Covenants are shaping up to be massively important in Shadowlands in terms of the general and class specific abilities.
Already, we are headed toward a Scryers and Aldor situation where 1 or 2 factions will probably be best for most players.
I think that this problem of weak faction perks should be addressed with a self-correcting modifier to faction abilities.
Let’s say you’ve got two abilities for mages.
Fairy folks: UwU moon light beam, average dps 80
Vampire folks: UMBRA DEATH THRASHING, average dps 150
Suddenly, all the mages are going Vampire folks. Oh no. But wait, because there’s no Fairy mages- the UwU moon light beam gets a +X% bonus and now it’s competitive with Vampire mages. It would have to basically be a + or - bonus based on class representation relative to total class representation due to the class specific abilities.
If horde and alliance racials are anything to go by, blizz is horrible at balancing perks. Let alone in real time. If they weren’t most of the top end raiding guilds wouldn’t have gone horde and other players wouldnt have followed despite Alliance racials being better right now.
Blizz really should stop trying to balance things. They tend to go overboard and then not take steps to correct.
Yeah, that’s why I think a self-correcting system would be better. I don’t want to see the stupid massive buff > massive nerf > massive buff cycle and instead what the abilities to adjust automatically based on what the community has identified as being meta.
If the covenants were buffed whenever it had low amounts of players in them, people would be switching so much to catch the “bonus” that there would never really be any bonus.
The covenant would be trash again as soon as enough people switched and another covenant would be buffed instead…tempting people to again switch.
Players should be encouraged to make a choice and stick with it, not covenant hop for little bonuses every so often.
There is no equilibrium when the balance of a covenant is dependent on the number of players in the covenant. It would go back to being trash when too many players are in it, and they’ll leave it again.
Given that there will be large respec costs, people will probably not be hopping for little bonuses every so often. Once they converge on being comparable, as in both in the above example doing about the same DPS, people would stop switching due to the cost.
They shouldn’t have abilities tied to them. It’s going to be a massive pita if W covenant is best for X spec but Y covenant is best for Z spec.
Switching from say, fire to frost mage and having to switch covenants as well would just be terrible. What if you like to tank keystones but also want to pvp?
They could just allow players to switch covenant abilities for free, like talents, one they’ve earned it through each.
Then, to give player choice and commitment to a covenant meaning - give players perks and bonuses for each week they’ve continued to stay with the same faction.
Covenant ability balance becomes irrelevant, player agency is conserved, and player choice and loyalty still has meaning.
Sounds a lot like warmode scaling based on population, which hasnt solved anything.
Honestly I think a lot of us are trying to address a problem we havent been able to properly assess yet. I mean sure, ability a sounds super good and ability b sounds bad. But maybe in testing they are on par with each other.
If there are any balancing issues it will probably be addressed through hotfixes and minor patches like most balancing is. I’m not to worried.
The solution is:
Take the four abilities. Pick one and give it to us as an ability learned at, say, lvl 51.
Then pick the other 3 abilities and put them on a talent row for lvl 55.
Easy.
