My understanding at the beginning of the expac was to choose the covenant you’d enjoy most. Yes, there are some differences where one is bit better than another depending on your class or spec (a “bit” better was my understanding, not a **groundbreaking ** difference.)
As a pally who went Night Fae (for Ret it didn’t seem like a terrible choice, gives mobility and some buffs for myself or party members)
But as ret pally who now wants to explore tanking or healing, it’s a terrible choice, especially for healing. Kyrian is really the only viable covenant for holy pally.
Is this really what Blizzard intended? I realize I could change covenants but I do like Night Fae, and it wouldn’t make sense for me to switch to be better at one of my off-specs. So what this has done is turned me off from exploring my other specs this expac, as what’s the point if I can’t compete at higher content levels because of my covenant?
Maybe reknown is a quick catch-up, but not anima upgrades. Switching covenants at this point doesn’t make sense for me and I don’t feel like the game should have been built this way, I feel the covenants should have been better balanced to avoid this kind of situation.
First of all, define higher content levels. If you’re aiming for Top Tier World First Hyper Elite, your covenant choice is still the least of your woes.
it’s not what they intended. but since they have never in the history of world of warcraft achieved good balance even without convoluted systems, EVERYONE knew they would mess it up. Except them.
Nope, but despite all that they’d hoped would happen, the exact thing we were warning them about actually happened.
At this point they’re a glorified talent with 500 extra hoops to jump through. If they just eased up on the anima grind and allowed us to freely swap covenants (no two week timegate I mean) we’d be in much better shape.
People were saying it would be metapicked back when we only knew about the covenant specific powers and then dungeon bonuses. Adding in class specific skills really made it hard to not metapick.
In many cases the BiS Covenant power not only wins out in pure numbers, but also in usability and awkwardness. The BiS is almost always the spell that most interacts with the specs existing spells.
Well since I haven’t started healing with my pally yet maybe someone else can suggest at what point it probably becomes much more difficult to heal if you didn’t have the Kyrian abilities.
I’m guessing Mythic +10 or +12 and higher would be a challenge compared to having the abilities but I don’t know, maybe over +5 even.
Night Fae paladin seems pretty lackluster as a whole (which is absolutely a problem, hi Venthyr monk) but I can’t imagine it somehow impacting you more significantly on a different spec than it does Ret.
If you’re completing +10, 12, or 15s now, I cannot imagine this covenant choice being your barrier going forward. It looks about the same level of ‘Meh’ for prot and holy as ret.
When you consider how many ways Shadowlands leeches players time away - the covenant design influences players like yourself to level up a separate paladin for a different spec, so that you can join the “correct” covenant.
That goes the same for dps classes with the soul binds having conduit energy and the trees not changing with spec changes.
No it was not supposed to be like this. Blizzard said “trust us bro we’ll balance it properly” the community said “hell no we don’t trust you, you’ve never succeeded!” and they have failed miserably to deliver an even remotely balanced experience around covenants.
Expect lots and lots of naysayers who are like “YOUR COVENANT CHOICE DOESN’T MATTER FOR LFR BRO JUST PICK WHAT YOU LIKE.”
They obviously intended on forcing people into certain specs/covenants/conduits. They gave out a bunch of bad/unmeaningful choices and are trying to get you to zero in on a single spec and gameplay style. If they succeed they can then limit how players play through their design and have much less work to balance in the future. It’s also why they make changing conduits so slow and painful. They are trying to condition us to lock into what they want.
They are only a bit better, none are ‘groundbreaking’ difference. Yes some are 1% better but as you are not in a world first top 1% guild it shouldn’t make enough of a difference for you.
mfw people trusted Blizz to make every covenants abilities within a small percentage of each other in performance
The only way they could make them covenant specific yet not have great differences is if they made the abilities pretty much the same.
Like the ability for each covenant for every spec is you fire out a booger that does 100 damage split among all targets. The difference is Venthyr’s booger is red and Maldraxxus’ booger is green. That’s the only way I’d assume performance would be similarish across the board but even then it wouldn’t be because some specs will make more boogers fire and some specs are going to have harding hitting boogers.
Here’s how I took it as it unfolded… First they said that it was going to be tied to character choice preferences and would be meaningful…
Then… Beta testers got.
From then until launch it has been OMG this is broken and garbage and forced to chose play style (Raid,M+ And PvP) can’t have it all with same covenant. Plus the amount of power you did get was far too important and obvious to be considered anything but meaningful…
Then they balanced,
Then they balanced…
Should be about 3-4 more of them before they even get to the main endgame.
