Probably because Healers, like Tanks, are basically premium roles. People are far less picky with them than they are DPS specs, and for good reason. Try playing a Necrolord Hunter, any spec of your choice, see how many groups pass you over, and how much stronger a Night Fae Hunter of the same spec and the same gear as you is. The disparity between covenant abilities and soulbinds can be so incredibly high that it’s perfectly understandable when someone gets benched for being the wrong covenant.
And yes, “player made walls” is definitely a limiting factor because everyone knows, including blizzard, that people will choose the path of least resistance, and that means choosing the meta classes, specs, talents, covenants, etc
Problem with that is, Soulbinds are still part of the covenant system. It’s not just the ability, though that’s the bulk of the problem. Soulbinds are also a large contribution to it.
Compare Night Fae to Necrolord. Niyas mastery/health increase, burrs, and poison are much better than anything any of the Necrolord soulbinds have, and Koralyn vs Emeni? One gives you a large stat increase at the start of every pull, and with every add that spawns, while the other gives you a much smaller stat boost whenever something dies, aka, at the tail end of the pull when everything is dead.
Really the Covenant choice should have been purely cosmetic, while the borrowed power systems should have been moved elsewhere entirely
Statistics show that most players pick the OP specs/ classes. Does that mean class should be cosmetic?
It would have if they had all-in’d on covenants and the gamplay impact. But instead of getting something cool, deep or permanent, we get what we usually do. A fluff addition that never gets full developed because people just want to raid log fotm or have 16 mains.
Blizzard just listened to majority of their Beta / Alpha testers. Yes Shadowlands would 20x better, if Blizzard wasn’t so stubborn.
Exactly.
But instead they did it the difficult way which is highly improbable to ever be “balanced” unless everything is nerfed to ground, thus barely worth pressing.
Gotta draw the line somewhere. You might not like that proposition and only like your idea and that’s okay. I’m prepared to accept that there would be differences due to SB which is some OP seems cool with too.
My meaningful choice was to help the fairies. I got lucky with the ability. They didnt need to tie the ability down. I’m glad I picked night fae because of soul shape, the zone, and the story. The ability is really fun tho
Your choice is going to be invalidated the moment this expansion ends. Our choice was also invalidated the moment we were no longer the neutral leader of our class hall and stepped into a faction conflict knowing full well Azeroth needed to be saved. Most of these covenants don’t even represent Azeroth, so why would you lock yourself into any of them anyway?
I agree with this. I got screwed because I main a resto/boomkin and alt a mage. My druid is Night Fae, both for lore and the ability. Ardenweald feels “druidy” and I’d have been pissed if the covenant ability were bad.
I didn’t want two fae toons so my mage is Venthyr/frost. She’ll never have as high DPS as she would have been Fae/fire. I should not have been punished with a substantive DPS penalty for not wanting to repeat content. If the abilities were separated from the covenant, even if it were a one-time choice, it would have been much better.
Wow, those are some crazy good ideas right there. I agree 100% why aren’t there more covenant themed skins. Do us druids only get something new once every 5 expansions?
I hate to admit this but I’d frikking stay subbed and go through every darn covenant on a new druid just to collect those skins. Call me crazy, but that would be a mighty nice little incentive.
It’s not an ideal system. They needed to think about that more before they implemented it. It puts players exactly in your position, unfairly so, I might add.
You keep saying this but it’s just fundamentally not true, every class has a unique playstyle that differs from others based on various abilities.
Covenants give you ONE and a utility, and the soubinds only affect those two spells ( and I’m not talking about the odd damage increase or CD reduction you can put in literally any soulbind) .
Those spells dont change how you fundamentally play your class, they just don’t. They may tweak it a little but it is in no way comparable to me choosing between my druid and a priest or my druid and a mage or my druid and a warrior.
It just isn’t.
I have no idea how you can even compare the two honestly.
You get two Covenant-flavored procs based on your soulbind as well. Nadja’s Euphoria is fun and Dauntless Duelist is a bit boring but tailor your playstyle ever-so-slightly. Pelagos has me going around picking up orbs for mastery as well as getting me to throw out an ability I otherwise might not to keep my 3% spell-damage-reduction refreshed.
I actually agree that Covenants aren’t as big as they could be though. Personally I said prior to the expansion I would love to see Covenant-specific enchants and trinkets, and my belief in that has only been reinforced after consuming the content in SL. I think those kinds of things could be a lot of fun. Like the weapon tokens, you could loot Covenant trinket tokens you could trade for tank/healer/phyiscal/caster trinkets that do different things for different Covenants, like some kind of blood vampire themed trinket for Venthyr tanks or some sort of evasive fairy dust for Night Fae tanks.
I see what your saying but picking up orbs to maintain a buff isn’t really what I would call “class changing”.
Now if attacking enemies spawned orbs and you needed those orbs to preform abilities, that would be different fundamental change.
But as it stands these at glorified talents, heck they don’t even change any of the appearances of my spells, no new forms, and besides various stats boots none of them change how I fundamentally play my druid.
Or here is a thought. Stop giving us borrowed powers. Covenants should have been a meaningful choice based on one thing. Flavor / Transmog / Mounts you prefer.
Player power should have just been given in the form of a tank / heal / dps talent that you perhaps select in some general window or talent tree somehow. Or a part of your legendary item.
Pretty crazy if everyone had the same general well tuned dps or tank or heal cooldown that no one would really complain about covenant swapping because you’d be working towards the transmog or flavor you like the most rather than sacrificing that for power.
