No Preach...

[Squishlee]

My rebuttal would be, this is my viewpoint. As shared by millions of others. Preaches viewpoint is in the minority. Does not devalue his personal opinion, it just means most of us want story vs mechanics.

This is funny to me, because out of the ~50-75 people in guild who I play with regularly, which include everything from people who just log in to do dailies to people who farm the hell out of achievements/mounts/etc. to people who push raiding and m+, I have yet to talk to a single one that thinks it should be "story over mechanics" when it comes to covenants. I don't think you understand how much of a minority people like yourself who are die hard about story/RPG being the most important thing really are.

[Neuroticaine]

My rebuttal would be, this is my viewpoint. As shared by millions of others. Preaches viewpoint is in the minority. Does not devalue his personal opinion, it just means most of us want story vs mechanics.

Where is your evidence that that Preach's views are the minority?

Anecdotally, literally no one I know likes how the Covenant system is being implemented, and as far as the forums goes, is pretty consistently looked upon poorly.

[Cthulhu fhtagn]

The issue has always existed though, there's always a class or spec that perform's the best. Now there's just quadruple amount of options. Changing a covenant is still easier than rerolling classes and having more than 1 character has always been mandatory at the very top end for most of the top raiders. As someone who nowdays only plays a couple of characters i don't really see any change in the grand scale of things, if there's some really OP combo people are gonna play it for a tier and thats about it.

[Bbrigham]

I do love the argument who's so quick to invoke "well the majority is behind me" with exactly 0 evidence to substantiate that point.

Arguing failure 101

I would expand on it to say, looking at graphs, the majority of wows player base are NOT as competitive as those in Preachs camp. We care about the story. Not inching our dps .004 percent more.

[Tyze]

Ok thanks for giving me this information

[klogaroth]

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of email.

What it does is it takes a message that you have for someone, and it delivers it straight to their email inbox, so they can know it's meant for them and read it.

I know it's hard to keep up with technology these days, just thought I'd let you know about this new development, because it's probably more efficient than leaving messages for people on forums and hoping that they come across them.

[Fenzha]

I would expand on it to say, looking at graphs, the majority of wows player base are NOT as competitive as those in Preachs camp. We care about the story. Not inching our dps .004 percent more.

You do realise people through all difficulties try to perform better with their characters.
That some classes/specs have abilities from certain covenants that are just dead buttons no matter how much they may like that covenant

Its not just an issue of the 1% trying to do that extra couple dps.

[skorgg]

I would expand on it to say, looking at graphs, the majority of wows player base are NOT as competitive as those in Preachs camp. We care about the story. Not inching our dps .004 percent more.

Being competitive or not has nothing to do with how terrible the core feature is. Are you really this stubborn?

[NihilSustinet]

My rebuttal would be, this is my viewpoint. As shared by millions of others. Preaches viewpoint is in the minority. Does not devalue his personal opinion, it just means most of us want story vs mechanics.

Do you have the metrics to prove this? seems like a bold claim.

[Toybox]

I'll care about the RPG elements more when the covenant I'm the most attracted to isn't a good 20%+ behind the others, while also being the absolute worst ability of the 4 to use.

[klogaroth]

But in the fact of it matters WHY WE FIGHT. - PANDAREN EMPEROR

That trailer was narrated by Chen Stormstout.

[Sluvs]

It's an important choice which cause to fight for? to put our power behind?
You know just because we lock ourselves to 1 we still fight for all of them, they are friendly for the most part and work with each other.

Pretty much everything this important choice is supposed represent is opposed by how they have written the story and designed SL.
All it does is inconvenience people that care about character performance and promote the "it doesn't affect me so i don't care if it affects you" mentality.

To be fair, just because you have to choose does not mean that the other choice has to oppose yours. It happened with aldors and scryers, but this is to whom you wnat to pledge allegiance with. Just because you pledge allegiance to a lord does not mean you have to oppose the other, hell they may be in friendly terms even. What changes is that you are going to have a deeper connection with the one you pledged.

[Demsi]

I really dont see how me being able to freely swap between covenant spells ruins the game for others.

[Depakote]

Youre wrong. And here's why. I watched your most recent video, about the covenant "imbalances ". Heres the thing. This is an mmoRPG. A roleplaying game. What makes a great role playing game, is CHOICE. Our character makes an important decision, on which cause to fight for. Which to put their strength behind. And, to paraphrase the immortal Syndrome,"When all choices are the same...they don't matter". Preach, your words: you don't care about the story. You don't care about transmog. Without those things, as said by a Blizzard Game Developer, the game is basically a math equation. That's NOT an RPG. Speaking as someone who has made the Lore my area of expertise-as you have made the mechanics-Choice is important. It is VITAL. You, and those in your camp, want all abilities, all flavor abilities, all the things that make up CHOICE-to be irrelevant. Its like going to a restaurant, and looking at the menu, and no matter what you order, its all the same grey goop. It makes PERFECT sense for the Night Fae to be able to move vines and such in a dungeon. It speaks to lore, to who they are as a people, and is flavor. I am not a Mythic raider. I've raided Mythic, but its not my cup. I love the lore of the game, PASSIONATELY. And Transmog-what I wear, whom I represent-it matters. The powers given, the abilities inferred-it matters that only one covenant has the blink ability, or the spirit animal ability, or even an owl butler-if all covenant had the SAME things, they would be the SAME GREY GOO No, Preach, I wholeheartedly, passionately disagree. This isn't aspersions cast on your knowledge of the game play mechanics. This is a player who has that level of knowledge of the Lore. The Story. Which, you said you do NOT care about. So, to close, yes. Choice matters. Not in the minescule dps increase. But in the fact of it matters WHY WE FIGHT. - PANDAREN EMPEROR

That's a big wall of text to basically say nothing. Congratulations?

[Raone]

Youre wrong. And here's why. I watched your most recent video, about the covenant "imbalances ". Heres the thing. This is an mmoRPG. A roleplaying game. What makes a great role playing game, is CHOICE. Our character makes an important decision, on which cause to fight for. Which to put their strength behind. And, to paraphrase the immortal Syndrome,"When all choices are the same...they don't matter". Preach, your words: you don't care about the story. You don't care about transmog. Without those things, as said by a Blizzard Game Developer, the game is basically a math equation. That's NOT an RPG. Speaking as someone who has made the Lore my area of expertise-as you have made the mechanics-Choice is important. It is VITAL. You, and those in your camp, want all abilities, all flavor abilities, all the things that make up CHOICE-to be irrelevant. Its like going to a restaurant, and looking at the menu, and no matter what you order, its all the same grey goop. It makes PERFECT sense for the Night Fae to be able to move vines and such in a dungeon. It speaks to lore, to who they are as a people, and is flavor. I am not a Mythic raider. I've raided Mythic, but its not my cup. I love the lore of the game, PASSIONATELY. And Transmog-what I wear, whom I represent-it matters. The powers given, the abilities inferred-it matters that only one covenant has the blink ability, or the spirit animal ability, or even an owl butler-if all covenant had the SAME things, they would be the SAME GREY GOO No, Preach, I wholeheartedly, passionately disagree. This isn't aspersions cast on your knowledge of the game play mechanics. This is a player who has that level of knowledge of the Lore. The Story. Which, you said you do NOT care about. So, to close, yes. Choice matters. Not in the minescule dps increase. But in the fact of it matters WHY WE FIGHT. - PANDAREN EMPEROR

If you actually watched the entire video you would see where he talks about the RPG element doesn't exist. There is no meaningful choice in the story and it comes out of left field. These are 4 factions that are not at war with each other and have been at peace and only some decenting factions are attacking each other but will all have to come together to defeat the jailer, so why are we choosing one? Even the faction story lines themselves have nothing to do with having to choose one and only one, it literally makes no sense why you can only help one Covenant, Blizzard has done a terrible job at given a reason why you can only choose one and not help the other three. Your basically choose between 4 storylines that are self contained within their Covenant. Also when you choose a Covenant it doesn't reflect that in the world, the World Quests are the same, the main story is the same, and the maw is the same. The only meaningful choice in choosing a Covenant is what ability you want, and what storyline you want to watch out of the 4. It's basically like the beginning of BFA when you get the map of what zone you want to quest in but you can only choose 1 of the 3 and that's it, and here is some tact on ability.

There is no RPG element to this choice, and once you made the choice it doesn't do anything meaningful to the world/story for it to exist. We made a meaningful choice back in the day, it was choosing the alliance or horde, it was choosing what class to be. Those were both meaningful choices that impacted our game. This however has no meaning except the player power we get attached to it.

Also this has never existed in WoW in any form before, so why is it so important now?

[Adamas102]

As a DM for 20 years, if my Paladin of Bane can give me a good explanation of why he should have Sunlight, ill give it to him. You picked a shitty comparison because D&D the most important rule is "Rule of Fun". The DM is not supposed to be a Rule Nazi, they are supposed to foster fun and storytelling.

Blizzard shouldn't be a choice Nazi, they are making a game and they should foster what is fun.

That maybe be how you like to run your games, but the bolded is not "the most important rule" of D&D. The rules are there for a reason, and the DM's job is to manage them in addition to the storytelling. Your players may enjoy playing at YOUR table, but if your ruling is to say yes to everything they want to have and do then it's not the kind of game I'd want to play.

I'm willing to bend the rules in my games as well when the "Rule of Cool" comes into play, but I have also said no plenty of times when something doesn't fit the setting, tone, or rule set that has been laid out. The key is that the players know what they're getting into. In the example the two of you used, I might allow that Paladin of Bane to eventually attain the ability to cast daylight, but he might have to jump through a few hoops to do so because I do run a game where choices have consequences.

As I've said before though, WoW is very weak on RPG elements so them wanting to lean into it with Covenants seems a bit weird. It doesn't bother me as far as a design choice goes, but I can see why people are upset.

[Redhell]

I would expand on it to say, looking at graphs, the majority of wows player base are NOT as competitive as those in Preachs camp. We care about the story. Not inching our dps .004 percent more.

The issue is you're ignoring the reality that the vast majority of players you speak of don't read MMO-C or reddit or the official forums, and probably don't know even know who Preach is, yet he addressed that very point in the video and he believes that those players will be disappointed when they find out they can't switch their covenant on a whim.

The guy you are accusing of speaking for the majority actually seems to care more about the real majority then you do. You just want the game your way, everyone else be damned.

I am willing to bet Preach is right and Blizzard will even partially unlock the covenants before CoN is released. You confident enough to bet otherwise?

[Marxman]

My rebuttal would be, this is my viewpoint. As shared by millions of others. Preaches viewpoint is in the minority. Does not devalue his personal opinion, it just means most of us want story vs mechanics.

You have absolutely no way of knowing which group is in the minority. My anecdotal evidence would suggest that most of the "RPG" type of players are either on Classic or quit a long time ago. WoW isn't really an RPG anymore, and hasn't been for a very long time.

[OrcsRLame]

I really dont see how me being able to freely swap between covenant spells ruins the game for others.

The argument is that the community will then expect you to conform to the meta and respec your covenant to fit the content in the same way that people expect you to play a good spec/class nowadays.

What the people making this argument don't get is that people will still expect you to have the right covenant for high end content, and if you don't then tough shit, you're not welcome in our group.

We see this in classic all the time. It's piss easy content, yet ret paladins don't get brought to raid even though they can do more than enough damage to meet enrage timers even in Naxx. Sure, you can find a raid as a ret paladin, if you know the raid/guild leader, or you luck into finding the perfect guild, but most ret paladins can't find a raiding guild that will take them purely because their spec is bad and everyone knows it's bad.

Anything that is serious content, namely high m+, high rated arena, mythic raids and heroic raids early in the tier, will be much harder to get into if you're playing a sub optimal covenant, in the exact same way that it's harder to get into m+ as a shadow priest than a mage.

[Schattenlied]

the Lore. The Story.

Problem is, it also doesn't make sense in the story.