Tying player power to meaningful choice in a multiplayer competitive game is a recipe for failure, if not disaster.
There is no way to balance covenants and their features, and there is virtually 100% chance that people will feel slighted by the wrong choices they make when SL begins.
Like Ion said, the way you make choices meaningful here is by imposing consequences to the choices you make. People just aren't gonna like that when you tie player power into it. It trickles down to way more than just the 1%.
But I'm sure anything I say in this post has already been repeated in this thread so I'm mostly just adding my piss to the ocean.
This is an MMO first and foremost.
The way this MMO is designed does not support permanent unbalanced choices.
The developers of this game are dogshit at balancing. They've got a zero percent success rate balancing a plethora of borrowed power systems.
Covenants will fail.
There's the rub. You're talking RPG, which WoW isn't. WoW is an MMO-RPG and as that is the case, needs to be treated as an MMO first and an RPG second.
In an MMO, the way you are going to be able to play with others is to be the as good as possible with any of the variables that you can control. Sure, you COULD bring 1 tank and 4 healers to a dungeon run, but it's needlessly complicating things. Instead, you do the normal and take 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 DPS.
Why? Because you want the best chance to do things in the least amount of time.
That's what "the complainers", aka the people who actually take an objective look at things, are talking about. They know that people are going to highly prioritize, if not demand, the best. If you choose the covenant you want based on your RPG desires and it turns out you deal 10% less damage than someone else who chose a different covenant (and that number isn't unrealistic seeing as we're currently seeing upwards of 20-40k DPS difference in the best and worst specs right now) who is to blame?
Do you blame yourself for making the RPG choice not the best choice?
Do you blame the person who is complaining even though you are doing 10% less than you could be?
Do you blame Blizzard for not balancing things properly?
Well, you're saying we shouldn't blame Blizzard, because "Hey, RPG choices shouldn't be cosmetic only."
It's also wrong to blame the person complaining who can't do anything to improve the situation.
No, the only one left to blame is yourself, who chose the RPG element even though it offers less than what is needed to succeed.
The game isn't a RPG, it's an MMO-RPG and that means sacrifices: Either those sacrifices come in the form of you not finding groups and therefore don't have access to all the content because you purposely chose wrong or it comes from gameplay individuality, where you get your identity from cosmetics and not gameplay.
Hello actual Role playing game player here. All that matter is in the name role playing. I have my own houses i paid for in ff14, with furniture inpurchased or crafted myself. I also joined in a business with some players and serve drink in a bar a couple hours on every week end. I am playing a role.
Raiding/mythic plus doesn't even need to be mentioned here. I'm pretty sure there's a ton of people who chose some random talent because it sounded good, but then turned out to be dissapointing so they swapped it for another one. And then maybe went back to it some time later. Or didn't - doesn't matter, they had freedom to fix their "mistakes" without being locked into it for weeks/months.
I imagine this being a fairly common thing that has nothing to do with "raiders" or "hardcores", but simply screws normal players over because of supposedly "meaningful choices".
Ion: "We don't want you to have to constantly sim and use 3rd party sites to work out if something is good for your character."
Also Ion - Implements Azerite, Essences and Corruption. Also implementing Covenants.
- - - Updated - - -
Good one bro!
Maybe they should just add a paid class change. They already do it for races and those are horribly unbalanced too!
If you want constant new content, then yes. Story and looks is all need. Borrowing temporary power fulfills the building your character portion.
You can't keep growing forever, there'd be no balance.
Firstly,
I strongly believe that WoW is not an MMO. It surely is a Multiplayer Online game but not Massively. Most of the people, who are not completely solo and actually play the game they are either playing with two (2) other friends in Arenas, nineteen (19) other people in Raids or four (4) other friends in Mythic+. That's not massive.
Secondly,
WoW stopped being an RPG when sometime in TBC my +healing gear started contributing to my spell power and from the necessity of having a friend warrior in Tyrs Hand to sweeping strike everything down because we had like 10Gs to wipe all night in Naxxramas, i became a farming Juggernaut.
The thing with WoW is that fifteen (15) years later this game is still around, while others failed into obscurity.
I was not around to see its slow transition from the MMORPG that i loved into the game that is now, but from what i have seen and experienced in BFA i can only say that
Performance >>>> Everything
You are what your Parse or your RIO says you are and in that world everything should be either balanced or you GTFO and you reroll a Fire Mage or w/e the flavor of the month is. Yeah, you will whine that it needs to be faster not locked behind grind but you will inevitably do it!
If Shadowlands is on the same boat as Legion and BFA which, lets be realistic, will be , it means that we as players, in order to have fun and be able to compete we have to get to play the most optimum specc, covenants and everything, otherwise we will either quit or reroll, it depends how much invested on the team we are playing with are, i personally i am not invested that much and i would quit as i did with BFA.
In and ideal -for me- WoW covenants should be a very interesting thing to have and lock you behind and i would also welcome more drastic changes but i am sure that i am not the target audience any more and that is why i would pick Performance over everything in Shadowlands, as everyone will and i am not gonna do the same mistake that i did in BFA.
As a final note, i would like to add that WoW nowadays is an entirely new genre and it is a very interesting topic to talk about, I would say that that it is a Multiplayer Online Instanced PVE&P game (the open world is there, only, to keep the grinding alive )
No, they got rid of the old talent trees because they were too lazy to keep adding rows and fix the boring talents in the system. The WotLK DK trees are what every class should have looked like going forward. Instead they sucked all the life out of classes and mimicked diablo 3, which was already being lambasted for it's absurdly shallow systems compared to its predecessor.
I just watched the latest Preach video. I still don't understand why he's hell bent on insisting that RPG is story only. Since he's the representative for the mythic raiding community I can only assume that they all believe that otherwise they would've corrected him.
Your character is just as important as narrative and story, if not more important. I wish they would stop trying to change the definition of RPG games to exclude building your character.
RPGs have nothing to do with cosmetics. RPG are about character progression both in power and in-depth. RPG means Role Playing as in "Playing a specific role"
WoW hasn't had actual character progression for going on the 3rd expansion and you realize subs are also, way way down. WoD had 10 million players
WoW, has ceased all actual power and depth progression in BfA. Unless you call a Paladin shooting random laserbeams from his necklace as character depth.
Covenants are pretty cool. But player power being tied to them is the wrong direction. They should've focused adding new specs for existing classes or alternative play styles within each spec.
I would never call WoW a real RPG any longer unless you are a RPer.
Theyre role players what did you expect? As long it makes their toon looks good for their standards so they can mantain their role play bonner while looking at their characters nothing matters. Even screwing a spec over a trivial change like 2 hand frost dk so they can BUT MAH RP AS ARTHAS!!! I WANN BE THE LUCH KING!!.
Lilithvia Thread Directory| Go Utes!
Do you really think all those great rpgs that were played solo limited you to st or aoe?
Did you not notic the pattern where one person controlling multiple units could have them specialise but they still had a plethora of choices?
Rpg was never for "you sre single target aaahhh suffer your choice."
This is an mmorpg which is another gender as well. Evolution in the game has given flexibility. And flexibility differs from full on change class wherever.
It is a joke that we talk about choices that matter on gameplay when Lore is butchered like that and things like logistics are non existant.
- - - Updated - - -
I will give a more consistent answer cause i was in the bathroom.
Preach argued about the way player choice and character role is directly entangled with the cosmetic AND the power side. That did not occur in rpgs in the way its happening now. Stories had aditional options around your characters choices or class or race but its still a lore platform to add replayability and break the monotony of replays. Core class mechanics were their own and at most had spinn off storylines that did not say: now you dont save the world, now you conquer it.
Covenants go too far in both directions and his preach argued against ion's declared intent: that they return to rpg by messing with mechanics-AND ONLY mechanics as the story is dogshit, has been dogshit, they dont really spend time adressing that (OH MY! WHY IS THAT YOU SUPPOSE???) and create a combat-lore relationship, only the only value of the lore is to limit the ability selection.
Yes class is theme and character progression is an rpg element. MMORPG is NOT the same as a single player rpg, just like a tactical squad rpg like xcom is not alike witcher. So those bullshit comparisons are hyperboles or flat out dishonesty.
I have been crying for better rpg elements over the years. As better class hall stories for some of them. As more cosmetics that have to do with the theme like the backpack. As more nuanced class quests and things like an area for the thrall-anduin alliance and or for example a quest for warlocks when garosh took the warchief mantle as they would have been chased out.
Character building is not saying: Jack took the ST covenant and lina took the AOE. And the whole reasoning Ion was claiming was that lina should have an advantage over jack on a role simply due to a talent choice that is exclusive with another one.
He used THAT as a guideline for their "rpg" design.
RPG is 100 things and they take the 10% and butcher it and present us with it.
I have been playing rpg since 1995 and i can tell you i feel shit that wow does not respect its lore. This last thing? Is a joke, and a worse joke is how people eat it up.
There is not a problem with character choices. There is a problem with char choice reaching and overtaking single player rpgs.Try that covenant shit in baldurs gate or dnd. Just try it lmao, what do you think will happen?
Last edited by Popokolara; 2020-08-01 at 12:36 PM.