That's right the game we love to hate has a release date for the new expansion. Also there is a new animated series to introduce characters, like in the Lords of War and stuff in the past.
Been playing since vanilla EU open beta, more on and off during BFA but for some reason I'm just not feeling it with Shadowlands based on what I've seen so far. Will probably end up playing it on launch though because its just the way the cookie crumbles. What's bothering me more is that I just put the releases that interest me on my calendar, got the WoW expac first, a week later Black Ops releases, 4 days from that the next Destiny 2 expansion comes out and then a few weeks from that Cyberpunk 2077 due to be released. May have to go on a sabbatical or something just to find the time to play all these.
Ha yeah there's no way to keep up. I didn't play much BFA either. Just never really grabbed me. I played like a month+ at launch and all of 8.2. It didn't help that I started hating my class as well and there was no way in hell I was going to re-roll with the amount of stuff you had to do. It looks like there's some good changes coming, but if I can't find a class I like the rest is moot.
I got like 1 of everything now but I always go back to my Ret/prot paladin or Fury warrior, Demon Hunter's are ok too. I still need to make a Gnome rogue one day, got a night elf rogue which I mained for a while back in the burning crusade but Gnome's for the win! My problem with BFA was that there just wasn't enough variety in the levelling experience as it was always the same quests across 3 zones. I much more preferred the old way of having multiple zones shared by both factions and the stories criss crossed amongst them. Wotlk was the best at this as you were presented with 2 starting zones with different stories for both factions and I still enjoy the expansion to this day.
Yeah wotlk leveling was pretty great as you basically had two choices whenever you finished a zone, or at least very close to it. I think in Shadowlands I will have to go back to melee. I played melee in WoD and Legion, went back to warlock for BFA. It is just a lot more satisfying to press a button and do damage instantly. The only thing I don't like is that there are so many goddamn spell effects flying around the melee that you can easily get clipped by a cleave or ground effect. But I will not make the mistake of going with a class that has only 1 melee spec again. So it basically comes down to rogue, dk and warrior. Hunter is a possible wild card as it doesn't have many casted abilities afaik but I think people are unhappy with it last I heard.
Played very actively vanilla through wotlk and then legion and a bit of BFA. There is an enormous design gap between those two periods and BFA is the worst the game has been for me. Sadly Shadowlands are exactly the same. The new covenants and soulbinds are a terrible systems that will leave people feeling (and being) bad by playing some sort of content because their choice is simply not tuned for it. It's also going to cause a lot of uproar in a few weeks when they do tuning pass to the entire thing and it will force many players to reroll and endlessly grind. I really don't get why Blizz has decided to simplify talents to a few rows and saying that previous systems were complicated when they then added convoluted systems on top of your character and they even change it every expansion. So even if chars are fun to play and actually work by the end of expansion, they burn it all down and try to reinvent the wheel again.
Yes the covenants will blow up in their face. All they had to do was leave the class abilities out of it. I can't pick the covenant I find more appealing, I want my class to perform as good as it can which mean I have to take the one with the best ability for my spec. And then you have to deal with the fact that your other 2 specs have a different best ability. I'd be more ok if they were somewhat close in power and utility, but they are not and they never will be. However re-rolling is not a big grind. It appears as if the current process of re-joining a covenant is 2 weeks of very light content and you keep your earlier progress. Joining a new one is instant. As for the talents I don't much like it either, but there was some glaring flaws in the old one in that it wasn't really designed for extra levels. Just look at TBC warlock. Suddenly the previously unobtainable combo of siphon life/soul link was available. They could shuffle talents around every expansion to avoid that, but I can understand why a game designer would not want to carry that system forward. But other than covenants I think the expansion looks really good and that's what most beta testers I have seen are saying too.
I think they just should have left any power completely out of the covenants. That way you can actually pick the one you like instead of going for the most useful one and then leveling, gearing and playing 3 other toons of the same class, just so that you can run m+ along with your raids or pvp if you want. I disagree on talents, since they don't need to add new ones every expansion. E.g. they haven't added a single talent row since WoD and they're not going to change that in Shadowlands either. Also, your example of TBC warlock is exactly how it should work, because vanilla warlock has glaring issues with missing talent points that don't really allow you for solid build. That's why mages were far superior until almost the end of vanilla. Aside from that, they also don't need to add new spells every expansion, but in WoD and Legion they have pruned so much, that WoW now resembles moba or diablo more than an MMORPG. And by making new systems of power every expansion they do themselves (and players) disservice, because it takes the entire expansion to make it work for most specs and that's the time they scrap it all again and try again from scratch.
Why on earth would you level 3 other toons of the same class? Unless you are an MDI player I really doubt you'll get kicked based on your covenant. As for talents, them not adding new ones are pretty much why we have these borrowed powers every expansion. I get why they do it, so we don't have the ability bloat of MoP. But it still feels bad whenever they remove our new toys. And if you think sl/sl warlock is exactly how it should work then you either didn't play one or never faced one. It's one of the dumbest specs of all time, perhaps only beaten by t8 holy-prot. And that was my point. Take it from me, warlocks had many glaring issues in their talents in tbc too. Anyway, there was a lengthy beta update posted yesterday: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/development-update-the-road-to-shadowlands/638371
Endlessly grind? You literally do 2 world quests to change covenants. How exactly do you propose you leave power out of the covenants?
Welcome to any game ever, including Vanilla WoW. Yes you could pick whatever you wanted from your fancy tree but there was always a meta build for every class.
It's not really comparable though. Let's say you play a shaman and covenant A is best for elemental, B for enhancement and C for resto. So maybe you think well I play mostly enhancement so I'll go with B. But covenant B is useless for elemental. It's just going to arbitrarily lock people into a spec just like artifact weapons did for a very long time and just like azerite armor did for a very long time. Hopefully the coming tuning will fix that but I know there are specs that have basically dead covenants right now.
Things will change with patches, we're basically getting a rough draft of things at launch, it's been the same with BFA, look at all the catch up mechanics and changes made as the expansion evolved. Look at your cloak corruption resistance in BFA for example, it's so easy to just pile on resistance now. Just an example. Yes, in it's current state, changing covenants could be a pain if you swap roles, but otherwise I don't really see a big problem if you just stick to the same role. And I'm sure they'll make it even easier to swap, I mean it'll be super easy from the get go, it'll only be time gated. I wouldn't be surprised if we get to change covenants once a week quite early into the expansion, if I'm honest.
Yeah I can't really think of a way to fix them in an elegant manner. Even just having one ability per class instead of spec would have been an easier choice imo. I'll save my whine for when the product is out
I guess what most people would want to see as a "fix" would be if you could change covenants any time in either in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.
Yeah and I kind of agree with the post they made yesterday that the game doesn't need yet another thing you can swap between fights. We tried that with essences. And I can't tell you how many times I forgot to change them before a new fight. And you wouldn't just be changing covenants, you'd also change the soulbind people and their respective talent trees.
People have been changing things like this for years, glyphs is another good example, and I agree, it's something that is easily forgotten. I'll have to say though, you're right about covenants being a bit of an issue if you multi spec. I personally stick to one spec unless a major patch changes things, but then that will be tested prior to patch release and it'll be known that a different covenant will be the new meta. In which case I'll just do the quests and be ready to switch when the patch goes live. But if you want to multi spec, it might be an issue. Maybe covenants could be spec specific, rather than class, meaning you can lock them to a spec or something. Azerite armor kinda worked in this respect, because you could have different armor pieces with different traits so you could have one for raiding and one for M+ for example. Either way, I'm excited for the new expansion, new content is always good.
Who even cares about levelling anymore? It takes like, what, a few days of super casual playing to go from 110 to 120. That's the least of WoW's issues, as it's only going to take a week out of your 2 year expansion cycle. Also, you don't have to quest to level, you can do PvP, you can do dungeons etc. While leveling was much improved in TBC, compared to Vanilla, which let's be honest was a total clusterf*ck and don't even try to say otherwise please, WotLK improved on leveling even more, I'll give you that. But it was still just a bunch of zones you played through before hitting cap. That being said, SL is doing things differently when it comes to leveling, there's the level squish, of course, and then how the leveling from 50 to 60 will be different from what we're used to (linear for your first play through with some options opening up for alts).
