Blizzard, Shadowlands, Covenant, thoughts.

[Flauxx]

There has been a lot of discussion about the balance and implications of the covenant abilities and a clash of their intent and how that impacts competitive play.

First I want to define a few things from my point of view. In WoW the systems I describe as competitive are Rated PVP, Mythic+, and Mythic raiding. While I respect that some people may compete in other content it is not competitive in a meaningful way.

From my perspective it is fair to say that most of the criticism and complaints come from competitive players since they are the ones that are affected in a negative way by covenant abilities. Not to imply that they think or that I think covenant abilities are bad or shouldn’t exist, or should be hot swappable.

This issue for me comes from the fact that these abilities will define your performance in a meaningful way. They will not be a 1 or 2 percent shift, they will be closer to 10 percent, maybe more. Attached to an ability you cannot change easily, and will end up defining your classes desire in a competitive environment.

Before going forward I’ll elaborate on something so people understand. For me Building my character as strong as I can is important, doing as much damage as mathematically possible is important. Doing research and discovering and learning about what I have to do to be better at my class and as a player is fun. I have fun min-maxing and sweating. So when a system that influences that fun I get defensive. It is up to you whether you agree or disagree but I do not think your way of having fun is wrong.

I want to draw a correlation to covenant abilities that helps me with what I think is the solution to this problem. Torghast meaningfully plays with and changes the way you play and effects your character. Creating fun little instances of play that you experience inside its closed ecosystem. That is my solution and one that preserves covenants for everyone. They should exist within their closed ecosystem.

Competitive Wow content is influenced too much by things that are not a choice. Corruption quadrupling your dps with no player input except playing 400+ hundred hours. To a less extent azurite traits and essences. At least in some cases those changed or made you think about how you played. If competitive content existed in its closed ecosystem it would be more meaningful to participate in it.

To be clear I do not think everything should be excluded from the competitive content. Just things that are designed to provide large swings in character power and are meant to be meaningful choices. I know someone will mention legendaries, these should exist in competitive because it is reasonable to expect you will have all, or at least all of the meaningful ones fairly quickly. Able to swap and change these to tune your performance the same way a player would with talents or spec.

I hope my thoughts were clear, my main point was people would discuss the idea of competitive being in a closed system and not devolve into. “Just pick what you want, it doesn’t matter.” Because it is raid position defining, it does matter. When you are surrounded by like-minded players that want to get every single dps they can and push progression raiding. Everyone has the same mindset and to entertain the thought that because you picked a covenant that loses you 10% dps on a fight, but you had to because otherwise you’d lose 13% on other fights. You just get mad.

I can see it now, people will have to maintain 2-4 alts of the same class in order to swap for certain fights. For me there was a hope that Shadowlands was Blizzard shifting from this design philosophy of; make sure players always have to play, 18 hours a day every day endlessly.

(Note, this is all in the context of being a competitive player. I’m not talking about casually raiding Heroic 2-3 nights a week with friends.)

But they are seemingly just shifting where the gatcha is. Instead of it being in slot machines, or in insane power-creep. It is in alts. It still looks like they want me to play 18 hours a day and never play any other game but theirs. I just don’t want that anymore.

WoW has borrowed from FF over the years, but always avoided borrowing the one thing that has made it my main mmo for so long. It is okay to not play. There is plenty of optional content, and cosmetic content. The competitive scene is a closed ecosystem and your character is BiS in a maximum of 11 weeks. Most being done in 6-8 weeks. I can compete on fflogs, I can do prog raiding. All the while I can also stop playing the game.

Shadowlands had my interest in the Alpha, but every new update every new system. I am further and further away from buying it. I’ll just keep doing my FF Ultimates, and Savage raids, doing the casual stuff when I feel like it and NOT PLAY THE GAME when I feel like it. Without the game punishing me.

If it was up to me none of that garbage would exist and there would be 2 raid difficulties, normal, mythic. LFR would just put you in a normal group. But I’m always for pushing player growth and trying to have players learn to perform better.

So I want to discuss what current competitive players think. Do you want Competitive to be a closed ecosystem so you don't have to play 18 hours a day everyday to maintain relevant character power to participate? What would a better solution be to you?

[Kralljin]

I personally view it as the probably the biggest issue of the game that Blizzard has really lost track of any sort of target audience and nowadays attempts to cater to every audience they could possibly fit into the game.

It is very difficult for a game to maintain a coherence, when there's content which requires 300+ attempts from people that basically play this game as a job while at the same time, content within the same frame exists that's basically designed to be played without having done any research on your own class or the content itself.

The issue by catering to every audience is that it creates the expectations to work for them in their own right.
If you have a Mode such as Arena, which awards one of the most prestigous mounts within the game (Gladiator Mounts), then people who primarily focus on Arena obviously expect a certain variety within the Meta and ease of access to in order to be competitive (gear).

Ion saying that "WoW is not an E-sport" while his employer hosts tournaments for Arena and M+ at the same time strikes me as weird to be honest.


If Blizzard wants to double down on the RPG portion of the game, then they should do it, but to me this is simply at odds with a lot of aspects that are currently within the game.
The more "competitive" side of the game isn't solely to blame here, but that's another story.

[Krakan]

I personally view it as the probably the biggest issue of the game that Blizzard has really lost track of any sort of target audience and nowadays attempts to cater to every audience they could possibly fit into the game.

It is very difficult for a game to maintain a coherence, when there's content which requires 300+ attempts from people that basically play this game as a job while at the same time, content within the same frame exists that's basically designed to be played without having done any research on your own class or the content itself.

The issue by catering to every audience is that it creates the expectations to work for them in their own right.
If you have a Mode such as Arena, which awards one of the most prestigous mounts within the game (Gladiator Mounts), then people who primarily focus on Arena obviously expect a certain variety within the Meta and ease of access to in order to be competitive (gear).

Ion saying that "WoW is not an E-sport" while his employer hosts tournaments for Arena and M+ at the same time strikes me as weird to be honest.


If Blizzard wants to double down on the RPG portion of the game, then they should do it, but to me this is simply at odds with a lot of aspects that are currently within the game.
The more "competitive" side of the game isn't solely to blame here, but that's another story.

I find it weird the " competitive side" is ever to blame...

This IS OUR HOUSE. We are not moving towards you...you keep advancing on us.

[Kralljin]

I find it weird the " competitive side" is ever to blame...

As said, i don't think the competitive side carries all the blame, but in certain areas, i'm not going to deny their influence.

Look towards PvP, outside of 3v3 Arena, it's a complete mess, Healers being unkillable because dampening is nonexistant in Battlegrounds.
Why does every dps need an interrupt? Because they're shit in Arena without one.

Or M+, why do you think every class suddenly needs to have "good" AoE?
Because any Dps spec that struggles with AoE Dps fights an uphill battle in M+.

Take a look towards Resto Druid, why didn't they get any buffs they absolutely need in order to be actually okay in a raid enviroment?
Because they dominate the M+ healer scene.

I think Mythic raiding at very least can get away on class design front because the larger raidsize allows unique tools to exist, but within those smallsized competitive modes such as Arena or M+, one cannot wave away the homogenization that has happened in order to keeps things balanced there.

This IS OUR HOUSE. We are not moving towards you...you keep advancing on us.

If people who play this game as their job require over 300+ attempts to overcome a certain encounter, i'd say that encounter wasn't designed with the average Mythic raider in mind.

And that comes from someone who is a hardcore raider since Cata.

[Puremallace]

I mean obviously Ion acknowledged that they know there are balance issues. What I hope is they have not set themselves up for failure by saying "yeah we know it is not balanced right now but we will balance it closer to launch" because the backlash is going to be rough.

Honestly listening to Preach speak with Sloot and this resignment to the fact that there is no chance this system will ever be remotely balanced. My biggest fear on the day they announced this at Blizzcon and I posted about it on the WoW forums was that they would tie player power to what could be the greatest cosmetic system introduced into an MMO since transmog.

What makes me scream is this obsession with temporary power. Why in gods name is there not just another talent row with the Covenant class abilities? I mean my god why do they do this over and over and over again. It is already going to feel HORRIBLE going from Azerite gear, Essences and Corruption abilities down to a bare class that is busted with a GCD that I cannot stand and then being forced to pick a path plus grind out the same damn powers I just had.

Best way I can word it is I fear bad decisions will overshadow the ShadowLands which is the first real original lore content we have gotten in WoW in years.

[Zestyz]

I mean obviously Ion acknowledged that they know there are balance issues. What I hope is they have not set themselves up for failure by saying "yeah we know it is not balanced right now but we will balance it closer to launch" because the backlash is going to be rough.

I'll be surprised if Ion actually holds true to his statement about reversing their policy on swapping covenants if they realize it doesn't work. Even when he said that to Sloot in the interview, you could tell Sloot had no faith in them. It's actually impossible. I mean hell, I doubt they could balance the 144 covenant abilities by themselves, let alone the other systems on top of that. They struggled with corruptions just 5 months ago, and there's what, 64 of them and they aren't class/spec specific. I'm not even bashing them when I say that. I have no doubt it is hard to balance things in a MMO, as WoW has never been balanced. So yeah, I have no idea why Ion is trying so hard to hold onto this when it's clearly never going to work. Just lock transmog and what not to covenants, and you can unlock the abilities to use in some kind of quasi glyph system.

I see all the optimism that Blizzard has changed because they are listening to feedback, but... it's still the same team working on Shadowlands. Seeing good changes is awesome, but I can feel the bad decisions have yet to be seen. It's still Ion, who is still stubbornly defending his stupid GCD change that no one likes. And I hope we won't see design philosophies that intentionally time gate to keep people subbed longer, but I won't hold my breath.