Actually playing the launches not watching other people play it?
thats not how game development works bud.
certain teams/people work on different parts of the game at different times. legion was far into development before wods last patch came out. same goes for legions last patch and bfas last patch.
It’s not like 8.3 came out and they were all like “okay 8.3 just released today. Now we can finally make shadowlands.” lol
From WoD’s release to Legion was 1 year and 9 1/2 months. From legion’s release to BFA’s release is 2 years, regardless of patch dates. BFA to Shadowlands is 2 years and 2 1/2 months.
We knew that was going to happen regardless of how much work they put into it- heck, the moment covenants were announced that was one of the first things I myself was saying.
And it’s not even just nerfs, which are inevitable, but scaling and mechanics too. All it takes is some raid bosses in the second raid to be cheesed by one of the covenants, or for the next layer of ilvl scaling to cause one ability to outpace others, or even for new trinkets to happen to work very well with one covenant to make one of them stand out as the clear best even if they did absolutely nothing to the covenants themselves between launch and the next xpac’s prepatch.
The covenant meta WILL change, potentially with every patch, and players WILL expect their raiders to change their covenants, and M+ groups will put covenant requirements beside the raider io and ilvl requirements in group finder.
That’s why they’ve made covenants so grindy to change, think about how much you had to grind out corruption stuff when 8.3 dropped- now imagine you have to do that AND a covenant grind every patch. They’re banking on people putting considerable time, and thus sub money, into these patch gear resets. This isn’t the old days where you could get the raid gear from x.2 and wear it until you get the x.3 raid gear, they want you always grinding something, and there’s no better way to do so than making it so you have to regrind grinds you already ground.
Think about it- they don’t even have to make new grinds this xpac for us to do each patch, they can just shift the meta around a bit and boom, you have a full grind every patch with no new content. It’s garbage for us, but brilliant for a company that wants to make more money with less effort.