Covenant Abilities... why didn't they just...

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Link the Armory, because Im still not buying it..

I don't have any characters with a relevant armory my pve play has fallen causal due to a lack of time/interest in shadowlands and most of bfa. my friend group has stayed the same though some still raiding in either shadowlands or tbc other taking there same mind sets to other games we play together (looking at you stellaris).

[Swnem]

I'm actually really hoping they do this for next expansion. Every class gets a new talent row with 3 of the covenant abilities.

They won't. Their point for these systems is so they throw them out at the end of the expansion rather than let classes repertoires increase.
Only a few might survive and become talents.
I would say divine toll, Abomination limb, convoke the spirits are some that might become talents in replacement of weaker unused ones cause they look iconic to the classes and use silloutes or abilities that already exist in the class.

[Kralljin]

The player base is/was too embedded in the spreadsheet/raidbots methods of decision making on how to play a character in an RPG for this type of power choice.

I mean, WoW was never that heavy on the story / fantasy / immersion approach to begin with and in my opinion, favoring the gameplay approach over more "subjective RPG elements" has been a pretty consistent change across all expansions.
One expansion simply changing that, while retaining the pure gameplay over fantasy focus on almost every other avenue, was bound to fail.
Blizzard has painted this house in red for years, now decide to paint one wall blue and guess what, the house now looks worse because the color of one wall clashes horribly with the rest.

Please, stop pretending that because of Covenants WoW has somehow made a banging return to its RPG roots, Classic in my opinion beats Shadowlands in almost every regard as far as "RPG Elements" are concerned.

[Thestrawman]

Good thing we have smart people like you to tell them they're dummy dums all the time. It'd be a shame if Blizzard developers went more than a second or two without being reminded how monumentally stupid they are.

Nice ad hominem. Page me when you've got a real argument.

/Tenchars.

[Devilyaki]

If anything, the player characters are some of the crappiest heroes ever. Up till cataclysm, it was a learning experience for the classes, kind of like growing up and learning new things a long the way. Since then? They've forgotten most of what they've learned, much of the stuff that made them that class in the first place. What kind of a mage learns spells, and what it is to be a mage in 6 years; only to spend the next 10 forgetting much of their life ever happening?

The blizzard gods give and the blizzard gods take away.. and take away and take away.. lol
Remember the lesson of Panda land of why do you fight, ya that didn’t last long lol

[Ethas]

At this point, asking that question is just being disingenuous or wilfully ignorant.

Whether you agree with that or not, the devs' vision was that covenants were to be this semi-permanent choice with an assortment of gameplay features tied to them. They did not want to just give you abilities to switch whenever you wanted. They wanted to go the RPG route, but the vocal minority rebelled because they were conditioned to chase the meta.

So much this. This is why the game can't change for the good. As long as devs remove convenience features people complain. Yet it is these convenience features that make the game bad.
Hell, they can't even experiment with their own game. Maybe in the end we would get something better, but alas.

[Echocho]

At this point, asking that question is just being disingenuous or wilfully ignorant.

Whether you agree with that or not, the devs' vision was that covenants were to be this semi-permanent choice with an assortment of gameplay features tied to them. They did not want to just give you abilities to switch whenever you wanted. They wanted to go the RPG route, but the vocal minority rebelled because they were conditioned to chase the meta.

For once I agree with them. The WoW community is way too focused on being optimal 100% of the time, completely changing your loadout between trash packs.

RPGs to me are about building your character to fit your playstyle in a way that makes it fun to play and not have people demanding that you play in the way that they want.

Granted Blizzard isn't helping since there's such a huge gap between the best way to play and the "fun" way to play. If the difference was something like 5% between the worst setup and the best setup I don't think it would be as big of a deal because personal skill can easily make it so that you perform worse with the optimal setup.

[Wuusah]

Because people would complain about the lack of covenant identity, laziness on blizzards end for not wanting to create more than 4 spells, etc etc. Can't win either way

Since when has Blizzard cared about player complains? They do what they do because they feel like doing it. Covenants have been the way they are because Blizzard wanted to make it like that. They wanted those limitations. Only a mass exodus of players and lawsuits made them rethink that. They don't give a damn about player complaints. They care about money and only money.

[Kralljin]

Hell, they can't even experiment with their own game. Maybe in the end we would get something better, but alas.

Considering they did very similiar things in Legion and BfA, maybe a "live experiment" should yield results after the 3rd iteration.

Disregarding Corruption here, which also was "an experiment", which turned out to be pretty broken.

[Elias1337]

I mean most classes had 90% + of their population as the same covenants it's time to stop calling them a minority..

A loud minority cried "we want 90s era text rps" blizzard paid the price for ignoring the majority of its playerbase

Yeah except players are not bored becouse of covenant skills. It just took blame. Look you can free swap now and players are still bored. LFR, difficulty levels, mythic+, crossrealm, sharding, lfg, bad story writing, power inflation, boosting and way more had way way more impact on players fun than some covenant choice.

- - - Updated - - -

So much this. This is why the game can't change for the good. As long as devs remove convenience features people complain. Yet it is these convenience features that make the game bad.
Hell, they can't even experiment with their own game. Maybe in the end we would get something better, but alas.

This what happens when you listen to entilted whiny playerbase. Imagine having covinience ruining your game but players cry when you took it away. Even when you explain all the dynamics what causing covinience features and all the harm on sour game they still whine and blame features or lack of content on why game isnt fun. Even when it have literaly nothing to do with it.

[Amnaught]

In City of Heroes, they literally remade all of the powers at one point so you could literally just pick any two colors and it would work.

They should do something similar in WoW, though obviously limiting it to unlocks. Wouldve been awesome as part of the Renown system to unlock recolors like this to basic spells from every spec, and if they made the effects in such a way that they could just drag-and-drop colors, they could add these glyphs basically infinitely. So like a sin-red Consecration, or blue light and drust magic for priests, literally just recoloring existing spells one at a time.

[Ryzeth]

No, you'd still need >50%. A majority always has to be more than half (i.e. no other individual group could possibly be bigger; exactly half is not a majority). A plurality is simply the largest group.

Can... Can you not read? I literally said more than half... Thank you for saying exactly what I just said, I guess?

Also half the total (for a single option) is a majority, if there is more than two options. If A has 20%, B has 30% and C has 50% ... C has the majority. If there are 4 parties running in an election, where the first 3 combined gets 50% and the 4th gets 50% ... 4th has majority vote, and wins. This is how math works.

[Pakheth]

TBH, this has been one of the big frustrations I have with the current state of the game. For at least 3 expansions now, my character has not grown at all. He only gets temporary powers and then moves to the next expansion having learned absolutely nothing for the past 6+ years. That's a great way to make a game stale.

I have to agree. Having to say goodbye to abilities I loved every expansion because they were only temporary leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The last expansion we got something and kept it(apart from the total rewamp in Legion) was what, MoP? Iirc WoD started the pruning. It just haven't been as fun reaching max level anymore because nothing new is waiting for you at the top.

[Azadina]

In City of Heroes, they literally remade all of the powers at one point so you could literally just pick any two colors and it would work.

They should do something similar in WoW, though obviously limiting it to unlocks. Wouldve been awesome as part of the Renown system to unlock recolors like this to basic spells from every spec, and if they made the effects in such a way that they could just drag-and-drop colors, they could add these glyphs basically infinitely. So like a sin-red Consecration, or blue light and drust magic for priests, literally just recoloring existing spells one at a time.

If they were to do recolored spells, unlocked something like legion artifact tints...I mean...I swear to you blizzard, I'll pay next 10 years sub immediately. Just for that.

[Pakheth]

Am I crazy or couldn't the roleplay have been handled with just the unique stories, weapons, armor, mounts, and hub? Why did RPG necessitate power constraints for the color Covenant you chose?
"I threw in my lot with these guys so now I live with them and go on adventures with them and dress like them - but it also handicaps my performance in endgame because without hamstringing my performance, its not 'RP'".

Let's not forget we've also already got things like talents, specs, race, faction, gear, enchants, etc to choose from for RPG elements. So why lock/split up the new abilities/power for players behind really steep grinds in the name of something that we already had in spades?

There was no reason to embed the borrowed power systems in the Covenants.
They offered plenty of meaningful trade offs as is (before they made everything useable across all characters thus completing shattering any "MEANINGFUL RPG CHOICES") by restricting their stories and aesthetics.

I guess that is why Legions class order halls worked so much better, since all the RPG elements were linked to your class and spec and therefore didn't interfere with gameplay in the same way. Sure some class specs underperformed but that happened every expansion and always changed around. It was only hampered by the early grind.

But I agree it would have been perfectly fine to have Convenants if they weren't tied to character power and instead only visuals and lore. People feeling they are forced to play specific ways to perform is a deep rooted problem in WoW's player culture. Makes you wonder if WoW would be a better experience if you had no way of seeing how well you performed stats wise something ala what FFXIV does.

[Rucati]

I have to agree. Having to say goodbye to abilities I loved every expansion because they were only temporary leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The last expansion we got something and kept it(apart from the total rewamp in Legion) was what, MoP? Iirc WoD started the pruning. It just haven't been as fun reaching max level anymore because nothing new is waiting for you at the top.

This is such a weird criticism to me. The game would be absolutely horrible if you kept your abilities from one expansion to the next, for starters you'd have about 500 abilities by this point, but it would also be boring to just be using the same skills for years on end.

The game is so much better when each expansion gives the player new skills, and that couldn't happen if they never took them away.

[Puthred]

That's... not how math works, 50% is not a majority, let alone a "massive" one. You are also desperately trying to goal post shift from the original claim, which was that it was a vocal minority who were up in arms about being forced into a meta choice, not that people who pick the meta are a minority.

That's... exactly how math works. 50% out of four choices is a pretty big majority.

[Pakheth]

This is such a weird criticism to me. The game would be absolutely horrible if you kept your abilities from one expansion to the next, for starters you'd have about 500 abilities by this point, but it would also be boring to just be using the same skills for years on end.

The game is so much better when each expansion gives the player new skills, and that couldn't happen if they never took them away.

Well I'm sorry I enjoyed playing from Vanilla to MoP when we did just that. I loved MoP gameplay because we had a lot of variety in buttons to use. The gameplay nowadays is so slow and bland because you have rotations with only like 3-4 buttons max.

I never agreed with the button bloat idea some people have complained about. I much rather enjoyed the streamlining of abilities like making all hunter traps into one button with a drop-down, or that all tracking options became part of the minimap menu.

And I absolutely hate having to relearn all the classes constantly and when I find a class I like to play they change it and I have to start looking around again. And I say that as someone who usually have most classes at max level.

[Rucati]

Well I'm sorry I enjoyed playing from Vanilla to MoP when we did just that. I loved MoP gameplay because we had a lot of variety in buttons to use. The gameplay nowadays is so slow and bland because you have rotations with only like 3-4 buttons max.

I never agreed with the button bloat idea some people have complained about. I much rather enjoyed the streamlining of abilities like making all hunter traps into one button with a drop-down, or that all tracking options became part of the minimap menu.

And I absolutely hate having to relearn all the classes constantly and when I find a class I like to play they change it and I have to start looking around again. And I say that as someone who usually have most classes at max level.

If you're only using 3-4 buttons you're either doing something very wrong, or you're doing very easy content. I have about 20 skills hotkeyed that I use all the time on my HPal, and more on other classes.

Not to mention you said you enjoyed Vanilla? Where classes quite literally used one button to do their entire DPS rotation? TBC? Where DPS classes had less than 3 skills to use in raid? Either you're heavy into nostalgia or you're lying to yourself lol.

How do hunter traps all being in one button drop-down help? You still need to hotkey all of them individually. Having them in a dropdown menu does literally nothing but make the spell book look a bit better.

Also I find it very weird that you find the gameplay slow and bland because you only have 3-4 buttons on rotation, but yet you dislike having to relearn classes. If I only use 3-4 buttons on a class I'm pretty sure I could relearn that class in under 5 minutes.

[Hitei]

Can... Can you not read?

The irony being that,

That's... not how math works, 50% is not a majority

Uh. If something has any number more than 50%

you completely failed at reading in your initial post. Also

the first 3 combined gets 50% and the 4th gets 50% ... 4th has majority vote

No. The 4th has the most votes and wins, which is a completely different thing than having most votes, which is what a majority is, and by definition requires something be more than half. If the first three combined got 49% and the 4th got 51%, then it would be a majority, but 50% is simply half and a situation where it got more votes, not the majority of them.