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

[threads]

why didnt they just give us new abilities will leveling up and have covenants for cosmetic and story?

[Chipped coin]

Think what you want, but it did. Some Druid specs had well over 90% Night Fae in 9.0, which is far more than would happen based on "best Covenant" alone.
They're still by far the largest fraction, even though the other Covenants have gotten closer or even eclipsed them in power. That can't be explained by your view.

No...90% happens because of best covenant not in spite of it... rune of power isn't the most taken mage talent because its finicky and annoying to use. It's taken because it's the best...

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98% of that 90% did what the guides told them to do and weren't actually complaining. You are still the minority.

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You don;t havbe to be at the top of the meters to play the game well. Anyone who claims that anything less than topping the meters is subpar will not get in my group and is elitist.

If the majority just want to follow guides then the entire exercise was pointless to start with. A vanity project for people who wanted concepts over well thought out design.

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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.

No... but not for the reasons your thinking. FF works the way it does because compared to wow it is an extremely easy and simplistic game. The hardest content in FF is roughly on par with mid range heroic bosses in wow.

They cater to different crowd. You can argue maybe wow should be easier but at this point I think it would do more harm then good.

[Pakheth]

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.

I said we kept max level abilities from Vanilla to MoP, not that I enjoyed the gameplay in it. Please understand me right.

In my opinion peak gameplay was in MoP with the amount of buttons needed for basic gameplay rotations.

I don't play ranked PvP and don't need all my buttons hotkeyed, I still have most of them on my bars because I like having the overview and I never had an issue with the so called ability bloat many claimed was a problem. For me as a casual to semi-hardcore raider I enjoyed having things to click on my bar and using those abilities in accordance with each other. Nowadays that type of gameplay is lacking, either due to artificial gating of abilities aka longer global cooldowns(which were introduced in BfA) or stupidly long cooldowns on spells you could usually spam or use on the move like in MoP. The slowing down of the game is one of the things I like the least about current gameplay and I've always felt that was Blizz's attempt at catering to players who enjoy the slower pace of games like FFXIV. The same way they speed combat up in MoP to counter the fast paced on the move gameplay of Wildstar which I greatly enjoyed. Always move, never stand still. Now you are mostly rooted to the ground on most classes. Marksman hunter was and still is burdened by this. Just too bad BM has become a spamming class instead forcing you to choose between standing still (MM) and spam (BM) instead of the more balanced earlier iterations. Same goes for Elem and Enhance shaman.

And just because you have few buttons doesn't mean you use the buttons the same way as you used to. When they constantly change around order of use or what the button does, or what it does in accordance with other buttons, but doesn't change the name, gameplay changes. And I am a creature of habit so my brain thinks a specific button should still do the thing it did 5 years ago though that has changed. When you play many classes this becomes troublesome after a while. For example hunter's Stampede today is not Stampede from 3 expansions ago. This makes relearning classes especially difficult for me, especially due to muscle memory.

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No... but not for the reasons your thinking. FF works the way it does because compared to wow it is an extremely easy and simplistic game. The hardest content in FF is roughly on par with mid range heroic bosses in wow.

They cater to different crowd. You can argue maybe wow should be easier but at this point I think it would do more harm then good.

I guess. FFXIV seems more punishing with player placement and following a very strict recipe during very scripted boss fights, while WoW is more about reacting correctly to RNG with a diverse toolkit, which is definitely more advanced. Not to mention PvP.

And by all means, I don't want the game to be easier, but being punished by other players because your race/class/spec is slightly worse or you got unlucky and misclicked a few buttons in your rotation, becomes rather tiring after a few years. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

[Fenrys]

Because the power is temporary (which is a very good thing), and in terms of expansion content, each covenant is much more than just a button. There are certainly neater ways it could have been executed. Your suggestion isn't one of them

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Think what you want, but it did. Some Druid specs had well over 90% Night Fae in 9.0, which is far more than would happen based on "best Covenant" alone.
They're still by far the largest fraction, even though the other Covenants have gotten closer or even eclipsed them in power. That can't be explained by your view.

To confirm your point; Venthyr druid is head and shoulders the best covenant for balance in 9.1 (its the difference between being one of the best dps specs and being rock bottom in terms of dps). Even poorly played venth is better than NF, yet, 68% of balance druids are night fae. Clearly there are things influencing the decision which are not merely whatever is "the best".

[Cosmic Janitor]

This was suggested pretty much immediately. None of the abilities are actually unique enough that you couldn't adopt them to another covenant by changing the color of the spell effects and some slight alterations to the text string.

[scubi666stacy]

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.

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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.

Well it looks completely different from my point of view. I am an altoholic. I had at least 2 of every class on max level in Legion and finished a total of 103 Mage Tower challenges. Alts have the most impact in the replayability of this game because you cannot play all classes and do all professions on one character like in FF14. And you can only play alts to your full enjoyment when there are many QoL and convenience features in the game. BfA and SL made playing alts an incredibly horrible chore and I slowly slipped away from this game. If the next expansion would make it even harder, then I will leave for good and enjoy my FF14 character who can be anything I want.

[Ethas]

Well it looks completely different from my point of view. I am an altoholic. I had at least 2 of every class on max level in Legion and finished a total of 103 Mage Tower challenges. Alts have the most impact in the replayability of this game because you cannot play all classes and do all professions on one character like in FF14. And you can only play alts to your full enjoyment when there are many QoL and convenience features in the game. BfA and SL made playing alts an incredibly horrible chore and I slowly slipped away from this game. If the next expansion would make it even harder, then I will leave for good and enjoy my FF14 character who can be anything I want.

I don't think this is true because:

a) you are not required to play 24/7
b) there is plenty of content to do on your single character
c) did you clear the last mythic dungeons/raids/pvp? I don't think so.

Creating new character is your own decision. You decided that you want to play through all of this again second and third times. Not Blizzard. So I fail to see why Blizzard should care about your convenience when you play alts. In fact, alts give you gameplay advantage so again if you have so much time playing alts please do so but at the same pace as your main character.