The feature is ridiculously bad. Just as an example, as a guardian druid I can’t track barkskin or rage of the sleeper. Being able to see when these are active is necessary to survive higher keys.
Not only does the feature not track them, it has also removed the ability for them to show up on the personal resource bar. So now the only way to track this buff with the ingame UI seems to be just trying to find it in your buffs. I’m essentially forced into using an addon for it now, the exact opposite goal of the feature.
All of that just to give an example of issues with the feature, that’s not the point of the post. There are already several posts on that topic. I’m more interested in how this kind of thing even happens, because we’ve seen similar things before where it really seems like it should’ve been super obvious that something was a bad idea, or that it wouldn’t work or that it would even mess with other systems.
Some examples of that are the release state of augmentation in season 2 dragonflight. That spec coming into the game in the state that it was should’ve never been possible. If you didn’t have an augmentation evoker in your group in that season it was like you were half as strong. It was actually ridiculous. Another example would be locking covenants in shadowlands and giving them different abilities. This is the kind of thing that, when suggested should be shot down by someone else on the team. It shouldn’t get further than that.
Also, just because I know someone might bring it up, these aren’t conclusions people came to in hindsight. Most of the time it’s obvious upon the announcement of these features that it’s a bad idea, rather than the actual launch of them. Locking covenants was an obvious L before anyone even played shadowlands. Similarly with augmentation evoker, while we didn’t know how insane the actual stats would turn out to be, a lot of people saw the spell previews and could deduce that the spells would be inherently problematic, as they have proven to be. Testing doesn’t even seem to be required to know that some of these ideas were bad.
So what gives? Why do these features make it all the way to launch? And why is nobody saying “Stop. You’re being stupid. This is a bad idea.”?