I think the reason they aren’t changing covenants just yet is pretty simple - the idea isn’t great and this can actually be seen from the beta, but someone like Ion already said to the dev team a couple of weeks or months ago that they are going to see how it works first and that’s it for the moment. They are trying to balance it, but it is absolutely clear that their efforts will not do much, the idea is flawed at the root. You CANNOT balance abilities that do different things and players DO NOT want to choose to be optimal in role A and suboptimal in roles B and C.
I have no doubt that they will come around and allow free switches - the only alternative is to nerf these covenants into the floor so that they are all irrelevant trash. I only hope that they do so earlier rather than later.
Frankly, issues like these are supposed to be found and fixed on the betas. That’s what the betas are for. But…
I think part of the issue is perception of this “total disaster”.
Some players are seeing a difference in maths as a “total disaster” (if that’s true, every wow expo has been a disaster because the gaps between top and bottom classes performance has always been more than 20%. In BFA it’s been as high as 100% or more).
I don’t think Blizzard see a maths difference as a “total disaster”. They’ve actually said several times, very clearly, they want to try and move away from the perception it is, and that not everything should be equal all the time.
The reason there is an issue is because the players mentioned above (not saying they’re wrong to, before anyone leaps on me) absolutely refuse to believe otherwise and want to resist all attempts to change their mind. In fairness, Blizzard have been responsible for fostering this mindset.
But essentially it’s a “lost in translation issue” some players go “omg this is an issue, imbalance!!!” and blizzard, who have said they’re moving away from that, predictably reply “it’s not an issue because we were never aiming for that”.
So no side will back down. The players won’t budge on their stance because they expect balance and do not want to accept hypothetical lack in their performance, it’s all about the numbers. Blizzard won’t budge because they’ve said several times “we’re going into this with the mindset that it’s not about the numbers”. Until one side changes their mind, there will not be progress.
I don’t like how it appears to penalise me for different content, let alone different specs. This feels counter intuitive but I’m going to see how it works out.
From the informal conversation between Ion and Preach it seems they want to move away from the best dps is whoever pushes their buttons the most efficiently. This system forces some of that variation.
I think the issue is expecting them to math. This is the fundemental issue here.
People are expecting blizzard to respond to maths, because they value the maths. Blizzard have said they’re trying to move beyond just pure maths. Expecting them to therefore respond to “issues with maths” is expecting something I don’t think will happen.
I think the arguments that will convince them are those that aim at stuff like multispeccing and char identity. About how shallow the covs actually feel on a certain level. Maths is not the argument to use because Ion basically spearheaded this system as an attempt to move away from maths.
The solution to make people care about the abilities themselves is obviously to make the math behind them balanced so they don’t have to care about that.
Get it Blizz? Solve the math part, then people will pick their preferred flavor abilities which make the gameplay enjoyable for them.
It’s mostly the same as racials. They tried to balance them for years and in the end just nerfed them. The problem is that all those covenant abilities/soulbinds/most of the conduits are shared between all the specs. There’s no possible way to balance this.
Depends what you mean by underperform. I think you’re overegging the case here.
I’m not using the BIS talents, nor traits, nor essences for my DH. I care very much about my contribution to a group. Other than an initial teething problem in my first high key, I haven’t yet failed a key yet, often +2 or more despite playing this class in mythic+ for 2 weeks.
I am confident if I get gear upgrades, I could keep climbing and climbing…so I think what you mean is “in a high-end group” because honestly the amount of slack/wriggle room in groups below that is actually really generous.
Telling MMO players to not follow meta because its not needed, is like telling teenagers not to have sex since they got their whole lives to do that. Technically correct advice but also useless.
Agreed. I’m kind of non-commital on this debate but there are concerns I have, but all of the abilities being absolutely equal isn’t one of them, but it makes sense to try to remove an issue players may fixate on, yes.
And yet if i go to a site and input a gem for 50 versa vs 50 mastery it gives me how much each of them will give me.
The same for 1% crit, 1 % mastery etc
Take note that the difference is so little between most of them, you just need to nerf the outliers to make them somewhat balanced.
I’m talking about making several bad choices that make your character do literally 30% lower… i’ve seen 50% with the same class/spec just different abilities, gearing was the same, just the abilities chosen were questionable.
I couldn’t with good consciousness pick something to make me 30-50% less capable.
Covenants i’ve seen going for 20-30% difference… and everything else is then the above i mentioned, that’s why it’s going to be a train wreck, the differences will probably go to be wider.
That’s because the cons of corruptions are different than the cons of covenants. With covenants the problem is that whatever you pick, you are screwed, this is just infuriating. With corruptions the problem was that you have to grind-grind-grind and keep lots of pieces for the perfect combo, this is very exhausting.
When Blizz tried to make these Covenants they’d go for … utility powers, ST, AOE, overall.
These all fit most likely in a game area, so ofc if you compare them to let’s say raiding, everyone will probably go for the ST one.
The thing is… that some are so imbalanced, that the AOE one is best on ST as well, thus invalidating the ST one as well and ofc the overall one, utility going to trash tier.
So why not take the AOE one and be good in raids and M+ as well, no?
That’s one of the issues with Blizz balancing that goes beyond numbers.
When creating abilities… make them go up against each other in the same field(aoe vs aoe, ST vs ST, utility vs utility…). This makes their tuning much easier to do.
That way when a player chooses, he can chose based on flavor, or on gameplay.
