I'm maining a class.. not a spec.

[Super Kami Dende]

I think they’ve decided that their target audience is people who want to play hours a day endlessly.

Their target Audience is people who don't whine constantly about their woes of Min/maxing. It's why covenants have gone ahead, because they don't particularly care about People who sim everything and would rather have a bunch of unique different abilities to have fun with.

[orsraunia]

It doesn't need to be fixed though... I'm not frustrated by picking a covenant because I am a functioning member of society and can make choices.

Exactly my point. I am glad you agree with me. Since we are functioning members of society and we can make choices, there's no point for blizzard to limit our choices in weird, counterproductive ways. They can lets us make our choices freely. Choose our covenant, choose our talents, etc.

[kaminaris]

I definitely play a spec and would love to have them put even more restrictions on that.

There is not a single class that I enjoy more than two specs, and even then its probably just ONE class. Other 11 classes is just 1 spec while i hate off-specs with passion.
Good example is lock, I will never play destro or affli even if that meant sitting on bench. Fortunately I can just play different class.

Games where there are no consequences, no choices, no inconveniences and you can't even shoot yourself in foot FUCKING SUCKS.

[TheRevenantHero]

this is just 100% not true, theres no way. I alone pugged kil'jaeden so many times that i had to have played with 1000 different people alone. Theres no chance mere thousands saw kil'jaeden unless i pugged with the majority of them...

Blizzard has actually said in interviews that if LFR was removed, raid tiers would suffer. LFR gives them a reason to keep making cool raids because way more people will see it. They wouldn't see a reason to make interesting raids anymore if only a small percentage of the game same them. Also, they're talking about TBC Kil'jaedan and not Legion Kil'jaedan.

[Caerrona]

Exactly my point. I am glad you agree with me. Since we are functioning members of society and we can make choices, there's no point for blizzard to limit our choices in weird, counterproductive ways. They can lets us make our choices freely. Choose our covenant, choose our talents, etc.

Glad you agree with me, it would be awkward if you didn't seeing as how we get to choose our covenants right now

[Eurhetemec]

I definitely don’t min max. But to raid at a semi competent level, once you hit 120 you had to do that awful legendary chain from the beginning, you needed to do visions to get your legendary up, and you needed to get a bunch of corruptions. It’s a slow, annoying process that takes months.

When I started playing, the game was: hit max, run dungeons for two weeks to get catch up gear, time to raid!

When the hell did you start playing, in the pre-patch for a new expansion?

Literally the only times "hit max, run dungeons for two weeks to get catch up gear, time to raid!" have been true have been in:

A) Late Wrath of the Lich King.

and

B) Some pre-patches.

That I remember anyway. I mean, TBC? No. You need to do a bunch of stuff. Wrath - not initially, but it did become that way. Cataclysm? Nah, you had to eff around with a ton of stuff, particularly reps. MoP - I have no idea I skipped MoP. WoD - nope. Loads to do. Let's not even discuss Garrisons. Legion? You certainly weren't doing "semi-competent" raiding two weeks after charging into the expansion half-way through or w/e. If I misremember, please correct me.

Also, the "awful legendary chain from the beginning" takes like, what, 2-4 hours? So the idea that it's some terrible crime is pretty silly. And that and corruption are specific to 8.3, not true generally in BfA.

As for the thread in general, I find it a bit bizarre, because even the very-negative Youtuber types are saying it'll be drastically easier to have raiding alts in SL than BfA, not harder or as hard.

[Toby451]

Valid concern OP. I feel the same.

They can easily "fix" this by removing the class abilities from covenants and making them available as talents, giving us a new talent row. Covenants have enough going on to feel different and meaningful, even without a unique class ability. Additionally, something like this would make balancing easier for them and would save us enough frustration. Their persistence of not going down that path is troubling to say the least.

To be honest at this point, I dont even really care what they do with covenant abilities. People have cried so much about X, then Y, then Z being mandatory everything that was good has already been nerfed to the ground so hard they all feel weak now (testing from a tank PoV at least). The ones that do still feel good are probably next on the chopping block for nerfs.


"given the choice, players will min/max the fun out of the game" is so true it is comical. Watching people obsess over the smallest of gains when they cant even maximize their base class toolkit is golden.

[valrchron]

I definitely don’t min max. But to raid at a semi competent level, once you hit 120 you had to do that awful legendary chain from the beginning, you needed to do visions to get your legendary up, and you needed to get a bunch of corruptions. It’s a slow, annoying process that takes months.

When I started playing, the game was: hit max, run dungeons for two weeks to get catch up gear, time to raid!

Dude, 2 weeks are more than enough to get good enough gear to start doing mythic raiding. The legendary questline takes maybe 2 hours without the skips. Visions to level the cloak to 5 (the level you need to do the last 2 bosses in Ny'alotha) takes less than an hour. One week of m+ dungeons and you have good enough gear to clear Ny'alotha HC, 2 weeks you should be able to at least do the 3 first bosses in mythic. One of the most common complaints is that Blizzard is handing out loot too easily.

That it'd be more time consuming to get in shape for raids now than it's been before is NOT a valid concern. The one thing that actually is time consuming is to unlock the best essences for the first time. However you get some decent ones from just playing the game, not the BiS ones in all cases, but good enough to, as you said, raid at a semi competent level.


As for the people complaining about the covenants locking you to a spec, get over yourselves. Yes, some covenants are obviously better for some specs. However, playing with a covenant that isn't the best for your current spec won't gimp you so that you can't play the game. I've tried out tons of different specs/covenant combinations in the beta, and you can do all content (PvE at least, never had any interest in PvP so haven't played any of it) in whatever spec/covenant combo you fancy. Chosing the best covenant for your main spec, will not stop you from clearing +15 keys or mythic bosses in your offspec.
The only ones that should really worry about their covenant choice are world first racers, and people pushing really high keys.

A red thread in this discussion has been that they have to keep LFR because not enough people do organized raiding. Yet it's only the top percentages of the small playerbase that do the organized raiding that really have to care about this.

To sum it up from someone who's played lots of beta, Playing in a covenant that isn't BiS for your spec won't be impactful enough that you can't clear all content, unless you go for it competetively. So unless you are going for leaderboards on your offspec, playing in your main specs covenant will be perfectly viable.

[Eurhetemec]

Late Wrath and Cata. Cata had reps but you could get them passively with the tabards. Early Cata dungeon grind was tough but I don’t mind challenge. Late Cata was just hot heroics and into Dragon Soul. I think you had to do something for Therazane but it was relatively trivial.

MoP (after first patch) and WoD were mostly like that too except for the legendary.

Cata's big problem was that the gear you got from Heroic dungeons wasn't really acceptable for raiding (which was funny because you couldn't get much more than that, just a bit from reps and stuff). It certainly wasn't acceptable for Heroic raiding. This was different to late Wrath. Late Wrath, sure, that gear from TotC and the ICC dungeons, was fine for HM Ulduar, Heroic TotGC, ICC and even Heroic ICC if your guild was pretty well-geared generally.

Also, in Cata you couldn't rep-up that fast with the tabards. There just wasn't that much rep in the dungeons. The idea that you had it all done in "two weeks" as you're saying is absolute nonsense unless you were running dungeons literally 8 hours/day. Dungeons which were significantly slower and more tedious, and harder to find competent people for than Wrath, I should add.

I skipped MoP so I'll take your word for it, but WoD absolutely was NOT like that. The sheer amount of grinding and effing around you were expected to do was huge. You certainly couldn't just pop in half-way through the expansion and bing bang boom, two weeks later you're doing Heroic raiding (i.e. "semi-competent" raiding), not unless you got a shit-ton of help.

I think what's confusing the issue here is that, in late Wrath, yes, the catch-up mechanisms and simplicity of stuff, plus TotGC being kind of a joke even on Heroic (when even the half-dumb guild I was in beat Heroic TotGC the first week it was possible to beat it, well...), sure, you could barge in, and two weeks of dungeons (maybe even less) later you could be "semi-competent" raiding (if we see TotGC Heroic as "semi-competent" say, which sounds about right).

So you experienced Wrath from the perspective of arriving late, and then going direct into raiding.

But then what you're describing in Cata, MoP, and WoD, is totally different. It's playing from the beginning of the expansion as normal. Not arriving late and catching up. If you arrived late and tried to catch up in any of those expansions, I think your experience would be very different from what you're describing, except maybe Cata HoT/Dragon Soul. A couple of my friends went back to WoW in later MoP and they certainly didn't find it like late-Wrath in terms of ease-of-catchup.

And I honestly don't think it was that bad in 8.3, compared to any of these eras, in terms of amount of time/effort to catch up. You could certainly gear up completely for Normal and arguably even Heroic raiding in 2 weeks in BfA in 8.3 (you could make a much better case that you couldn't in 8.1, say, but you picked 8.3 as your example).

[TheLucky1]

Implying that spec's aren't full fledged classes compared to a few years ago (combat rotation wise).

[Inoculate]

When the hell did you start playing, in the pre-patch for a new expansion?

Literally the only times "hit max, run dungeons for two weeks to get catch up gear, time to raid!" have been true have been in:

A) Late Wrath of the Lich King.

and

B) Some pre-patches.

That I remember anyway. I mean, TBC? No. You need to do a bunch of stuff. Wrath - not initially, but it did become that way. Cataclysm? Nah, you had to eff around with a ton of stuff, particularly reps. MoP - I have no idea I skipped MoP. WoD - nope. Loads to do. Let's not even discuss Garrisons. Legion? You certainly weren't doing "semi-competent" raiding two weeks after charging into the expansion half-way through or w/e. If I misremember, please correct me.

Also, the "awful legendary chain from the beginning" takes like, what, 2-4 hours? So the idea that it's some terrible crime is pretty silly. And that and corruption are specific to 8.3, not true generally in BfA.

As for the thread in general, I find it a bit bizarre, because even the very-negative Youtuber types are saying it'll be drastically easier to have raiding alts in SL than BfA, not harder or as hard.

You didn't have to murder the poor man.

[cparle87]

this is just 100% not true, theres no way. I alone pugged kil'jaeden so many times that i had to have played with 1000 different people alone. Theres no chance mere thousands saw kil'jaeden unless i pugged with the majority of them...

I was slightly mistaken, it was Kel'thuzad, not Kil'jaeden. Here's the quote. Eh, both start with K, three letters, apostrophe, the rest. M'bad.

"LFR justifies the creation of more raid content when millions of players are able to see content. Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing. The reason Mists of Pandaria is starting with 18 bosses and adding larger raid tiers than we have had previously is because many players are going to see the raids through LFR."

[gutnbrg]

Blizzard has actually said in interviews that if LFR was removed, raid tiers would suffer. LFR gives them a reason to keep making cool raids because way more people will see it. They wouldn't see a reason to make interesting raids anymore if only a small percentage of the game same them. Also, they're talking about TBC Kil'jaedan and not Legion Kil'jaedan.

oh ok if theyre talking about tbc KJ than maybe they are right, i started playing at tbc kharazan, neve really got a change to do sunwell, times were way diff back then. Much harder to find pugs

[Thundering]

I was slightly mistaken, it was Kel'thuzad, not Kil'jaeden. Here's the quote. Eh, both start with K, three letters, apostrophe, the rest. M'bad.

"LFR justifies the creation of more raid content when millions of players are able to see content. Only a few thousand people actually saw Kel'thuzad, but millions saw Deathwing. The reason Mists of Pandaria is starting with 18 bosses and adding larger raid tiers than we have had previously is because many players are going to see the raids through LFR."

If this is true why do they make less raids now than they did in the past when lfr did not exist.

[Uvania]

Yay, go YOU ! ive also "mained" my paladin now since vanilla and i've never been a fan of melee dps and holy has gradually become worse gameplay-wise during the years forcing me to only play protection since cata as "main spec" with a occasional focus on trying to get holy to be fun again or trying retri getting annoyed about other tanks being dipshits wanting to jump into my tanking gear and showing how its done.

[Wuusah]

Blizzard altered the deal. You are maining a spec. Pray that they don't alter it any further.

[Unholyground]

At least some classes feel more like classes again.

[Eurhetemec]

I’m not sure which is worse - MoP and WoD with the legendaries, which was basically run one set of LFR each week, or 8.3. I personally think 8.3 is worse because of essences. Grinding for most essences is even more boring than LFR. In LFR you’re in a group and you’re spending most time fighting and you can do it in one day each week when you have time. Grinding the rep essences meant going back day after day to do quests where most of your time is spent traveling.

Yeah that's a matter of perspective. I find Essences are a lot less awful, but YMMV.

WRT the Cata reps: I had two raid geared toons, pugging all the time, and I never did a daily. I just threw on a tabard for the next pieces I wanted and got them.

Son, my face here is incredibly skeptical. It's obviously not impossible but you must have been running those dungeons over and over so much long after you'd got literally every bit of loot from them (because in early Cata, that's all they offered, shit-tier loot, that includes the Heroic versions - I mean, you took what you could get but fuck).

So here’s my experience:

Late wrath: 2 weeks and you’re in. Fine.
Early Cata: it’s gonna take more than two weeks because the dungeons are hard, but that’s ok. Hard dungeons are fun! Fine.
Late Cata: hot heroics. Two weeks and you’re in.
Early MoP: dailies everywhere. Horrific.
Late MoP: no dailies. Timeless takes 2 weeks, legendary drags on but that’s one small thing. Not great, but better than early MoP.
Early WoD: easy dungeons, no legendary catch up. Getting garrison going took a bit of effort at first but then it was fine.
Late WoD: mythic dungeon grind took a week, then 2 months of LFR legendary catch up.
All of Legion: rng legendary grind that encouraged you to do everything, with very slow/non existent catch up for those behind. Slow catch up on ap.

Then we know what bfa is.

So overall it was Wrath>Cata fairly good, MoP > WoD worse, Legion>BFA atrocious.

Yeah this is mostly true and then for some reason you just decide to lie wildly about Legion? Why? It's transparently bollocks.

Legion had massive AP catch-up. I had a friend who didn't come back until 8.2 or 8.2.5 or something, and his character was caught up to mine in absolutely no time. I also had alts catch up really quick. Legion had distinct phases, just like all the other expansions. Early Legion was horrible, mid-Legion was okay, and late Legion was basically easier to catch up than any other expansion except late Wrath/late Cata.

BfA also had phases, but it had countervailing factors at all times, which was unfortunate. For example, once they put in the "jump to L50 heart" that saved an insane amount of grind, but they also put in Essences and then Corruptions, and increased the grind. Still, you're exaggerating what it takes to get to "semi-competent" levels of raiding, which is what, Normal/Heroic-level raid-appropriate gear?

And the other big difference is that in both Legion and BfA there are more methods to acquire gear.

Also I take issue with: "it’s gonna take more than two weeks because the dungeons are hard, but that’s ok. Hard dungeons are fun! Fine."

That's only true if the dungeons are fun/interesting to play in the first place, and there are enough to them to keep that interesting. That was absolutely NOT the case in Cataclysm. There were too few dungeons, and they were tedious and finicky. Hard dungeons are fun when they require to think on your feet, play well against bosses, have good routes and so on (though I personally loathe most "skips" that involve any kind of trick/reset, but that's just me). That was not what was going on in Cataclysm. Cataclysm dungeons in the early expansion were hard solely because it was a case of "CC certain mobs or die". That was it. So it was much more about marking for CC and then avoiding breaking it (generally easy but tedious unless cretins were in your group). Oh occasionally mobs had to be pulled in a certain way/timing too. But it was boring, systemic, procedural stuff. The bosses were exciting the first time or two because they were hilariously overtuned and you had to blow everything and play smart to stay alive (on Heroic), but then they got really boring, because most of them had a ton of bullshit you had to deal with, but it was boring bullshit. I never thought I'd miss tank-and-spank bosses, but when almost every boss has some kind of bullshit "do this one weird trick or lose" mechanic I'm just rolling my eyes.

The launch Cataclysm dungeons are, to this day, some of the worst-designed dungeons in WoW. Ugly, slow, boring, loaded with "lol fuck you" mechanics, and full of themselves story-wise. Even the ones that weren't just outright fugly managed to take a potentially-cool look and make it dull (the air elemental and egyptian ones). The later dungeons were much better, but I'd mostly given up on Cata after doing the first two raids on Heroic and just finding the whole thing interminable.

I guess if you ran them as much as you say, you must have felt differently, but UGH. And let's be clear - I was really good at them. People were begging me to take them through them. But they're so ugly, slow and tedious. WoD's dungeons were also pretty shit but at least they weren't as tedious. I remember when they nerfed them I was pleased not because they were easier (I didn't need anything from them), but because they became effectively significantly faster and less tedious.

And the sad thing is I was surrounded by good people I liked playing with, going into Cata. We'd just come out of doing great in Wrath and were kind of pumped.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I'm amazed that people still didn't learn the lesson from WoD and how it handled LFR.

Stop being asshurt by what others can obtain, and you'll become a better person. LFR and its engagement by players literally justifies the resources spent on raids. Get over it already.

And I mained Survival Hunter, a RANGED Survival Hunter. RIP.

[Snowfunk]

I'm maining a spec.