This poster is absolutely right. If they were all balanced to be equal DPS in all situations (or just freely available to all) people could actually choose the one based on their own playstyle and it would be great.
Just like when azerite reforge costs were too high, it sucked because we couldn’t play our specs as openly, couldn’t experiment without huge cost, couldn’t just try things out for fun. Or when legendaries had that magical BLP for 4 drops and then went away making it really hard to play other specs because they felt bad without their specific legendaries…
So much is dependent on borrowed power for specs to feel whole.
And as this poster says, how “cool” you think they are won’t matter because you’ll probably pick the one that actually lets you enjoy the gameplay the most. if you like to AoE but your favorite looking one has better ST, what do you do?
So thanks, Ralph of Barthilas, for this great opinion on covenants. I fully agree.
But this is an rpg! You’re asking for too much fun and freedom! It’s not allowed!
I like the idea of the freedom but others like the idea of being locked into them because it’s more immersive or something.
I get the other sides point. My only problem with it is the fact I’ve spend months of 8.2 and 8.3 just doing dungeons, raids, and pvp. Nothing else meaningful to do. I’d be cool with the system as they have it if I had months of rpg content to tackle.
Picking my class was a doozy, then of course my race, oh and my faction… another tough one.
Then there was which specs I was going to spend hundreds of hours of gameplay learning, which consequently was time not spent on another spec. all that time spent in raid and dungeons, which was time not spent in PVP…
it’s almost like being optimal everywhere has more to it than juts which covenant ability you select…
That would be cool. Unfortunately, the covenant abilities don’t unlock months of RPG content to tackle. they’re just a button you press every 45s or so.
they could do a lot more with the covenant zones and stuff for sure!
That’s fine for the abilities that are pure DPS but how to you balance the utility effects? For example, take the hunter ability that lets you ignore LoS. If you were to apply it to Visions (since most people have an idea of what those fights look like), that effect is useless when you’re fighting Thrall but it’d be great on Alleria since you can keep DPSing while hiding behind the pillars.
I think this would be the best solution. Even if you ignore min/maxing like Blizz wants us to, I don’t think it’s good design to force people to choose between a fun Covenant and a fun ability if they’re not lucky enough to have them match up to the same Covenant. If you split them, you’d create two good choices (Covenant and ability) instead of the one bad one that it’s currently shaping up to be.
not really, like the majority… we just take the one that does the best! just like with talents. there is no other choice when there’s numbers involved. not hamstringing yourself is fun!
No kidding. I think it’s really cool I’ll get to choose between an AoE ability that makes my spec passable for m+, the single target one that will be required to be competitive in arena, and than the covenant that has cool lore/cosmetics for my class. How meaningful, wow!
I don’t. i know my classes and specs have struggles, not asking for them to be the best at everything!
that has nothing to do with covenant abilities. you know people can want more access just to have fun and experiment with them, right? its not always about your numbers!
