It is very easy how this will work. People decide for themselves what the main content is (how hard that can be for themselves), and after a month or 2 the game is ‘settled’ and logs are available. It will be clear what is the best in dungeons or the best in raids, or in pvp, and a lot of people switch.
By game design you can not go back and have fun with the other covenant for an evening. You can not try it out again.
Like for example with legion legendaries you could pick different ones for a night and just enjoy those impacts and gameplay. And then just switch back again to the ‘real deal’. But i have run myself a lot of dungeons with the non meta legendaries or the non meta build/talents/azerite/corruptions in bfa too.
There are definitely options that are not that different in performance but creates different playstyles. I have run myself 100% echo of the elements in raids on my resto shaman in legion, and not cloudburst. Still i performed pretty good on it (got like everywhere purple parses). People overreact over non meta builds. I have timed KR 21 with Beacond of Virtue instead of Divine purpose.
There is a difference between a non-meta build which is still in the ballpark of being competitive and a build which is so under-performing to be outside of said ballpark.
Of course unless you are engaging something very high-level you can ultimately do almost everything, but if you need to struggle much harder it can become frustrating quite fast.
I would like to show you this as an example. https://mplus.subcreation.net/holy-paladin.html
Even on the highest levels there is a wild viarity of azerite, corruptions, trinkets, essences, etc.
So many people think there is 1 right thing, and then everyone sheeps… that is just not the reality.
Again, nobody questions there are multiple builds which can be competitive. This doesn’t exclude there are builds which are not competitive and lead to a much harder struggle for all involved.
I am not sure why that is relevant to the discussion of people wanting to have fun, trying out other things. Obviously you are right with that statement. But for covenants we are in those for 2 years. There is no trying out, there is no having fun with different stuff. We are going to be sheep. it is creating meta.
I think that’s only for people with that mindset.
I’m not going to change (for that reason anyway). I MIGHT decide to alternate covenants and max out all the renown for them on 1 character; not sure about this yet.
I really think this issue is being blown up way more than it has to.
So you won’t have a ‘perfect’ ability for every type of content. So what? I just don’t understand how people can be this obsessive about it.
Anyway, we can keep on discussing this, but it won’t change anything. Blizzard has made their intentions clear. I hope it works out; I hope that people will discover that not having 100% ‘BiS’ abilities isn’t a huge deal. And for the vast majority of players it SHOULDN’T be a big deal. It’s all in the mind.
Yeahhhh that’s a stupid example. Because… if you have a 2 week waiting time, that means you already WERE with that covenant before. So you’d likely already know that that ‘really cool and fun-looking’ thing existed.
Switching to a new covenant takes no time at all; you literally go to an npc and say ‘I want to switch’. Done.
My issue is with the idea that the design of Covenants will mainly affect players which PuG compared to players in a guild or friend group.
I think the opposite is true, since in a PuG you can pick and chose the party composition from a very large pool, whereas in a guild or group of friends the options will be much more limited.
This means it will be far more likely to have a sub-optional party composition in the latter situation compared to the former.
‘oh noes’.
Just like you don’t get to try out a class in ‘certain situations’ either.
Jeez… what’s with people and wanting everything superbalanced with the ability to finetune with a comb. Come on… this is an mmorpg. Not some hypercompetitive esports moba.
In term of actual gear yes but what about Lego recipes and conduits ?
Because I can tell you, it’ll be essences 2.0 if the vendors fail to cover most of the relevant Legos and almost all conduits (conduits scale with ilvl so if you can’t obtain them from your favourite content… You know how this is gonna end right ?)
