DK Covenant Abilities Revealed

[Bangaa]

In the recent gameinformer article we can see the current iteration of the DK covenant abilities. Below is a transcript of them and a link to the image of the article.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...5/image5-1.png


Death's Due - Night Fae
Instant, 30 yard range, 45-second cooldown

The targeted ground begins to wilt, dealing 14,250 Nature damage over 10 seconds to targets within the area. Drain power from each enemy within the area, reducing their damage done by 10 percent and increasing your strength by 80 for 10 seconds.

Shackle the Unworthy - Kyrian
Instant, 30-yard range, 1-minute cooldown

Admonish your target for their past transgressions, reducing the damage they deal to you by 5 percent and dealing 1,678 Arcane damage over 14 seconds. Shackle the Unworthy's cooldown is reduced by 4 seconds when you damage the affected enemy with a Rune-spending attack.

Swarming Mist - Venthyr
Instant, 1-minute cooldown

A heavy mist surrounds you for 8 seconds, increasing your Avoidance by 311. Deals 136 Shadow damage every 1 second to enemies within 10 yards. For each enemy damaged, you gain 3 Runic power.

Abomination Limb - Necrolord
Instant, 1.5-minute cooldown

Sprout an additional limb for 8 seconds, dealing 4,900 Shadow damage every 2 seconds to the nearest enemy. If the enemy is farther than five yards from you, they are pulled to your location.


What's everyone's thoughts on these? Are you more or less excited now? Personally I think Abom Limb has the chance to look silly in a good way if they attach it to the player correctly. The mist seems decent for a spec that wants extra RP and the Night Fae one looks like a good tanking one due to the AoE mitigation.

[Gungnir]

Anything that increases RP generation will inherently be very powerful for basically all of the DK specs.
Abom Limb looks like it might be real nice for PvP, having an extra grip.

[Yeti Glanchi]

Death 's Due + Abomination Limb look the best at first glance ... but i think Swarming Mist will be the most popular option

[faithbane]

first 2 seem to be a favoring tanks based on aoe vs single target fights, 3rd is the pure dps option and 4th is a pvp/dps I guess? based on how much damage that limb does.

the abom limb looks like a cool and interesting move but the rest are really bland and meh.. nothing really exciting or original.

[Galathir]

I like the Necrolord one. Sounds nice.
I just hope they overhaul the movement/avoid stuff ability shown on Blizzcon because that alone might turn me to another covenant.

Judging by everything shown so far Night Fae would be the best to join but I'd rather switch mains before I join them with my DK.

[Ashgaan]

Are the abilities also active in PvP zones?
If yes, i do not see this very well, if you want to tank, PvP and DPS from time to time, it will mean 3 different characters (as they already stated that crossing covenants will be expensive)

[crox]

abom arm sounds fun as hell.

[Medrawd]

Death's Due and Swarming Mist seems to be the safest pick both for tanking and dps. Abomination Limb looks like could be tons of fun (and kind of broken) in pvp.

Having both Swarming Mist and Bonestorm might break blood in m+, i look foward to it.

[Nerovar]

To be quite honest, these abilities look incredibly underwhelming. The first one is basically defile/death and decay. The second one is another dot with some damage reduction and pretty high uptime. The third one is some kind of overpowered rune weapon type ability with a bit of AoE damage sprinkled on top? All of these could just as well be passive azerite traits for all I care. I don't really see how they interact with the DK toolkit except for the Venthyr one if you play Breath Frost.

The last one is the only one that is remotely interesting even though it's on a pretty high CD. It will probably be pretty overpowered because of its duration and a must have in PvP which shows the obvious weakness of the covenant system. Luckily, I really like the Edgelord/Necrolord visuals but for someone who really wants to play Venthyr and is also a PvP player - tough luck.

I think it's kinda funny that this was literally the first concern people like Preach had when they heard of this system and Blizzard somehow couldn't figure out this was going to be a problem? I can already see the writing on the wall. System will be close to finished in Beta (it certainly isn't finished as of now), people see it's hella unbalanced and complain about it. Blizzard doesn't have enough time to react to feedback and releases one of its main features in an unfinished and broken state (BfA says hi). Then they try to fix it with every content patch by slapping a new, unfinished system on top and then they'll completely scrap everything come 10.0.

Am I the only one who just wants good ol' class design back? No Artifacts, no Azerite, no Covenants. Just interesting, class specific abilities that are here to stay.

[Nosgoth]

Anything that increases RP generation will inherently be very powerful for basically all of the DK specs.
Abom Limb looks like it might be real nice for PvP, having an extra grip.

Which means you'll have to pick your covenant based on whether you wanna PvP or PvE, whether you wanna be Tank or DPS. Sounds awful. This is basically like another row of talents, but spread across different factions, which makes it hard to switch your talent.

[Nerovar]

Which means you'll have to pick your covenant based on whether you wanna PvP or PvE, whether you wanna be Tank or DPS. Sounds awful. This is basically like another row of talents, but spread across different factions, which makes it hard to switch your talent.

It doesn't make it just hard to switch your talents. Switching talents in Classic was hard. Here you have to completely reroll your covenant and they want to punish you for it. This is insane from a gameplay point of view.

[Clash the DK]

They need to ditch these covenant abilities. It just adds unnecessary bloat to our action bars. If I want more active abilities, then I have that choice within the actual talent system.

Furthermore, we already have these abilities making them completely redundant:

Death's Due is basically just Death and Decay with added benefits except it does Nature damage and doesn't interact with any specs Mastery...

Shackle the Unworthy is another ranged DoT similar to old Icy Touch. Except it does Arcane damage and doesn't interact with any specs Mastery...

Swarming Mist is Remorseless Winter but with Shadow damage... At least this one works with Unholy's Mastery...

Abomination Limb is literally the Abomination mechanics without the Abomination... Once again Shadow damage, so what about Frost...?


This is all a big mistake. They need to work on improving the base design of the class instead of focusing on more temporary abilities that don't even compliment the class.

[Oneirophobia]

It doesn't make it just hard to switch your talents. Switching talents in Classic was hard. Here you have to completely reroll your covenant and they want to punish you for it. This is insane from a gameplay point of view.

But you just said,

To be quite honest, these abilities look incredibly underwhelming.

It's "insane" to have to go through a lengthy process to change "incredibly underwhelming" abilities, am I understanding you correctly?

Why are you concerned with the difficulty of switching the covenants if you consider them incredibly underwhelming? Aren't you just going to throw a dart at a board and pick whichever underwhelming nonsense it lands on?



Side note, I don't think meaningful decisions are poor gameplay, however I'm of the mindset these abilities will be important.

[Zorish]

They need to ditch these covenant abilities. It just adds unnecessary bloat to our action bars. If I want more active abilities, then I have that choice within the actual talent system.

Furthermore, we already have these abilities making them completely redundant:

Death's Due is basically just Death and Decay with added benefits except it does Nature damage and doesn't interact with any specs Mastery...

Shackle the Unworthy is another ranged DoT similar to old Icy Touch. Except it does Arcane damage and doesn't interact with any specs Mastery...

Swarming Mist is Remorseless Winter but with Shadow damage... At least this one works with Unholy's Mastery...

Abomination Limb is literally the Abomination mechanics without the Abomination... Once again Shadow damage, so what about Frost...?


This is all a big mistake. They need to work on improving the base design of the class instead of focusing on more temporary abilities that don't even compliment the class.

abilities made about covenant theme, not just class. Bastion giving shadow damage ability sounds stupid as it is. And you might wanna check mage skills to, they have same situation, where venthyr and necro give shadow ability. Honestly? only DK specs have masteries left for specific school type.

[Nerovar]

But you just said,




It's "insane" to have to go through a lengthy process to change "incredibly underwhelming" abilities, am I understanding you correctly?

Why are you concerned with the difficulty of switching the covenants if you consider them incredibly underwhelming? Aren't you just going to throw a dart at a board and pick whichever underwhelming nonsense it lands on?



Side note, I don't think meaningful decisions are poor gameplay, however I'm of the mindset these abilities will be important.

Okay, I'll bite and elaborate.

When I call these abilities "underwhelming" it's a statement of personal taste first and foremost. I think these abilities are underwhelming because they don't really fit or add anything to the DK toolset, they're not thematic and they don't provide any interesting gameplay apart from the Necrolord ability. But even if all of them where "incredibly underwhelming" it wouldn't change the fact that there could still be obvious BiS choices for different areas of the game/different specs. Just because they're underwhelming (in terms of the criteria I mentioned above) doesn't mean these choices don't impact your gameplay. It just means that they don't impact your gameplay in a way that's fun/well-designed. All of the Azerite traits were underwhelming to me but they still obviously affected my damage output by a ridiculous degree (e.g. literally oneshotting people with the "correct" trait/talent combination as an Unholy). It's just that they didn't provide any interesting gameplay (mostly because they weren't well integrated into the rest of the kit).

To stick with the Azerite example: If I was somehow locked to a few of them and had to go through a huge grind to access e.g. the PvP BiS Azerite traits in order to compete in arenas, it would have been terrible game design. That's the problem we'll face with the covenant system.

[Syegfryed]

they seem very cool thematically, sadly you have to chose

[Heartlessnobody]

Death's Due seems to be the way im gonna go cuz its more interesting

[FlubberPuddy]

Love how Venthyr is basically a love letter to vampire fans. Definitely gonna have my DK go with that covenant!

[plz delete account]

they seem very cool thematically, sadly you have to chose

Syegfryed saying something positive?

Now I've seen it all.

[Arawrabearialis]

Okay, I'll bite and elaborate.

When I call these abilities "underwhelming" it's a statement of personal taste first and foremost. I think these abilities are underwhelming because they don't really fit or add anything to the DK toolset, they're not thematic and they don't provide any interesting gameplay apart from the Necrolord ability. But even if all of them where "incredibly underwhelming" it wouldn't change the fact that there could still be obvious BiS choices for different areas of the game/different specs. Just because they're underwhelming (in terms of the criteria I mentioned above) doesn't mean these choices don't impact your gameplay. It just means that they don't impact your gameplay in a way that's fun/well-designed. All of the Azerite traits were underwhelming to me but they still obviously affected my damage output by a ridiculous degree (e.g. literally oneshotting people with the "correct" trait/talent combination as an Unholy). It's just that they didn't provide any interesting gameplay (mostly because they weren't well integrated into the rest of the kit).

To stick with the Azerite example: If I was somehow locked to a few of them and had to go through a huge grind to access e.g. the PvP BiS Azerite traits in order to compete in arenas, it would have been terrible game design. That's the problem we'll face with the covenant system.

I disagree, they're CD's with both defensive and offensive value, aside from the Necrolords one. They definitely adds to the Blood kit. Rotations don't need to be overly complicated in order to be fun and when they add new abilities, they shouldn't simply be there to increase rotation complexity.