I was just thinking people must be enjoying the gameplay because I haven’t seen many complaints about how their characters are playing. It’s still only been a couple of weeks.
I think that pretty much became the main focus of this expansion. (gameplay) As it was the biggest complaint of BFA. No doubt about that. I think they spent too much time on it tbh and made it over complicated when it didn’t need to be. (Just extend talent tress instead…) Time could’ve spent doing other fun things for the actual game…
Sorry I digressed anyways hopefully people are having fun with all these new abilities to play around with and it’s enough gameplay fun for them.
I was not a fan of them being linked to covenants.Since day 1. As I know if I am not apart of a certain covenant will probably get alienated. Who knows the real test and results should be coming the next couple of days right? As the raid opens today? See how much covenant matters to other players and if they will be discriminated against…
Tanks and Healers tend to already take the role more seriously. There are more examples of classes fitting their theme up there in that data.
Ya’ll just dying to be mad about nothing.
Guardian covenants are actually pretty balanced. Which isn’t surprising considering that the devs spent far more time and attention on Convoke the Spirits all by itself than they did on actual Guardian as a spec.
There’s very little reason to nerf Harvest. It’s not that great for Ele or Resto, and it’s a big big memespell for Enh, and while it does a bajillion damage on cast, it doesn’t have high DPS.
Made the game harder with things like Torghast and the Maw then act shocked when people try to min max their characters to handle these things since so much it locked behind them.
The fact that some may have chosen based on taste is one that can be used to explain why some people pick a certain way, but why the majority of the numbers favour the best options shows that is not likely to be even remotely as much of a contribution.
You have to try not to see what the data is showing.
How they got there is irrelevant. The immutable fact is that the majority of players are in the most powerful covenant for their spec/class.
Now you can argue that almost all Hunters are Night Fae and Paladins are Kyrians because they like the zone or whatever. I have no doubt that a lot of them do.
But you also gotta come up with an equally convincing argument of why most Resto Shamans vibe with the Necrolords, whereas Venthyr have an almost complete monopoly on Enhancement.
I guess I’m the odd man out because I picked my main’s Covenant based on judging their abilities for myself instead of consulting some website.
Really, it was a tie between Kyrian and Venthyr. and Kyrian won out because AoE Holy Shock is so gosh darn useful for a Holy Pally, especially since it has a far shorter cooldown than the equivalent Venthyr ability (forget what it’s called).
On the flip side, the Venthyr targetable teleport ability is soooo tempting for someone like me who likes to explore odd nooks and crannies. Which is why my first alt went with Venthyr,
Oh sure, I’m sure it does things - it’s just not really noticeable for me. Especially since I have no interest in playing this game seriously at all anymore. I’m also primarily maining Disc, and again - it’s far less noticeable than other abilities. Kyrian or Venthyr would go much further to be noticeable.
Despite that I want to kyrian DK for that soul reaper feel and want to make my pally maldraxxus because he wants to slay things that looks undead to him.
(Also Emeni gives a group buff, and I like giving buffs)
So basically, the choice was easy enough because of how blatantly better the Kyrian ability was. That is the big issue here, that even if you don’t look at any numbers, theorycraft, or lean on people who do that already and publish the data, you were able to pick the best option.
I never saw that position being taken. Of course some people are gonna pick the meta.
However, to know the magnitude of the people that were motivated by improved role capabilities and not aesthetics or other reasons, the covenants would have to be rebalanced then you would have to look at the ratio of players that switched covenants.
I mean, a whole lot of druids and hunters rolled Nightfae. It could be because the Nightfae have the better ability, or it could be that the Nightfae was the only nature themed covenant for a nature themed class.
An example would be something like survival hunter:
50% picked Nightfae, therefore 50% did not choose based on the numerical advantage of a covenant.
Of the 50% that picked Nightfae it can easily be assumed that some percentage picked it for reasons outside of numbers. Therefore the percentage of players that picked based on the meta is <50%
I’d place the number of players that picked their covenant based solely on the Meta to be around 30-40%. But that is just a random guess.
Or if they decoupled player power from Covenants (and made the abilities new talent rows instead), and gave everyone the ability to swap freely to a new Covenant, you’d see way more diversity.
The fact that every spec where there’s a clear best choice - mathematically or otherwise - is so heavily invested in that one Covenant can only be explained by the fact that it is the best choice.
There’s no other consideration for why, as aesthetically and thematically people would have been far more spread out.
For most classes, that’s not really “odd.” In a lot of cases, some of these things were just mechanically superior and normal play would have told anyone that.
Some classes though, not as much. Rogue choices, in terms of power, had to be done with sims since their choices are based on the soulbinds, not the abilities themselves.
Yes? I’d like to pick the covenant that I like without the caveat of being worse at my job for doing so. Covenants as a story element are completely worthless to me as a player as it stands.