People who take the time to have Wowhead accounts and make forum posts are more likely to shell out money consistently than those that don't. We are the target demographic. Not to mention we make up a decent cross section of the playerbase.
Most of the players want to be good at the game. this system punishes everyone trying to do so. you might be good at 1 aspect of the game. but in other aspect of the game u will consistently be outmatched. Is that what really gonna happen? your choice for being the best version of ur self in m+ is gonna cost you arena loses and being behind the meter in raids. In this world not a single char can be good at all of the content. every char in game will be like. good at this. decent at that. trash at the last one. and we also have other specs. if u choose covenant for healer, u might be trash every time you try to go dps. we want to be good at the game. is that why we are being punished? well , Blizzard forgive me for i have sined. i have been a good player in m+ raid and pvp. and for that when i step in the shadowlands have to be punished for that. the ultimate hell.matches the theme to be honest. wanted to remind you that this is the patch that is SUPPOSED to be good. DO NOT MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE AGAIN.
Ion has a fundamental disconnect with the idea that the game at its core has always rewarded well-performing players, which means min-maxing and caring a lot about performance. Covenants at their current inception are harmful to players who care about this, and has no effect on players who don't care about it. It's a valid discontent which I share issue with.Playing a healer has not felt worse in recent years. Tier pieces were replaced with Azerite, which required you to have potentially duplicates of the same item to just gain any bonuses from them in another spec. Corruptions also have essentially no healer-specific essences, so when we get DPS-procs that we can't opt out of them, it's layering of systems which just feel bad.Now when I look at covenants, I realize I want to play what does the best in a raiding environment for my main spec, there is no way to argue that there is anything wrong about caring about my raider performance. There is even more merit in arguing there is some level of obligation to do the best for the betterment of the group. If everyone picked AoE covenants because they felt better in Mythic+, that could be a severe issue on patchwerk bosses. The issue with me picking this however, is I cannot heal mobs to death out in the world and I don't want to spend an hour killing something, so I spend a significant majority of my time as a DPS spec, but I cannot pick what I want to pick for that spec because I have to pick for my main spec. I will probably also spend more time in Mythic+ than raid, but I cannot pick a covenant that feels better in their either. Even if none of these covenant abilities affected your performance in any way whatsoever, I'd be mad if a covenant that gave me a raid buff was suddenly brought to mythic+ and it's borderline useless.I don't see them making everything spec-specific, but as it stands there is a decent chance I will be unhappy with the covenant I am using in 2/3rds of the content I play if not more only because Blizzard does not care that players will ultimately favor covenants for one reason or another and it simply does not translate well into the many different times of contenet: World PvE, Instanced PvE, World PvP, Instanced PvP, Mythic+, and soon Torghast. Each of those I could be playing a different spec, or a different focus (aoe, single target, priority), and if everyone else who raids with me expects they have to make the same raid-first decision, the issue Blizzard has with players not having agency wraps around to achieving the same problem. It's entirely possible with being able to switch covenants freely that people pick different ones on the same boss fight or in a Mythic+, and allowing players to have more agency is all we ever want. Attaching all of these performance-related effects to Covenants killed the idea of permanent choice. Even if I stick with a covenant for a while, maybe how my healer heals is not ideal in the next tier, or the final boss is so important I switch to it knowing it could take us a month or two to progress on it, but we're punished in other types of content because the type of content we care about is simply more important to us.
At this point it's useless to discuss if covenant rejoins/swaps being not so easy will be good or bad for the health of the game. Theorycrafting about it's only getting redundant. I just hope they implement this system asap in beta, so people get to test it as many times as possible to give feedback about it to Blizz, then they can decide where to take it.
My personal take away from this whole issues surrounding Covenants is the mind set of a competitive skill based background vs an RPG background. Like Ion said about Overwatch, everyone who plays Tracer has an equal foundation, but some will have more skill playing her than others might. In an RPG things change. I think back to my time playing KOTOR, my decisions in the game could cause me to lose companions, change the flow of the story, and even how that game ended, choices had consequences that you could not just redo unless you saved the game before every move. If you didnt like how things turned out you just forged on ahead and made the best of it. Then made a different choice on your next character. Honestly if they wanted to solve this issue they really should consider making the abilities equal. a couple examples would be to either make them all some sort of fun utility that didnt hinder or improve the competitive side of things. Or make them 2 types of Damage, the general Cov skill could be an AoE with different visual effects but the same damage, and the class specific could be a single target just with different visual effects. Damage would be the same, across the board but the uniqueness would be found in the visuals that connected them to the cov that you belong to. Overall I think the issue is a little moot at the same time, the players of WoW have always and will always find ways to make ANYTHING work for them. Side Note: I wouldnt mind seeing other convos with Blizz in this sort of atmosphere from other viewpoints both on this and other topics, This is honestly a prime way to constructively talk points and see all points of view.
I just find it so bizarre for Ion to talk about not wanting to add more rewards to Mythic+ because "people might feel pressured to get those rewards" because, any multiplayer game adds pressure to you to play a certain way if you want to be good and get better rewards. I just want an elite armor appearance like how PvP and raids has their endgame armor sets.... if they are really going to make Mythic+ a endgame mode to where we even get MDI tournaments then they should have atleast something like that as a reward in the game. I mean, obviously people who play the game casually wont get those endgame rewards because they want to play however they want which is fine. I don't see how having more incentives to play the game better is unhealthy for the game.If he truly believes this "people might feel pressured to get those rewards" stuff then why is Mythic raiding a thing. Idk.... maybe this mindset lead us to why Mythic raiding is less relevant now in BFA than it was in Legion because, back then I cared to look for a guild to do mythic raiding with and now I have zero interest in it. I just want more of a reason to push mythic+ keystones than just for increasing a 3rd party website score that most players probably don't even know exists.Oh, and in terms of covenants.... why is it bad to allow players to freely swap their crap? In Legion when you had all legendaries (talking like Antorus tier) it felt great to be able to pop a tome to swap talents and legendaries plus other gear and play optimally. What does not feel good is to have to slog through a grind or/and pay a increasing fee to swap builds just to have fun with the game/play optimally. This imo hurts players both casual and non casual its just dumb. This is a case where lore or whatever weird philosophy Blizzard has should not transcend gameplay
If you want to be the absolute best in every type of content, then being locked into a covenant won't matter to you. Why? Because you'll obviously have a different alt for each type of content as well, since there is no class which is the best in all aspects of the game. So your rogue can choose the best PvP covenant for the best rogue PVP spec, your mage can choose the best raid covenant for the best mage raid spec, and your demon hunter can choose the best M+ covenant for their Havoc spec. Problem solved!
Being a hc raider myself who sometimes dables in mythic, I think i am with the philosophie of locking abilities/story behind convenants. My guild doesn't do world race or anything so I was never asked to switch class or spec. I play frost dk and ran with Ice Cap build before it was cool simply because i like it. I also ran with Inexorable assault instead of cold heart which does way less dps simply because it's a comfy pick for me. I did all that and still my logs are 90+ for hc and I am usually in the top 3 guild dps. What I am saying is, yea the a lot of ppl who aren't into hardcore wow won't be affected by this because they usually play with the less optimal setups simply because they like it. As for the hardcore players, they will switch convenents like they switch classes so I don't think convents would bring any new problems to the game.