Are you saying that the Covenant abilities are so powerful, that they’re going to replace your entire rotation?
Shadowlands is all about strengths and weaknesses. Strengths: It looks cool! Weaknesses: Functionality.
Not at all. But difficult content in this game is often balanced around us making our characters as strong as we can, so if the abilities are powerful (and many of them are) they will end up being important even if they’re just coodowns we press once a minute.
Once a minute? Idk…some of them are longer than 1 minute…in some cases they are 3 minutes.
So then, they’re glorified trinkets?
Not particularly, and there are imbalances between Covenant abilities for each class.
Death Knights are a great example.
Death Knights…right now. Aren’t they still doing tuning passes and iteration on the numbers?
For the entirety of Beta, and it has a lot to do with HOW the abilities work.
DK’s Kyrian ability is hot garbage compared to Venthyr or Night Fae, and the difference in value is extreme.
But I’m sure that it wouldn’t be hot garbage if the numbers on the ability were changed, right?
Kyrian ability would pretty much need to oneshot mobs to be as good as any other abilities.
Nope. The difference in what it is intended to do compared to those other two is drastic. The core concept of the Kyrian ability is flawed and is nearly useless by comparison.
They’re kind of all over the place. Decimating Bolt (Warlock Necrolords) is a 45s cooldown that is part of your rotation because of how it buffs other spells (which incidentally makes it pretty bad for Demo). Some of them are closer to traditional trinkets like Ravenous Frenzy (Druid Venthyr). I’d say most of them are like DPS or healing cooldowns.
I’ll bite, the current arguement I’m seeing for priests who have fairly bad covenant choices to begin with. Kyrian is the current winner for disc and holy, but mostly disc because for holy its just the best of the worst. The three minute cd matches up with evangelism which traditionally was a big part of disc raid healing. The big strength of it is that it counts for atonement which effectively gives disc priests a healing cooldown where they can choose to carry raid heals by themselves once every 3 minutes or do massive damage and keep the full group up for 10 seconds in 5 man content. Necrolord was in the running until it got repeatedly beaten with the nerf bat, via numbers tuning, only one dot counting for atonement, and the heal on hit being effectively deleted by tuning. Venthyr was never competitve conceptually, and nightfae is a consideration if you aren’t disc because it requires you to avoid casting power word shield and shadowmend to abuse the fairies to their fullest potential.
In terms of power I’d say kyrian covenant is worth about 1.5 to 2 good talents worth of value and utility before thinking about soulbinds which are also decent.
Beyond that what about the covenant abilities with no cd? Isn’t that inconsistent?
So aside from opening up Covenants…what would you change about each of the class abilities (dmg, CD, interaction with # of mobs, radius, range, etc) to make them palatable?
First thing I would do about covenant abilities is remove them from the gcd.
Abilities are more fun without gcds.
I had this conversation in another thread. The way the abilities are designed, it’s almost impossible. There are very few instances where covenants are good for all specs, and even less that one covenant is good for an entire class. So you run in to the problem of if you nerf an ability because it’s strong for one spec, it makes a covenant that is already bad for the other spec, even worse, and vice versa.
3 Likes
So they won’t buff the one that’s already worse?
I don’t think you understand. If Kyrian is by far the strongest covenant for Prot Pally, but by far the worst for Ret Pally, if they buff or nerf the Paladin Kyrian ability, it just widens the gap of either being over the top good or over the top bad.
On a scale of 1 to 10, rank the Covenant abilities for each Paladin spec
Let’s put it this way. Some abilities are designed to shine in certain moments. If you buff that moment you run into the problem that people can take heavy advantage of it and it becomes way stronger than abilities that are just decent and okay and work all the time.
It’s more complicated than buff and nerf them.
Like I said, for me the kyrian ability of dks to be on par of other abiltiies would need to oneshot the mob it target.
What is more to happen is they will nerf them, so all their damage won’t matter. Then the strongest utility will win xd The abilities are too strong and overloaded (meaning they do too much things at the same time). The main design of a lot of them is just broken. It should have been some smaller stuff or something that are basicly re-skin or very close.
I suggest reading the feedback here:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/covenants-and-your-spec-a-survey/616438