I can say this. I’ve pugged all of my 15/16 clears and not once has a single party leader asked me what essences/azerite traits I’m running. I even accidentally went into a dungeon with my pvp essences on because I forgot to switch before I logged out.
Was having my pvp essences less efficent? Yes. I mostly do random bgs and I take vision of perfection for all the dispel fun times. But it sucked to have in a dungeon. While I did complete the dungeon, I was not having fun with it.
It’s possible some of those party leaders inspected me, but I doubt it. If you asked me off the top of my head what the best setup via stats, talents, azerite, and essences was for a random half dozen specs I would have no idea.
I want to be able to freely switch the covenant abilities purely from a “I want to have fun with them” standpoint, as well as a “I want to personally optimize” standpoint. I am not interested in forcing anyone else to optimize. If I was, I’d take the time to find a team and a guild to run with so I wasn’t subjecting complete strangers to judgement over a choice they made because it sounded/looked cool.
I mean, you can find many, MANY people saying they want Covenants unlocked for reasons besides wanting to be good at everything in every situation all the time.
That’s why I say blanket statements like this get people nowhere.
They’ve already said they’re willing to change it based on feedback. What are you giving feedback on? Numbers that aren’t solid? A concept? There’s no real feedback here, only predictions.
That’s still a prediction. It’s not feedback. Have you played with the Necrolord ability in all the content you’d want to do? Have you experienced the feel of the other Covenants, or played with their abilities to see how they feel to use?
Edit:
Entirely fair. But they haven’t dropped the ball yet. Screaming because of something they might (probably will) screw up is ridiculous, though.
It does seem that they are nearly ready for release, I will be keeping my fingers crossed. I think the problem though is that it’s difficult to turn the ship around once it starts sailing in a particular direction. The best bet at this point is to figure out how to make covenants work for everyone without making expensive and time-consuming changes.
And can happen without covenants affecting gameplay in any way.
Covenants will never be a “singular” permanent choice, so you aren’t getting what you seemingly want anyway. But if they didnt affect gameplay, they could be a permanent choice.
It is! “I’m not excited for this” is completely valid feedback. “I’ll have to take X” or “I won’t be able to play what I want” or “The swap mechanic will be too punishing”-- those are predictions. We still don’t know how all the systems interact. We know most of it, but there’s major puzzle pieces missing.
“I don’t want to pick”: Fair. Totally valid. “I don’t want to pick because I’m going to be forced to do something I hate and not what’s fun”: Nope. You have no idea if that’s true or not. You might feel like it will be true, but we just don’t know.
Historically Blizz makes the latter very likely and I understand the concerns, but you can’t make that the basis of your stance unless we’re just going to play crystal ball games.
