The great failure

Shadowlands has been by and large a strong expansion for WOW.  In particular I commend Torghast and the first raid as being especially fun.  There is one thing that stands out as being a horribly designed disaster though:  The new mission table.

I like the idea of recruiting heroes and sending them out on missions.  Ever since this mechanic appeared in Warlords of Draenor I have been a fan.  It made me feel less like an errand boy delivering goods and more like an important leader, which is appropriate considering the lore and history of the world.  Each expansion has brought a new implementation of the mission table, and this new one is the first catastrophic failure.

It looked good at first glance.  Heroes all have unique abilities, and positioning matters since each side has a front row and a back row.  Some units attack in a cone, or attack the furthest away unit, or defend their teammates.  In theory this seemed like it could be a deep tactical subgame for WOW.

In practice it is a pure numbers grind, and the numbers are rubbish.

Attacking targets in the back row *seems* like it is a way to take out casters.  However, because all of your units bash into the front line and the back line has plenty of health, you want every attack to smash into the same enemy in the front.  Attacking back line enemies is useless.  Units have all kinds of special abilities but they can simply be summed up by figuring out their damage per round and ignoring any unique traits.  All you do with most covenants is fill up your ranks with random heroes and make sure your level is high enough to plow through the enemies.  Strategic decisions are nearly irrelevant to the outcome.  It simply doesn't matter that enemies have a cone attack, or a bleed, or a heal.  You deal with every threat the same way.

So the system is a complete failure when it comes to delivering on its obvious promise of strategy.  How does it do otherwise?  Since there isn't any strategy that matters, you would imagine it would be trivial to balance at least.

Unfortunately the balance is completely busted.  The Night Fae have troops that permanently reduce enemy damage done by 20%.  You put four of those in a group with a healer and they can beat any mission.  The rest of your heroes don't matter, you just send out that one comp and it beats everything.  The game has challenging plot missions and as you do them the level of the missions you face rises.  After awhile of smashing everything with your broken comp none of your other heroes can beat anything and they are utterly worthless.  You have level 30 heroes going up against level 50 missions and they are helpless.  

The Night Fae situation is a disaster because of one stupidly overpowered ability.

Kyrian, on the other hand, has troops that are utter garbage.  Instead of 'all enemies do 20% less damage, stacking', the Kyrian troops do 'a few allies take 10% less damage, not stacking'.  The Kyrian don't have any powerful way to do anything, and their heroes are weak.  If I want to beat a level 30 mission as Kyrian, I will need to slowly grind my way up to level 40 to even stand a chance, and I might need be level 50.  Those level 30 missions can be beaten by Night Fae at level 15 without any difficulty.

Simply put, they completely screwed up the numbers.  Many heroes are nigh worthless, and there are some outrageously broken ones.  That would be fine if every covenant had a mix of both, but they don't.  If you are Night Fae you get tons of materials, cash, mounts, pets, and other rewards.  Kyrian get basically nothing.  Both of these situations are wretched.

This basically comes down to the system having some cool ideas at the outset, and the numbers being written in 5 minutes by some intern.  I could easily take the ideas presented in the system and make numbers that would make sense and be enjoyable for players.  What players want is a way to level up heroes, defeat missions that seem appropriately challenging, and eventually earn the big rewards.  They don't want to grind endlessly for seemingly nothing, and they don't want to instantly crush all opposition without thought or creativity.

The mission table is a small part of the game admittedly.  This isn't wrecking it for everyone.  Still, covenant choice is not supposed to work out this way, and it is clear that the subgame was incompetently built.  It is so messed up though that I don't expect any fixes soon.  My guess is they will just write it off entirely until a big update happens in six months and then rebuild it from scratch.  It is a black mark on their record, no doubt, because this isn't some tricky thing that is tough to notice.  Anyone who played it through would have seen how wretched it is, and if they didn't then either there was no testing or the testing was as badly done as the original design.