World of Warcraft: Current Year

Warmuth · May 2, 2021

Foggy said:
The covenant abilities not being a talent you can switch between is the terrible implementation. If covenants were permanent only with respect to story and cosmetics, they would be great.

This is correct. I'm "lucky" enough to play a class where it hardly matters but some classes arent so "lucky".

Chris · May 3, 2021

Merrith said:
The problem is it often isn't just 1% dps. The major issue with covenants is that so many different combinations of cov/spec don't even come close to being competitive with the optimal. That coupled with the whole "choice matters because a lot of players don't care about optimal and just choose what they want versus what is best"...which we all know is bullshit.

Would it be a problem of you could farm all 4 of them and didn't need to choose? You were just limited to one ability like a talent which was switchable?

Shadowlands would suddenly have a lot more content if you were dividing your time/anima/renown between different covenants.

Mist · May 3, 2021

Leadsalad said:
Covenants are a shit idea in a game where character/spec performance matters. This isn’t a weekend dnd group game.

The covenant balance concerns are one of the things from beta that really hasn't played out in reality. They are surprisingly well balanced overall.

Fadaar · May 3, 2021

Leon said:
You're mistaken.

You're thinking of people competing for the top of the mythic raiding ladder. People who play 'professionally' if you will. Yes, i would ignore these as well.

There are scores of people who play all day and you wouldn't know because they don't make a bleep on the mythic radar.
These people actually are the ones consuming the most content in the game because they don't spend their time on ONE element of the game (not to say some of the mythic competitors aren't also achiev/mount consummers)

These people usually will have a pretty good idea of what are good and bad ideas for the game.

Love him or hate him, and god i don't like his persona, but when he sits down and talks 'seriously' about WoW Asmon has actually a pretty good hindsight of the game and what people like and don't, being that he deals with lots of people on a daily basis and gets a good sense of what people want to see and what they don't, what they like to do and what is a chore/ serious hassle.

Yeah when Asmon takes the time to make a serious video on his second channel you know the game is in a rut

xmod2 · May 3, 2021

Mist said:
The covenant balance concerns are one of the things from beta that really hasn't played out in reality. They are surprisingly well balanced overall.

Asmongold had a good point when he said he doesn't want to use those abilities because they're meta or overpowered. He just wants to use them because it's a game and he wants to have fun. Locking 3/4 class abilities away from you outside of leveling is kind of goofy.

Also, I've found min/maxing doesn't really affecting you anymore once you stop giving a shit about the game. Log in, clear the raid, quit for 6+ months until new content. What do you miss? SGDQ spergy speed run dungeons? Who gives a shit.

kaid · May 3, 2021

Mist said:
The covenant balance concerns are one of the things from beta that really hasn't played out in reality. They are surprisingly well balanced overall.

The overall balance is pretty decent although so many just look up the meta on icy-veins pick that and move along which is fine too. Overall most of the covenant stuff is on long enough cool downs as to not really be a very big part of your overall DPS and all of them seem at least viable now.

While I have some nits to pick with the way they did it overall I honestly don't wind up caring much. Unless you are doing world first stuff anything you pick will work well enough for the content yo are doing.

Merrith · May 3, 2021

Mist said:
The covenant balance concerns are one of the things from beta that really hasn't played out in reality. They are surprisingly well balanced overall.

Are talking overall number of players in each covenant, or % of certain specs that mostly go exactly to whichever covenant is optimal for them?

Merrith · May 3, 2021

Chris said:
Would it be a problem of you could farm all 4 of them and didn't need to choose? You were just limited to one ability like a talent which was switchable?

Shadowlands would suddenly have a lot more content if you were dividing your time/anima/renown between different covenants.

"a lot more content" is relative...If I was still playing, I wouldn't want to have to collect another 1k anima 3 more times over or save 20 more souls 3 more times for the other 3 covenents each week. Definitely wouldn't want to have to farm up thousands and thousands more total anima to upgrade 3 other sanctums or farm for trashmog looks.

Mist · May 3, 2021

Merrith said:
Are talking overall number of players in each covenant, or % of certain specs that mostly go exactly to whichever covenant is optimal for them?

I'm talking about the actual performance of the covenants. The fact that players don't look at the whole picture of the data and just choose to have someone else on wowhead or icyveins make their decision for them is not something that can be fixed.

Merrith · May 3, 2021

Mist said:
I'm talking about the actual performance of the covenants.

With regards to what? Did they suddenly manage to balance them for every spec and I missed it? Before I quit, there were many specs where 1 or 2 vastly outperformed the rest

Leadsalad · May 3, 2021

Are you a paladin? Kyrian or Venthyr if top end Hpal
Are you a Druid? Night Fae or you’re confirmed sub 80 iq.
Mage? Night Fae or venthyr if frost (but nobody is inviting frost over fire, come on now)

Mist · May 3, 2021

Merrith said:
With regards to what? Did they suddenly manage to balance them for every spec and I missed it? Before I quit, there were many specs where 1 or 2 vastly outperformed the rest

What is your definition of "vastly outperformed?"

There is almost no situation where the difference between performance of various covenants is anywhere near the difference in variation of individual skill.

Also basing everything off Patchwerk sims is a joke.

Merrith · May 3, 2021

Mist said:
What is your definition of "vastly outperformed?"

There is almost no situation where the difference between performance of various covenants is anywhere near the difference in variation of individual skill.

Also basing everything off Patchwerk sims is a joke.

I'll give an example from when I was still playing (I quit before 9.0.5). Marksman Hunter Night Fae v. Necrolord. Did they balance these better? For both single target and AoE situations?

Mist · May 3, 2021

Merrith said:
I'll give an example from when I was still playing (I quit before 9.0.5). Marksman Hunter Night Fae v. Necrolord. Did they balance these better? For both single target and AoE situations?

Necrolord's defensive ability got buffed by a lot. Necrolord is an outlier that is behind DPS-wise for the majority of classes, likely because it has the best defensive abilities. That said, the difference between the best NF soulbind and the best Necrolord soulbind is still only around 5% dps, which is considerably better than the spec/class balance and much smaller than the difference between individual skill or the difference between raid encounters. There's also tons of content that is not raid content.

I think your expectations and perceptions of what is "balance" actually means is way off.

Daidraco · May 3, 2021

You're right

Mist . You cant quantify abilities based off a stand still position in a perfect rotation. Adding in maneuverability, situation, cool down and appropriate usage though? There are some that are vastly more powerful/advantageous to use than the others. Night Fae and Necro just dont play out well at all for Prot Pally. Kyrian does really well in Mythic and Venthyr does really well in Raid. So even though you may think they are balanced with the 1%, I just have to disagree. That whole conversation is pointless though cause we cant do shit about it. The hard stance on not making content more accessible across the board and thumb nosing anyone that complains is some straight "The Vision" bullshit that we all complained about in EQ. I could have been creative designer for Shadow Lands and done a much better job than what was released simply because Im not going to die on an ant hill over shit.

Merrith · May 3, 2021

Mist said:
Necrolord's defensive ability got buffed by a lot. Necrolord is an outlier that is behind DPS-wise for the majority of classes, likely because it has the best defensive abilities. That said, the difference between the best NF soulbind and the best Necrolord soulbind is still only around 5% dps, which is considerably better than the spec/class balance and much smaller than the difference between individual skill or the difference between raid encounters. There's also tons of content that is not raid content.

I think your expectations and perceptions of what is "balance" actually means is way off.

Soulbinds are only part of the equation, though, the actual abilities makes up a good chunk of the overall dps profile. I don't think my perceptions are off, at all. Last time I looked, the split for Marksman Hunters was like ~80% Night Fae, ~15% Kyrian, and only ~5% combined between Venthyr and Necrolord. I'm pretty sure there is still a reason for that, even if the differences aren't as great as they were at release.

Daidraco · May 3, 2021

Mist said:
Necrolord's defensive ability got buffed by a lot. Necrolord is an outlier that is behind DPS-wise for the majority of classes, likely because it has the best defensive abilities. That said, the difference between the best NF soulbind and the best Necrolord soulbind is still only around 5% dps, which is considerably better than the spec/class balance and much smaller than the difference between individual skill or the difference between raid encounters. There's also tons of content that is not raid content.

I think your expectations and perceptions of what is "balance" actually means is way off.

But that change only presents the next issue. They made it complete ass to change covenants. The whole system is garbage and I feel like you are defending the whole picture in these statements, and not just the dev response view of "its generally a 1% difference" even though its quite obvious you cant compare those few situations where that statement is true.

Merrith · May 3, 2021

And

Mist just to qualify, if any of them are coming close to ~5% difference overall, I think that's pretty significant and not balanced very well. If they were all within like ~2% of each other, I don't think we'd see such a heavy lean towards a single covenant choice by a particular spec.

Mist · May 3, 2021

5% is nothing compared to differences in classes, specs, individual skill and differences between encounter types and other use-cases.

WoW has been reduced to people sperging out over patchwerk sims and it's so fucking stupid.

Mist · May 3, 2021

For example:

Difference between classes/specs:

Difference between covenants:

^I'm much more worried about the top chart than the bottom chart.

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