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.
That is the optimal solution.
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.
Yep… like Barrage for hunters… or until 9.0.1 drain soul for afflock.
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
Yeah, I think these kind of balance changes are a reasonable concern.
I mean they manage to balance different classes, and we are locked to a class.
Not trying to be snarky… but you are joking right? They don’t balance anything really they just play balancing golf and occasionally someone OP gets hit with a driver but they always slice pretty hard.
They got better at it. I remember during WoD we had huge differences in performance. Since Legion differences have been tighter.
looks at sub rogue which has been completely dead since 8.1 Riiiiight…
Lol what? Are you for real? Look at the damage logs for shadhar. arms warrior is 123k, outlaw rogue is 88k LOL.
Not to mention, now they have to balance every spec, plus all 4 covenants for that spec, while at the same time keeping all 4 covenants viable for both other specs. If you can’t see how impossible that is…
but you can check ahead of time what everything does and take an informed decision.
you know like old times diablo 2 where there was no respecing 
Pretty sure that was the fault of a couple of streamers and that snowballed into a big issue because of that. So trying to convince anyone, whose has already been convinced by a streamer that this is tragedy, is going to be a huge uphill battle.
No I convinced myself after reading the beta forums. Please don’t blame streamers.