I do not understand why people would not want the most amount of choice in a game as possible. If you do not want to switch, there is no one forcing you to switch, but if you do want to switch everyone is forcing you to not be able to switch. Let people play the game the way they want to play it. My biggest concern is that Blizz will break whatever cov i choose to go with and make another one better and then for the sake of ME, wanting to play as well as I can, I then have to switch covenants because the one they buffed will be so meta you'd be an idiot not to swap over. Just let people play how they want to play.
Everyone arguing that requiring long quests to switch factions is a great idea and "meaningful choice" is forgetting something...How many things that Blizzard ever introduces at the beginning of an expansion stay the same till the end? Do you HONESTLY not think that every player in WOW will have to switch factions at LEAST half a dozen times over the course of the expansion if they are trying to keep up with player power?Follow Alpha/Beta for a short while and you'll find out that Bliz is making pretty consistent changes to one Covenant or another in some meaningful way on a regular basis. From covenant ability changes to Conduit changes to a whole bunch of stuff...and GOD HELP US if at some point Bliz decides to tie something with the faction hall into player power...What happens, do you think, when you choose Venthier at the beginning of the expansion because it's the best ability for your class, then as of 9.1 bliz nurfs an ability or covenant because it's overpowered and now Necrolord is the way to go...so you switch. And then in 9.2 bliz says "So we undertuned Venthier, here's a buff" that makes it good again. Good God, right now Rogues can pretty much ONLY go Necrolord. How long do you think it's going to take before someone figures out that at a certain gear level and spec and playing it a different way that maybe the Nightfey ability provides a better buff? And again GOD HELP US if all of a sudden Nightfey ability with Sword/Dagger/Combat is better but Necrolord with double dagger/sub/assassination is better...Now what? That's a 1% problem to you is it? Because unless the ONLY reason you're choosing covenant is for the Role Playing it allows you to do (news flash that's not 99% of players, that's not even 50% of players), at some point I fully expect EVERYONE PLAYING to have to switch covenants at least a couple times over the course of the expansion.And while i'm ALL THERE with not having the ability to pick up Venthier for the raid this week, and then go Necrolord for the M+ your guild's about to run between raid nights, I'm NOT THERE with some long and arduous quest to continually keep up with Blizzard's hard on over "balance" and perpetual nerf/buff cycles of things that affect player power. Imagine if every time you wanted to change Azerite Powers on your gear it required several days worth of questing and an arduous quest line...Down with that noise.
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Don't you think covenant swapping is irrelevant if you are way behind in renown levels ? That means you would be missing a few conduits and a few soulbind abilities. Surely that is more throughput lost than gained through the ability of the new covenant. And your main covenant will also suffer from this, you will be behind what the current max renown level is (so a disadvantage compared to everybody that decided not to switch), just like corruption resistance worked. In both situations (easy to swap or not), you have too much to lose unless I'm missing something.For the pro-restriction side of the argument, I think "rpg" does not always refer to the lore elements (cosmetics, story, faction, etc), I think it also refers to the "niche" you got ahold of, meaning the customization you made through system progression, namely the renown levels you invest in a specific covenant, and the ashes that you invest in a legendary upgrade or new legendary. It's like unlocking two talent rows every week, except you cannot change them. Those decisions you make each week are "the build". That is the most amount of player power customization we ever had (and has nothing to do with lore). There will be fewer people that have the exact same build (i.e. made the same choices every week). This provides a sense of identity and uniqueness that reflects the decisions you made through system progression. We had none of this with the corruption resistance system for example. I think this is what is meant by the "rpg" dimension, having your progression and decisions carve out who you are (your power and playstyle).People won't be able to replicate this progression build on the fly because they have already locked in their renown levels/ashes. This kills the "meta" meta in a sense, meaning looking up guides or pvp/pve pros or simmers recommendations and just copying the build, which gives players more agency, your theory crafting capabilities will be reflected in your proficiency. Following what the computation tells you to do (being a meta slave) is not very fun, hindering that aspect is a positive. If the system is too relaxed, you will sometimes be required to be a meta slave. For these reasons, I understand where Blizzard is coming from, trying to add this new dimension to the game.For the anti-restriction side, for me the main issue is not being able to test these builds before investing time gated resources. It does offer less variety in terms of gameplay, you will be playing the same build (with its logical progression every week) all the time.You will also be shoehorned into choosing what kind of activity you want to prioritize (you try to make your build optimal in one situation mostly). Players will be seen as m+ or raid or pvp players/specialists, more than they already were, which exacerbates this sense of identity. If you see a necrolord rogue with a crit legendary, you know he's a m+ player, etc. But it does make middle of the pack players less competitive in secondary activities (but if it is not your main activity, it's natural to not be as optimized for it either, for example keeping your pvp versatility corruptions for pve). I guess that makes it frustrating for top players in all activities, but they can circumvent that by making extra characters.I read the argument that players want to be able to switch to be optimal in specific situations, however this is not relevant as long as the renown levels situation exists. If players ask for both (switching covenants with the same renown levels which I doubt will ever be considered), then it makes sense and could be a fun system, but it would be at the expense of all the pros of the pro-restriction arguments, and the covenant system becomes a glorified set of talent rows (4 options for the covenant abilities, and 3 rows of 12 to 36 soulbind abilities).Either way, I'm excited. I'm drawn to the novelty and complexity of the system and the dimensions and features it adds to the game and that we never had before, although I could live with the meta friendly alternative. The anti-restriction implementation is not as much an issue for me as the pro-restriction issue is for anti-restriction players. It really is a meta-gameplay design decision. I don't think anyone is wrong for preferring one or the other, just like it makes sense to have an audience for classic and one for retail.However it would feel lackluster to have a new expansion with no new feature (more of the same, meta-friendly progression, still frustrating because not 100% optimized). Maybe you can say this is an ambitious feature and too much of a change, but have to appreciate that Blizzard is taking the risk, trying to enforce a long-term meaningful vision, not just a flavorful change.
Oh, btw, since people lack reading comprehension (jeez, I'm remembering the mess of comments in the first post about the new weekly chest and how few people could understand it...), let's point out a few things that many people are totally forgetting about in these discussions.Swapping away from a bad selection of your covenant is free. The covenant tax / trust event only takes effect if you try to return to one you've previously been with. This means that if you start off with Night Fae and find it totally sucks for what you like doing, or just doesn't feel good to you, you can swap away from it without any penalty aside from a bit of Renown grind to catch up. This solution will accommodate most players' reasons for needing to swap.There's more to a covenant's power than the Signature Ability + Class Ability. While these are certainly powerful (and the Class Ability is spec driven so it can be tuned much more effectively than the Signature Ability given by the covenant), they are also not the only source of power a covenant can give. And no, I'm not just talking about the various dungeon effects. There's Soulbinds. Soulbinds modify your abilities and have a moderate amount of flexibility to them in a way that can allow you to perform decently with different specs or content types.Soulbinds can be modified as such: Each covenant has 3 Soulbinds. Within each covenant you have multiple paths with various 'Essence' type slots. Once a week you can re-do the 'Essence' slots. At any point you can choose which Soulbind supports you, as well as which path you have active within that Soulbind. (Someone, please correct me if something sounds off, I'm not in Beta unfortunately so I'm going by the things I've read rather than experienced.) This means that you have a LARGE amount of flexibility outside of that Signature + Class covenant ability, and it also affords reasonable tuning knobs to keep the covenants each somewhat balanced in different ways. To sit there and imply that covenant power comes only from your class ability is uneducated to a hyperbolic extreme.Another thing people are getting wrong, granted it was an edit a few hours past the initial posting, is that the trust event is LONGER than the 2 days of world quests. There IS more to it than just this. So you can stop making arguments that hinge around that piece of info. It's quite likely it will have a day or two of dungeons, maybe a special event of some sort, making it a 4-5 day process, potentially even including another round of world quests. It is absolutely not supposed to be a simple and convenient process, because Blizzard is trying very hard to do as the quotes above attempt to convey.On balance tweaks: Ion has directly stated that for general balance changes, they try not to disrupt the meta to a level that completely invalidates the active 'ranking' of various items, etc. For example, with corruption, they tried to retain the strong overall power of the ones that started off strong, in relative comparison to the other items. They brought the outliers closer to the center, but the general power ranking remained very similar to not invalidate people's purchases entirely. The same will likely end up being true for covenants post-launch. Emphasis on post-launch here. We aren't at that point yet. Let them make huge changes now. You should not need to swap during a standard patch cycle or season or whatever. However, they very-well may rework or rebalance the system in between seasons, for content patches, or other such times. So yes, there may come a point where you want to switch. Or they may even add a 5th and 6th one! We don't genuinely know right now. But if they add that, they will do their best to give everyone, even the 'traitors', a fair chance to swap.As a final point, I end up playing with a lot of people in various forms of content that don't have max level cloaks, have really low Neck levels, etc. There are definitely a ton of people out there who play without a drive to be maximized. Yes, many of these are alts, so they avoid the grindy things. Which is the point. These people will pick a single covenant for their alt and maybe keep it mostly topped off, or maybe not. A Rank-15 cloak person, even when in the 465-470 item level range, is not a guarantee. I believe this to be fairly telling in a sense, and so I feel like much of the frustration and shouting taking place is based on an imagined narrative rather than personal, direct experience. Which honestly? Really sucks to see. It makes me hate that the game is complex enough to need public testing. What we really need is a Rextroy QA Department then we don't need anything tested publicly. ;)
The entitlement is so thick if you get past it, you might discover Pandaria.
So let's have fun and debunk a bit of this, because even if you are eloquent, you seem to overlook A LOT of the issues at play here.