They can’t use their old tricks when people are locked into things that takes weeks to change. The community would go ballistic if they did.
You gotta remember we’re locked into choices now, which has never been done in the history of the game. Every part of the locked in choice has to be balanced. Even if they’re looking at the overall package of the covenant, they still have to take into account how any change will affect all 3 specs, how the legendaries now work with all specs and covenants now, etc.
But I digress. even if they are balancing in packages and just randomly nerf hammering the entire package instead of fine tuning, that’s just yet another argument for why lumping them all together is a horrific idea.
The only thing that’s actually locked like that are covenants and changing the conduits in your loadouts.
Once you get a legendary or pick a soulbind you aren’t locked into that choice for any amount of time. You can change your mind 5 seconds later.
I don’t disagree that covenants have a lot of bad things about them, but not because of balance concerns. I don’t expect balance to be any worse than traditional Blizzard balancing(which is already mediocre to begin with).
You will need to farm mats to craft the legendary, and then farm to upgrade that legendary. Using a legendary is a time commitment, the full extent of which we haven’t yet fully grasped.
You’ll need to put in some time for it, but it’s not like you’re locked to the choice.
People said they would have been perfectly fine with needing to grind to unlock the other covenants. That’s what legendaries are shaping up to be like.
The forums also have a habit of blowing things out of proportion, as evidenced by this thread.
Unless the abilities are virtually identical, it’s mechanically impossible which is as best I can tell… the intent. The issue is that doesn’t really work RP wise and isn’t very fun IMO, because it forces you to give up RP for the mechanical advantage.
In GD maybe. But that’s the beta forums. It’s actually very focused and extremely moderated feedback. I’d highly suggest skimming it. The issues are mechanical not numbers. It’s not something any numbers tuning really can fix.
You’re not getting that these are shared across different specs. So while you might be able to change legendaries, it doesn’t change the fact it will be a balancing nightmare because they will be be balancing a good covenant for rdruids that is already terrible for bears, etc, and legendaries will be affected by this.
It will be far worse.
As Jessail said. Because these are shared across specs, as are legendaries and soulbinds, it will be an absolute disaster
To be fair… they don’t balance for all combinations. As best I can tell they deliberately build intentional metas for each spec with some false choices in talents. They then balance around those metas intentionally. The meta is, despite what some would like people to think, not really player controlled. The devs are well aware of all of these… and they don’t care.
That’s what causes “noob traps.” Things look cool, they pick them, and then have a hard time trying to figure out why the same specs are consistently doing more dps/hps.
Yeah that was kinda my point. They won’t be able to balance around all these systems so there’s gonna be a lot of people who fall into these noob traps of awful covenants and then just be stuck there.
The time spent is specifically is weeks of farming, though, since we are limited in how many mats (Soul Ash, I think?) we can earn each week. You’re not locked to a legendary, but you are time gated.
I don’t think this onerous. Just something to be aware of.
I believe I heard somewhere that it will be 1 per week. Take with a grain of salt as I can’t remember where I heard this.
I’m more worried that what’s going to happen is they buff a cov for resto, then a leggo is too powerful so they nerf it for all the specs. Then it’s so bad that ele starts underperforming, so they buff a cov for ele, and just repeat the cycle. My point is they will never be able to balance these when so much stuff is shared across specs and locked in