Except it's not 1-2% better. Currently for Retribution Paladins a difference between the best and the worst covenants is 7%. That percent do matter. I switched from Night Fae Discipline Priest to Venthyr one because it was not 1-2%. It was much more for me, basically my logs suddenly improved from green to purple. That's because I can press Mind games during Spirit Shell and 18 players will get 6k shield. It's 108k healing or +1.8k HPS. It's a difference between 3k HPS and 4.8k HPS. It's a difference between dead player and alive player. Night Fae ability is literally useless. It regens some mana, but Venthyr ability regens mana as well. It could reduce my Spirit Shell cooldown if I would not cast a single flash heal for 20 seconds (not realistic), but I need to align it with Mindbender cooldown, so this cooldown reduction is just useless.
Don't blame players. I wanted to make a lore-based choice. Blame developers who did not do proper balancing work. I would play worst covenant if the difference would be 2%. But 60% difference? Not really.
Covenants are neat story things, and I'm fine with that whole aspect of it.
But conduits suck and reflect Blizzard's worsening ability to put fun into this game. These trees are all choices between "what thing do I dislike the least in order to eventually get something I actually do like," when they should simply be "which thing do I like the most." Players need to stop defending this using masochistic "bUt BaLaNcE" arguments; a game can be balanced without making you choose things you hate, and we shouldn't be on the hook to defend Blizzard's expanding laziness. Yeah, they'll have to work harder to balance something unique than they will to balance "a button you press once per week is 1.5% better," but that's literally what you pay them for.
Command tables are... bafflingly bad. For one, they literally copy and pasted them from Legion, to the point that you get Legion achievements for doing things with them that don't really match the achievement (or the expansion, obviously). But the whole UI is a weird giant step backwards, as if this was the alpha for the original tables back in WoD. I really don't get what happened here.
But if we kept everything else, Covenants are neat enough. If only they had more of that Scryor vs. Aldor style of tension going on, that was great.
I am yet to see the choice of the soulbinds having any significant effect on player power.
Everything I care for right now at least are the covenant spells (big impact) and to a much lesser extent the conduits, but the passive abilities from the soulbinds themselves feel so whatever...
Overall I love all the covenants and everything they add (items, quests/lore etc.), but tbh the "meaningful choice" does feel extremely useless. They should've just given us one more talent row and treated conduits similar to how the azerite essences were (you have one interface where you just select a couple conduits you want to use)
Last edited by RobertMugabe; 2020-12-29 at 02:01 AM.
https://www.youtube.com/@DoffenGG
Gaming and WoW stuff
This.
Im a casual player with for now 4 character playing a different covenant each, even if im not doing any m+ or raid , i have constanly something to do, even if the stuff outside mm+, raid are hard to get, its fun
So i can tell its a success for casual players, dunno for hardgamer playerd
It's interesting - People thought covenants and soulbind limitations would be the biggest problems of the expansion.
Turns out, the people screaming that they weren't doing much of anything with the actual classes/specs were right again, for the 3rd expansion in a row. Feels real good to have Frostbolt back on my Fire Mage though - Glad they made such an impactful and meaningful change to the way the class plays as I wait around for Combustion to come off CD so I can play the video game again as I complete my 15th M+ key for the week with 0 drops and wait like a good boy for my 6-9 ring/on-use trinket combos to come outta the great vault.
Doesn't paint the whole picture. Thematically, none of the covenants except Kyrian really scream Paladin, and Venthyr/Necrolord are very counter-thematic to Paladins, though a case can be made for RP Bloodknights for Venthyr. It would be more worrisome if an extremely large portion of, say, Holy Paladins went Necrolord simply because it was the strongest, considering how counter the covenant is to the theme of playing a Paladin.
This was a very poor choice to use for an argument, as Kyrian/Paladin is probably the strongest thematic covenant/class combination in the game.
Based off the numbers I'm seeing, overall popularity of a covenant among the playerbase looks to be very strongly tied to how much sense that covenant makes thematically to the spec they're playing.
So in a sense, the system is absolutely, positively, 100% working as intended.
The statistics of which covenant a top-100 mythic raider uses is irrelevant because they will always choose whatever gives the best performance, even if the advantage is 1%, and they are such an incredibly minute part of the playerbase.
If they didn't lock or gate content, most would be done with it within 1-2 weeks and then start crying about having nothing to do. Current system gives you something to do every week. Right now people who raid can focus on that and m+, and Maw and Torghast. Casuals can play with their covenant and have time to do some dungeons. The only people that would complain about having nothing to do are those who are online most of the day. And that's their personal problem, WoW shouldn't be the only game a person plays. Current pacing is pretty good.
Isn't that EXACTLY what covenants are? Each offers an ability that has a niche, the abilities and soulbinds make covenants relevant. And each has own unique storyline.How about not making it covenants, but factions with their own niches which makes them relevant and with their unique storylines?
STAR-J4R9-YYK4 use this for 5000 credits in star citizen