Is there anywhere to find sim data on this? I’m not doubting you but I’ve been wanting to see how covenant balance is shaping up. The only thing I’ve seen so far is a spreadsheet someone made for all specs and a ranking system. Nothing on it said how much of a difference the best choices were from the worst.
I will be very happy if the difference between the best covenant and the worst is only ~2%.
Go to the Altered Time Discord and check the #research section. Not everything has been simmed, because the brains there are waiting for more final balance patches (so likely during pre-patch we’ll start seeing more finalized sims), but preliminary sims for all covenants and all mage specs show them to be extremely close to one another, including soulbinds.
And yes, the above is still true even after the Venthyr soulbind rebalancing.
Honestly, after looking at the other covenants conduits, this change keeps Venthyr in line with the other covenants (at least on paper):
Venthyr Conduit:
Initial Rank: +3% damage over 10 seconds
Final Rank: +7.2% spell damage over 10 seconds
These numbers are the worst case scenario for 3 casts (assuming abilities are cast very quickly).
Night Fae Conduit:
Initial Rank: 0.1 second channel time reduction
Final Rank: 2 second channel time reduction
Necrolord Conduit:
Initial Rank: 3 second increase in duration. (115% increased duration)
Final Rank: 10 second increase in duration. (150% increased duration)
Kyrian Conduit:
Initial Rank: 2% increased damage for the next 4 spells.
Final Rank: 8% increased damage for the next 4 spells.
I think this change is good overall to keep the conduits in line with each other, but I feel the ability itself should have better built in damage bonuses to the mage’s spells rather than do damage directly via the ability itself.
For example, instead of inflicting damage per spell cast, put a 1% increased damage debuff on the mob/boss that stacks up to 3% for 10 seconds (Of course, tune these numbers so they are balanced, I’m aware damage debuffs are different than increase in spell damage). I know it’s not exciting, but this would enable the ability to scale with the different mage specs/synergies. For example, that 3% extra damage for Fire would get carried over into ignites from combustion windows where as the shadow damage does not. This would also keep the ability in line with Kyrian and Necrolord covenant abilities that enable this scaling. Without the conduit the Venthyr ability is honestly the only ability that doesn’t improve the mage spec abilities in any way.
I’m seeing a much larger swing than 2% on AT Discord.
Arcane single target has a ~13% DPS swing from the lowest covenant/conduit to the highest.
Frost has a 7% swing:
And another shows fire with a 16% swing:
8202 21.87% night_fae_niya_poison*
7968 18.39% night_fae_niya_burrs
7896 17.32% night_fae_dreamweaver
7436 10.50% venthyr_theotar
7389 9.80% kyrian_kleia
7373 9.56% kyrian_pelagos
7298 8.43% necrolord_emeni
7144 6.15% venthyr_nadjia
7076 5.14% necrolord_marileth
6730 0.00% base
AT has been refining their sims and APM, and the numbers are in constant flux. This is before final tuning passes have gone through, as well. Fire with its BiS legendary from the raid is underperforming Frost without any legendary.
Also, a lot of these sims are made with a lot of other assumptions. For example, most of the frost sims are made assuming Focus Magic swaps with another mage with 100% uptime.
Another assumption made is Niya’s Tools: Poison (which pops up at or near the top of all of these charts), which requires successful interrupts to maintain that buff. So many of these scenarios aren’t exactly realistic or sustainable in real situations.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/feedback-mage-class-changes/490704/199
Super excited about this change! Nicely addresses my issue with the ability above in a different way.
Oh, damn, that’s good, it basically fixed my problem with it about the spell feeling waaaaay too PvP focused, I was scared between having to play Night Fae for M+ and Venthyr for PvP, you know, 2 weeks to focus on each I guess, now it seems it will be a hell of a lot better to play with Venthyr on all kinds of content.
Wasn’t super excited about playing Kyrian frost so this is great but who knows what next Wednesday will bring.
Yeah I’ve resigned myself to waiting until last minute. I plan to focus on 4 characters in each covenant obviously ill have main and main alt with the other two just to goof off.
But need to wait and see… not going to deal with doing 10 to 20% less dmg over cosmetics.
That’s the sad part about it all to me.
Personally, playing DPS is all about topping those charts, you know? At least for me, Class Design in WoW hasn’t been interesting in a long, long while. Seriously, my rotation as Arcane Mage involves me pressing 2 main buttons alongside a few others that have CDs or Procs such as Arcane Orbs for AoE and Arcane Missiles, I can’t exactly say I play DPS out of enjoyment of gameplay, but rather purely for Class Fantasy.
So, I love vampires and you know, if I had to choose between dealing actual good damage and bringing utility to a raid/dungeon or looking cool I would get a fairly bit demotivated to play Shadowlands, especially since I am one that can barely decide what class I wanna play each patch.