"Only the top 1% will pick covenants based on performance" :S

[Balazzar]

These numbers aren't all that far off. Night Fae's travel form is inherently GOOD for casual players. Necrolord's abilities plain SUCK. Beyond Necrolord lagging behind the overall numbers are much more even.

Now if you look at the spec-level... there are clear winners. But again, it doesn't take a genius or someone reading min/max guides folks... you get to use these abilities for your class in each of the zones. Night Fae on my mage I was using over and over to reset Fire Blast in the quest area. Turns out that means it is beast... that isn't rocket science. That didn't take me reading an essay from Complexity Limit or analyze sim spreadsheets. It is clear as day. I never used the Kyrian or Necro class ability once because it sounded so stupid and slowed down how I play. I used Kyrian a few times but it felt dumb.

As to "covenant class fantasy" whatever. You spend like 5-10 minutes a day in the faction hub. The rest is in Oribos or doing the WQs and you can travel all over and do those regardless of which Covenant you chose.

[Malania]

These numbers aren't all that far off. Night Fae's travel form is inherently GOOD for casual players. Necrolord's abilities plain SUCK. Beyond Necrolord lagging behind the overall numbers are much more even.

Now if you look at the spec-level... there are clear winners. But again, it doesn't take a genius or someone reading min/max guides folks... you get to use these abilities for your class in each of the zones. Night Fae on my mage I was using over and over to reset Fire Blast in the quest area. Turns out that means it is beast... that isn't rocket science. That didn't take me reading an essay from Complexity Limit or analyze sim spreadsheets. It is clear as day.

As to "covenant class fantasy" whatever. You spend like 5-10 minutes a day in the faction hub. The rest is in Oribos or doing the WQs and you can travel all over and do those regardless of which Covenant you chose.

Wild Spirits wasn't used that often due to it being a 2m CD as opposed to Resonating Arrow which I used on CD @ 60s. WS sims higher. It's not always cut and dry.

[Xez]

I think this is a big brain move on Blizzard's part to disrupt minmax culture by making minmaxing directly at odds with a lot of players' lore and aesthetic sensibilities.

[VinceVega]

Fyi, Divine Toll > Ashen Hallow for m+. Kyrian paladin is actually really strong for all specs and all forms of content. It's overall the best even if Venthyr is 100 dps more on Patchwerk.

I was allready told and admitted my error

[ravenmoon]

then how is it possible the largest disparity is for specs where aesthetics and meta are aligned (paladins are mostly kyrians and druids mostly fae) but when its disconected and "best" option doesnt fit so well with aesthetics its actualy majority choosing DIFFERENT covenant? (holy priest only above 40% for necro despite it being the best, frost dk under 25% for fae despite it being the best and so on) thats DISPROVING the argument majority choose based on performance, yet somehow people claiming that ignore it, almost like reality doesnt matter to them, but their OPINION does...obviously not only best people choose based on performance, but to be fair nobody ever claimed it will be so, people claimed only "1%" SHOULD do so as the impact for them will be noticeable, unlike for the rest of playerbase... some players choose what they like the best some choose what sims the best, some will choose covenant bcs they already have characters in the 3 others and want to see the 4th covenant...there is thousands reasons to choose covenant and claiming vast majority chosen based on performance when its CLEARLY not true from the very post on wowhead (as i said, some specs are clearly showing the "best" covenant for them is below half, or not even their first pick) is definitely confirmation bias...

Thanks for the response, I hadn't quite considered his assessment fully. Glad you did respond

[Cosmic Janitor]

Sure is lonely as the only Venthyr Warlock in existence. I saw another one the other day and was glad that there was at least one person out there as dumb as me.

Haha I know the feeling. My mage is probably the only arcane mage on the server that picked Kyrian, at least I haven't seen another yet. I once met a frost kyrian mage, poor sod, probably has it even worse .

[Snowfunk]

Well yes, and no.

I picked Covenant based on aesthetics. However, Venthyr is very solid for Retribution, but it's a terribly unfun ability to play with.
It's a big thorn in my side that I'm not able to play with the Kyrian ability, which is good, smooth and SUPER fun to play with...

I really think they made a BIG mistake.

[gd8]

Meh i take the best performing covenant. I am not 1% and most people i know ingame are the same.

People should get away from the thinking, that just because you like to play with a covenant you like story wise EVERYONE should do it.
I like min/maxing. I don't care that much about the covenant story. It is an hour max story per week and probably will be done in a few weeks.

I can and i am allowed to min/max the shit out of the game no matter how good i play. And i am also allowed to not take you with me in a Mythic+ run if you are not optimized. Never looked it up for M0s for now. But if everything stays like this and i take an Ret pala for example i damn well make sure he has ashen hallow... just to good to pass it up.

You are also allowed to not care about it. I don't mind. But people should stop telling me how i am "supposed" to play the game.
I don#t give a flying f** about the story. I take what comes my way but if i watn good story i don't play wow. Never was its strong suite. Not even in classic. I go play a bioware/CDPR game or something.

Venthyr isn't even ret's best m+ covenant lmfao. God what an annoying person

[TheFirstOnes]

"And if you for some reason think that Rogues like to be fairies or ascended angle-creatures then you're absolutely delusional" You don't speak for the rogue community. Shut up.

[Aesahaettr]

I play a spec that not even the "best" spec for my class (demo lock) and I picked venthyr because they're cool. We start raiding on Thursday.

Performance be damned.

[Ragu4]

I picked Kyrian cause i think they may have the more interesting story, with the potential for massive change from their memory wiping ways. I'm a Monk BTW.

[faithbane]

This is confirmation bias. I chose my covenant purely on aesthetics and lore compatibility and it happened to be the top performing Covenant at launch. In beta it was simming like 3rd a week before it launched. If it gets nerfed i'll still keep the Covenant.

That's not confirmation bias, he is not putting extra value on some evidence that agrees with him and ignoring others. He is literally reviewing a statistic based on a full data set and making a hypothesis, its as clean as it gets.

On the other hand, what you re doing is trying to use a single outlier data point to contradict him at best.

[Unholyground]

I won't be mythic raiding, heroic is good enough so no one cares, though I am enhancement so I will be topping the charts regardless.

[DeuZWw]

the problem is not even "minmax", but the huge gap between some specs.

Warrior Venthyr vs Necrolord is HUGE.

If they did a better job at balancing the covenants, maybe there would be less of a difference.


Still, i'm expect blizzard to release a balance patch in the next weeks, because we will have more data to work with when warcraftlogs shows how underperforming some spec/covenant combos are..

[LazuOG]

My entire guild is going to be doing m+ and mythic as we've always done. They were all perfectly fine with people picking what they liked, as opposed to needing to minmax every little thing.

It is, as always, only the "top 1%" who are diehard minmaxing everything they do. And, as with every previous tier, there's gonna be people in LFD as well who won't take people unless they have the covenant they read as being the best on icy-veins. Doesn't mean they're (the people) are good, though. Just blindly follow guides.

Picking an appropriate covenant isn't even min maxing. What are people on these forums on about. It's common sense and a few mins of research. You will see how bad this cov dilemma gets when content starts to get actually hard.
No matter how good you play your fav lore covenant that sims 3rd, timmy who picked up the class two months ago and spent 10 minutes on the web looking for the way to play is gonna dumpster you. And once word gets around you will be scorned instead of invited for difficult content. Nothing is gonna change that.

[Malix Farwin]

This is confirmation bias. I chose my covenant purely on aesthetics and lore compatibility and it happened to be the top performing Covenant at launch. In beta it was simming like 3rd a week before it launched. If it gets nerfed i'll still keep the Covenant.

Its ironic that you say what the OP is talking about is confirmed bias when you quite literally do that in the next sentence. What the OP is doing is instead making a pretty sound theory. Yes there are people in your position but the variance is just far too great to be a coincidence. You are seeing things over 50% to upwards nearly 90% tilted towards one covenant out of 4 and you think its just because THAT many people of that covenant?

[Hellobolis]

the true test isn't now, it's seeing how many people will switch when the next raid tier comes out.

[wolfpackfan]

For my Hunter, I went Kyrion for the armor and weapon transmog, plus I love the zone. It happens the be super close to Night Fae in performance for MM, so no big deal for me. I hate the NF mail armor look, and not crazy about the Castle Nathria mail look either.

[Biglog]

Where are the stats that an equally skilled player that isn't in the top 1% doing a raid (which btw didn't even open until today lol), under different covenants, where dps numbers are wildly different for an overall run? Some covenant powers are more "bursty" compared to others, so I'm not talking about a cherry-picked fight. Those dps differences between covenants tend to flatten out over a whole raid, and it's not like you can change covenants between fights.

Until that has been provided backing up these claims this is just totally subjective that the OP 'thinks' the number difference is so huge that it forces people into choices. Moreover, it's totally discounting people that choose covenant for mount, reward, cosmetic, immersion, etc. reasons (which are quite valid for many players), and incorrectly assuming any covenant choice is minmaxing, which definitely is untrue. Casual players that minmax when their skill causes a dps variance of 25%+ is what's funny.

[Malania]

Its ironic that you say what the OP is talking about is confirmed bias when you quite literally do that in the next sentence. What the OP is doing is instead making a pretty sound theory. Yes there are people in your position but the variance is just far too great to be a coincidence. You are seeing things over 50% to upwards nearly 90% tilted towards one covenant out of 4 and you think its just because THAT many people of that covenant?

My second sentence is a statement about why I chose my covenant. It's not a statement about anyone else? There's no bias in that. Yes you are but you're also seeing highest simmed at under 50%. You can make of the data whatever you like. There's assumptions that it makes max sims and aesthetics. Ultimately there is no conclusive evidence until you can measure an active switch of the player base from one to another following a change in sims after a buff/nerf. Otherwise the data supports nothing as you cannot identify the reasons for the choice.