically had to arm bar his way in on the end so that he could actually give new information. The first 90% of the interview had nothing new to say, and the same issue kept being reiterated over and over again. Pressing or bringing up the issue about covenants (at least how he believes they're bad) is absolutely fine, but going on and on about them for most the interview just made my eyes glaze over if I'm being honest. At some point I just wanted Preach to shut up and/or move on, because it's clear that Blizzards going to go in this direction in regards to covenants.
You can call people Blizzard apologists or whatever you want to call them, but the majority of Ion's answers about the subject were fine. I've been playing a DK since WoTLK, and I have no worldly idea what Preach was talking about when he claiming that WoD had massive RNG factors for the class, and it was hard to compare himself to other DKs. As somebody who played a DK during every major period of the game and logged with the best of them, I had to basically facepalm, especially when considering he was talking about BRF era, and not the era of HFC where some particularly powerful trinkets were introduced to the game. If he was talking HFC era, he might have had a point, but he wasn't. Regardless of that, there's a history of WoW since the very beginning where Ion (rightfully so) points out that particular pieces of gear or trinkets can skew your comparisons to others within your class. Whatever the point is, comparing yourself is difficult when one guild has universally better players than another, pushing kill times to points where the uptime on particular buffs is massively inflated.
WoWs obsession with RNG procs and systems tied progression really didn't start until Legion, and was essentially baked into the game hard with the last patch of BFA. WoD for as shitty as people might claim (granted PoF was completely broken) was fairly sound class design wise and the best players, were simply the best players.
To me it's obvious they're going to stick with the covenant system and try to balance it to the best of their abilities, whether it's close or not, who could honestly know?
I think there's some extreme hyperbole going around from the pug scene though in regards to what people look for. In pure PUGS I actually doubt people are going to exclude you based on the covenant you choose, just like nobody excludes people based on the essences or azerite traits people pick right now. PUGS literally look for meta classes with high raid progression and/or IO score and leave it at that. Why? Because PUG leaders aren't fucking detectives. If they were detectives they would take some godly shadow priest over pants on head retarded demon hunter, but they don't. Why? Because Shadow Priests have a stigma in dungeons, and DPS DHs are seen as broken.
If Blizzard fucks up the balance and there's some MASSIVE delta between the best and worst covenant in regards to throughput, sure, maybe people will take that into consideration. But if you expect pugs to decline people because they don't have the Venthyr blink to like, skip a pack or something, please let me know what pugs you're doing so I can tell my friends who occasionally pug things where to look. The thought of much organization going into a pug just simply happens, let alone them doing precise skips/pulls that only work if everybody has the exact same covenant.
Obviously it's not exactly the same because choosing a covenant isn't as extreme as some of the examples Ion gave, but the overlying idea is still sound. How many groups on Alliance do people get declined on because they aren't NE so they can do particular skips they saw in an MDI tournament? Like zero. Same idea is likely going to apply to covenants to, although not as extreme as the NE skip scenario. Could it happen? Yeah, it could. Is it likely to happen? No. Pug leaders are lazy and the only way you get your foot in the door with these people is just rolling a good class to begin with, just like it's always been. People in TBC who were bad would LITERALLY look for 1-2 mages when pugging dungeons because mages had the best CC in the game.
TLDR in regards to pug group leaders is simply this;
Meta classes go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Non-meta classes are bad
And it ends at that. Not in the history of the world do they bring up your IO page and see what essences you pick, corruptions you have or azerite traits you pick. Ions example of fire mage = good, any other mage = bad, is exactly how the pug scene works right now. And that very fire mage could have every other aspect I listed above completely wrong and be a vers stacking fire mage, with all the wrong talents, with infinite stars as his corruption of choice.
Mythic+ Dungeon Adjustments - 27 April
Mythic+ Dungeon Adjustments - April 26
Dragonflight and Season of Discovery Hotfixes - April 25, 2024
MMO-Champion
Recent Blue Posts
Recent Forum Posts
Reply With Quote
