Well we did. Not Class wide but covenant wide at least.
Same class different coventant does 30-40% more damage than the other, in some cases.. if people are ok with that "for RPG reasons"... idk what to say *shrug*
Also tuning is more important now as tuning of the covenants in most cases tunes 36 specs at once... so you have to turn the numbers with the class itself or the ability you get... that again tunes all specs of your class.
It is nearly impossible to tune this this time around sadly.
So regarding that? You are right^^ why delay
People in beta report bugged quests that can halt player progress and some class abilities that are not even working and some that don't work properly. Other major issues too. And they are still changing covenant abilities, not tweaking, but completely changing some. So, ofc there is no balance yet, because they haven't gotten to the part where they need to be in order to get involved with balancing classes. They need to sort out other things first. So, ofc it's not about fine tuning, but about enough work that needs to be done in order for the expansion to be at a somewhat releasable state.
People that think that it's about extra polish and extra fine tuning are naive imo. They wouldn't delay for that. The delay is to fix and finish the expansion. If their major problem was fine tuning covenant abilities, they could just nerf the hell out of them and then balance classes around those nerfed abilities, with the prospect of revisiting them in a following large patch.
If your covenant class ability contributes like 1% to your DPS, it doesn't really matter much if a different covenant ability is like even 50% better... It becomes rather meaningless, if it contributes just 1% to your DPS, but yeah, it would be an easy bandaid and they'd release... But ofc, this is not the problem... it's not about balance. It's about being behind schedule in a lot more stuff too.
Last edited by orsraunia; 2020-10-05 at 11:03 AM.
Nah, we can only speculate. Pre-patch is set for Oct 13 atm, so I don't expect any new date being announced before that. I don't have any inside knowledge, so I am just speculating based on what is widely known. I believe that they want to wait and see how pre-patch launch goes, like if players find any major issues with the leveling, new systems, etc. And also see what their progress on the expansion will be up to that point.
Personally, I believe that we may get some news between pre-patch and Friday, Oct 16, but I am not holding my breath. Naturally, they don't want to risk missing the next date they'll announce, so we may learn the new release date even way later than that. Obviously, they are on a "lets see how things progress" mode atm.
Last edited by orsraunia; 2020-10-05 at 11:20 AM.
Have you seen this bluepost from 4 days ago? https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...nderway/660297
Apparently they started tuning Covenants... slowly. Very slowly.
I don't know how you can tune something that isn't even properly working or doesn't work with a spec at all. But we'll see how this continues in the next weeks.
MAGA - Make Alliance Great Again
Tuning can be done after release, this isn't much of a work, bugs are taking most of the time. Nothing should or will be changed in that time.
Oh, this ability is doing too much damage... hmm what can I do? Well it scales 450% with spell power so lets cut this to 300%, **slam**, done
vs
Shit, this quest bugs and people can't finish it, hell, what is wrong with code? I works properly for me... hmm, lets try this... nope, still work... maybe... no...
Debugging takes way more time.
We can only speculate. Personally my guess is that the delay is likely to be about 2-4 weeks which would put the release date mid-late November.
My reasoning is as follows: They announced the delay pretty late. What that tells us is that up until a few weeks ago they still thought they had a shot at finishing up on time. Which means that they probably would have got pretty close to finished by the original launch date.
Also they have announced the pre-patch which people expected to last between 3 and 6 weeks.
I mean in the past yes... so is a broken mess of poorly thought out interconnected systems though. Unless they actually grit their teeth and hashtag pull the rip cord it is going to take considerable time. Unless they utterly crush conduits at the very least.
Shadowlands is like the tale of Icarus. Blizzard tried to soar above min maxing only for their balance to be so terrible they crashed into the sea.
Here's a thought, just don't. You can lvl alts to prep for SL, gear them with the free ilvl 100 gear in prepatch and either get professions ready to go or just leave them till release.
Corruptions won't even be a thing in prepatch anymore. So farming essences and the like would be a pointless and worthless grind for nothing.
- - - Updated - - -
It's broken because if you do loremaster in all zones, you still don't hit 60. Loremaster currently takes you to 58, 59 if you kill a lot of extra crap along the way. It shouldn't be required to do every single quest in each zone plus 3-5 dungeon runs just to hit cap. After your first character, threads of fate gets even worse. Without the MSQ you end up finishing the zones at around lvl 56. Granted that is depending on if you do it all in a day or over time. As you are able to do WQ along the way so spreading it over days gives more quests.
The delay is very easy for anyone with beta to understand. It is still an extremely buggy mess which is a direct result from development having to continue from home instead of their offices. The prior release date was pushed by corporate (Activision, the source of all the shit decisions to come to WoW since the sale) to bump their quarterly numbers to artificially inflate things for their end of year reports etc etc stock manipulation nonsense and when it became clear that it was going to necessitate overtime to actually deliver on a date not determined by the actual developers of the title the buttholes and purse strings clenched up tighter than a drum.
It isn't rocket science.
So for all those thinking that the delay will somehow give them time to change things from how they already are, that is extremely unlikely outside of some small class implementations.
Blizz said the release will be in 2020 still, so I would be realistic about the expectations of changes. A few extra weeks, a month, or at most 2 months, is not a lot of dev time at all. Especially considering any changes also have to go through a full testing cycle. So it's really just a few extra weeks for devs.
So this time will be for exactly what they said it would be used for, polish. Minor bug fixes, some small graphical touch-ups here and there, some minor tweaks, that type of thing. I wouldn't expect major changes like a big revamp to covenants or a big shift to the plotline. Which is fine. I'd just say keep expectations level around that so people aren't disappointed that the delay didn't give us revamped covenants, player housing, and 2 extra raid tiers.
Wow, that little? Perhaps, definitely won't complain if it's just a month. I'm personally a bit suspicious of it being a month at this point, largely as they didn't have another date prepared with their announcement. Though really, they can't go much further than a month if they actually want to release the game in 2020.
Sorry, but this is not broken and you shouldn't consider it as broken. Not ideal, but not broken. Broken is if something bugs and you can't progress. And it's pretty much linear leveling this time around, so you can't just ignore that bugged quest, if it stops your story progress, and go quest in some other zone. Few days ago I "heard" that there are some quests that can bug out like this, but don't know details.
Last edited by orsraunia; 2020-10-05 at 04:07 PM.