I personally will not put much thought into my covenant. I like the aesthetics of night fae so I will play it with all of my Void Elves. I feel picking a covenant will not have those big consequences that everyone is scared of. It is literally 1 more button to press for gameplay and a flair ability.I get that choice matters and some might not want to be stuck in a place.So, therefore, my suggestion:Let the covenant abilities be changed like essences. (Switch in town or with a tome)Blizz could add a new row in the talent screen for choosing the abilities, displayed by each covenants logo.Covenants can be permanent choices for RP reasons and endgame content, but abilities could be free to choose. Especially after the introduction of each covenant, you may have already tasted the "power" of each ability, at least with your first Character in SL.
Mike has been consistently correct when providing feedback during the betas of both BfA and Legion. The big issues with the game, with legiondaries and azerite armor, eventually essences, were all things that Mike brought up before they went live. At this point the trajectory of the expansion is already set in stone, and it's so obvious it hurts.Launch will have swapping covenants be a 2-3 week grind, and players who want to do more than one role above the normal raid difficulty (or equivalent in other content) will have to hoard conduits. The first major patch, 9.1, will add a bit of a fast track to swapping covenants, but it still will take at least a week. 9.2 will introduce a rotating vendor who sells conduits that have been unlocked on that character, and 9.3 will make that unlock requirement account-wide, as well as let players quickly swap between covenants they have invested in previously.Throughout the entire expansion, people will complain about the degree of meaningless busywork that goes into swapping covenants since certain choices will be completely useless for some role/class combos, or will be completely useless in certain types of content, and it turns out that players actually want to do things like raid, arenas, BGs, and dungeons all on the same character without being forced to gimp that character in all but one of those content types. The people that don't care enough just pick the covenant based on looks anyway, and end up with less interesting or useful abilities that make the game less enjoyable and more difficult for themselves and the people they play with.The choice between covenants is meaningful - different abilities and passives have different uses and potentials that they bring to the table. Allowing players to swap when going between content means that more meaningful choices get to be made, about the specific content that is being engaged with at the time. Making that choice a single, semi-permanent one is essentially making the character specialized for only one role and context, rather than getting to decide what will be best for a given role and context. Meaning in a gameplay choice doesn't come from punishing a player with a timesink. It comes from the player deciding what tools will be most effective in the challenge they are about to face.
I try to keep this short-ish and to maybe draw to a close and be somewhat constructive at the end (thanks for your patience btw! :) )- I think that a lot of what you derive from the statistics you cite is based on assumptions on top of assumptions. For example, 37.5% of all Lv 120 characters does not mean it's 37.5% of all players. I readily grant that players without any Lv 120 characters shouldn't matter in this, but lots of dedicated Mythic raiders play alts, and I don't have reason to believe Mythic Raid *pugging* is much of a thing in the first place. You wanna guard against frustration, you better run with people you know and fill only the odd gap by pugging. For sure, 'knowing each other' does not prevent peer pressure in choosing the 'right' spec, but again, that's a problem of player mentality, not of game design. If I prevent my friends from raiding with me because I think they play the wrong spec or covenant, then I'm the problem here.- We don't know yet what penalty exactly there will be for swapping back to a previous Covenant. I expect the catch-up mechanism will play a role in mitigating the setback too. What I know for certain is that if it gets *too* easy, pressure to make the right choice for every content will actually increase, and players have one more thing to manage each and every time they go for a different boss, a different activity, you name it.Players who fanatically follow the meta in all things seem to have no problem switching their main to another class every new patch. I doubt the setback for returning to a Covenant you switched away from will be even remotely comparable to that kind of effort.- I'm under the impression that you think giving players what they want, under all circumstances, is the only correct course of action. I happen to disagree, even if I thought it was possible in the first place - they'll always find another inconvenience that prevents them from enslaving themselves to the meta of the hour, and that's where it goes into the question of where to draw the line: My slippery slope was supposed to illustrate the folly of saying some talents are 'objectively bad'. And I do mean depending on content. Why have a choice if only ever one choice is the correct one per activity? What worth is variety supposed to have if there's exactly one right answer that you have to look up in a spreadsheet? There's simply no 'choice' there, if meta is everything, so what is gained by having these choices, when there's a mathematically correct answer each and every time?It's one thing if players behave this way, but another when devs start being pressured into accommodating and even feeding that.Don't get me wrong. I totally get players wanting to find weird combinations, exploit oversights, find ways to break the game. But it's also not the dev's job to make this endeavour *easier* for the players. They already have the advantage of vastly higher numbers and exponentially more aggregated time, and no matter how seemingly inconvenient changing parameters is with some mechanic, they will easily overcome that. They always have, and always will.You say you dislike picking Covenants because of player power, I actually agree. But if players absolutely can't bring themselves to make a decision that matters to them regardless of player power meta, I guess the only alternative would be to say then:- scrap Covenant signature abilities entirely- give players exactly one new ability, covenant-agnostic- Soulbinds work 1:1 exactly the same for every Covenant and affect the new ability the same way (which will require some heavy redesign but oh well)The alternative to that would be having players, for the entirety of the expansion, managing 4 signature abilities, 4 class abilities and 12 soulbind trees. Together with the Unpruning, a lot more of dead buttons and a lot of spreadsheets then, but I guess this is what players want...
Has this video been taken down?I don't really use Twitch, does it just delete videos after a certain period?