For the millionth time. Covenants aren’t classes. In 2 years covenants will mean absolutely nothing, while we’ll still be playing our classes.
Once again “bad players exist so this horrendous system is just fine”, is not an argument in favor of keeping gameplay locked to covenants. Also as I have already stated
The covenant system as is presents no fun choice. To play what I want would mean gameplay needs to be separated from covenant choice. Do I need to repeat that another dozen times for you to get it?
More casual players are negatively impacted by covenant restrictions than min/ maxers. These casuals don’t care about the performance loss. They care about having fun trying out all the different combinations of options within the systems.
The saddest part is that the restrictions and up pushing these players to 3rd party sites and meta builds.
If everyone in this game dropped the idea that they’ll never experience content if they don’t choose the Hot New Flavor ™ of the month, then they would probably realize that it doesn’t really matter 95% of the time. The only time it does is when you have tryhard guilds who think they can become the next Method/Limit, or elitist pug groups. The solution is to not play with those types of people.
There’s never not going to be a meta. Not every ability will be equally great. The sooner you accept that, the better.
The most obvious way is the locks on switching things. It discourages playing multiple specs in your class and discourages experimentation. Also, it’s a gameplay choice that is trying to be sold as an rp choice. Locking gameplay to rp makes the rp choice less meaningful.
Here you go. Take your time, there’s a lot of good reading in there.
There is no definitive answer to this. Only time will tell. The development team has made many assurances that they will “balance away” the outliers. As it is just a simple number tune in most cases, I have no reason to believe they won’t.
It doesn’t lock anything outside of a weekly cooldown. You can still experiment with the covenants if one doesn’t feel right to you. We can argue all we want about whether or not this is “player unfriendly”, but your choices aren’t permanent. Annoying? I guess, but hardly anything to consider the expansion ruined over.
I asked an example from you, not a bloated thread of forum discontent. If you don’t have an example to provide me, then I’m just going to assume that the majority of the posts in that thread are people who are upset because they want to feel upset.
Like, if I wanted to see a bunch of echoing opinions on some mechanic in the upcoming expansion, I would have gone elsewhere. To me, it seems as though you don’t really have an argument to hold for yourself because you don’t really know what it is you’re upset about. You’re just listening to what others have told you.
Yes, obviously? People are making it seem like if they take Decimating Bolt they’ll be useless in Mythic+ and if they take Impending Doom they’ll be useless in raid as if it actually matters that much. I can guarantee that an Impending Doom warlock with i190 gear, well optimized, perfectly played and highly experienced will DOUBLE the DPS of an i140 Decimating Bolt warlock moron that lets DoTs drop and cancels casts all the time. That’s the entire point of this thread.
Things that are a significantly bigger contribution to your overall performance than your covenant ability:
Gear
Skill
Preparation
Execution
In some weird fantasy land where literally the only difference between two players is Covenant than sure, that’d be a big deal. But that’s not reality. You have freakin’ 4 million absolutely atrocious players losing their minds about the restrictive nature of Covenant abilities when they’re going to be barely 300 DPS above their questionably-disabled tank, struggling through Heroic Nathria eight weeks after release.
The distinction matters to such a small subset of the playerbase that the noise people are making is obviously and embarrassingly disproportionate.
In summary, I conclude that the hyper-majority of people complaining about the discrepancies in Covenant performance are actually so bad at the game itself as to make the distinction utterly irrelevant.
Did you even look at it? It isn’t just “forum discontent” it is a thread full of beta testers giving detailed examples on why covenant abilities are good and bad, and why some will be used and some won’t be. It’s over 200 posts of examples of why the covenant system is a train wreck that blizzard has basically said they refuse to fix.