Me too. And really, these covenants are a tiny problem compared to the excessive hamsterwheel we've been on for the last 2 expansions. Just waiting for pre-patch before I resub so I can figure out what class to play now.
I should have been more specific and said questing rather than levelling but regardless I and many others enjoy it, be it for the dopamine hits of numbers going up or experiencing the zone specific stories for example. I've been through the levelling thing through pvp, done it through dungeons, done speed levelling, done not so speed levelling and out of all the approaches my biggest enjoyment has always come from questing at my own pace be it fast or slow. Yeah it doesn't take long at all these days when compared to vanilla but I actually quite enjoyed the vanilla experience. It wasn't as fleshed out as it is these days, though I would argue that it has become a bit too quick and hyperactive now.
This will be the first time ever i won't be buying a WoW Expansion. I was subbed non-stop from February 2006 until August 2017, been on and off a bit since then, and last i played was December 2018. Got 7 physical Collector's Edition sitting on my shelf, minus the base game one.
I enjoyed the journey too, back in 2007. But 13 years later the meat of the game can't be the leveling anymore. It does sound interesting that the new way to level will be by picking your expansion of choice and then that is your journey up to level 50 before heading into Shadowlands. BFA leveling felt like a huge drag. I only did it on one character and I felt completely drained when I was done. I don't really remember why but I can only guess the quests were really boring. As horde at least.
Yeah that was sort of the point I was trying to get to, 3 zones per faction just wasn't enough. I levelled 3 or 4 of my characters to max and was just burnt out after that, also tried levelling a horde alt and grind the rep for the Vulpera but just couldn't get into it. I was also determined to do pathfinder part 2 to unlock flying but couldn't get myself to finish that either. Had some good times in PvP though and some of the dungeons were ok, couldn't be bothered with raiding, haven't really since WotLK and Cata. Think I'm just pretty much done with the game ( watch me be there on Shadowlands launch day ), I've been having fun with Guild Wars 2 this year and lately ESO.
You should be there imo. The first month of an expansion tends to be the most fun anyway with the exception of MoP and BFA.
Players at every level of performance do optimize their toons. It's just silly and wrong to pretend that performance doesn't matter here. Naturally, most will not have several of the same characters, but many will be just unhappy because they can't perform the same way as their guildmate, just for some arbitrary reason. I actually played a mage in TBC and while warlock was strong, I wouldn't say it was broken OP. Neither in raids or PVP, but I would say that warlocks had terrible talents in vanilla, you even have to invest 5 points to make corruption an instant cast. Anyway, the talents had the advantage that you could still make variations even in meta builds, which you can't do now. More importantly though, talents evolved with each expansion, Blizzard didn't remove all talents and then made a bunch of new ones with each addon, so there weren't such big glaring issues as there are now. Again, Blizzard doesn't even have to add new talents every expansion, just don't rip out everything and make a completely new and broken system all over again. Plus Blizzard was just removing spells since like wod, so I don't really see how this complaint is relevant. Yes, endlessly grind. Because if you want to do more than one thing in WoW, you either have to endlessly grind or have several of the same characters or, I guess you could just be unhappy that you are punished for your choice for no reason. Covenants could just have the story and transmogs, hell even some recipes, but why tie power to it ? Even if you think that some people don't care about performance at all, then that would mean that they wouldn't care either if there was no power in covenants, but now since there is you have a lot of people who do care and who are going to be unhappy about it. That's the issue though, Blizzard will fix it in 9.3.5 patch when expansion is over and no one cares about. They will then proceed to rip the whole system and replace it with something new with the whole slew of new problems that will last for entire expansion, or at least most of it. Just like they did for the last several expansions.
Of course performance matters, but we don't know how much one covenant will be over another when tuning is finished. But you will not need 4 characters. I played in a pretty progression oriented guild in Legion and I don't recall a single time anyone ever got benched for what legendaries they had. If you get benched over your covenant I suggest you find a different group of people to play with. As for warlock, it's subjective I suppose but being able to top raid meters with 1 button and being basically unkillable in arenas is in my mind broken op. And both playstyles were boring as frack. And of course you can have some variance in your talents now as well. There are utility rows that are a matter of preference. Even the meta builds can change per fight. Though there are some rows that are just locked in and I don't think they'll ever be able to fix that without making just bland options. Your last sentence I don't know what you are referring to.
The tuning argument would be fine if covenants just added passives, but they don't. E.g. having ability to shoot through walls as hunter is going to be always better than anything else for PVP, Blizzard simply can't balance that. Yes, most people will not get benched for wrong covenants in guild, but they will feel bad for underperforming and you will have problems getting into public groups for e.g. m+ if you have wrong covenant. All of it could have been avoided by simply removing all power gains from covenant. At that time you still had plenty of 1 button raid specs. But I do agree that it is subjective. Talent variance is highly dependent on you spec. Some specs do have some variety, but most don't and majority of rows are absolutely locked. Some specs also have basic abilities put into talents, which is even worse. I don't remember this being such a big problem when we had regular talent trees and I do remember having far more variety. Instead of of having such impactful differences like whether your short sprint has slightly lower cd or two charges instead. Since wod Blizzard was actively removing spells and abilities. You have most specs that have like 5 buttons to push. DHs that were released in Legion are a prime example of this design philosophy where you have like 4 buttons and a CD. It's more akin to be a MOBA than MMO.
Yeah we could go back and forth for the next month on mistakes made. But I hold on to hope that covenants won't be that big of a deal. I'm certainly not giving up cooler armor sets, perhaps even a cooler ability and general theme just to be 1.5% better in a mathematically and mechanically perfect environment.
WoW is far from a grind for a start. Compared to BDO, for example, it's a child's play. You can literally start playing a boosted character and within a couple of months you are pretty much on par with people doing Mythic raiding. And I don't see how doing 2 world quests to change your covenant is a grind. Not at all. Another thing, Torghast will be all about transmog. Covenants will have it's mog and power with it. And unless you change specs and roles all the time, I don't see the issue. Here's what I'm going to do. I'll be running a MM Hunter and I'll choose the meta Covenant. If a future patch switches things up, I'll do my 2 quests and change Covenants. I'm literally sitting here struggling to see where the problem is FOR ME. But I get that if you can't stick with a single spec, you'll probably hate that. But then you'll probably be behind on gear and other things anyway. I agree with you here. If covenants, or any new system really suck, the possibility is there that Blizzard will take too long to fix it, like you say, it could happen when nobody really cares anymore. But hey, we don't know.
asherons call, everquest and a crap ton of korean mmos call say hi about grind. AC i played 8 years to hit the level cap, i played 4 5 more years to "max" my build, and i could have still leveled up side stats and become a god. and yea there were quests and events to do, but it was a ton of grind to get xp to sink into skills and a good 2 3 years beofre they added specific XP oriented quests and dailies like stuff so you could level up past the level cap where skills got expensive as hell to get them to 200. i had 180 or 190 run jump, 300 sword and melee defense think could buff to 200 magic defense had decent bow starts, had item magic to buff level 7 spells barely, and if i had worked life magic to 6/7 i would have been near unstoppable outside some raid bosses.
Yes, if you compare it to Asian MMOs then wow is pretty timid on the grind. Although maybe saying grind is quite misleading. If you play more than just one type of content, you are going to be punished for it through covenants. If you e.g. want to tank in your m+ and dps in raid, you are going to be punished even more. You can swap it, in two weeks time, but that's irrelevant at that point. So this system is already going to piss off a lot of people just because of that, but it will also piss off casuals when they will realize that they aren't getting invited into groups because they have wrong covenants. And all that has had to happen to prevent all of that was to remove power from covenants. Just have some "shadowlands ability" be available to each class and have soulbinds as a button, like extra talents. Well, looking at the track record I am 100% sure it's going to be fixed in the end of expansion when no one really cares anymore, because that's what happened every time with these systems.
Apparently this is the main bad guy of the expansion, the jailer: Considering it looks nothing like in-game graphics I suspect there will be another cinematic before release.
