So, I’ve already been chatting and discussing the whole covenants bis with guildmates and different things.
One interesting note, was on the discussion of using the kindred spirits covenant ability as a druid dps or heals, as opposed to everyones favorite “evoke”. I’ve reached out to the dev team through one of my friends and asked for a little more clarity on how the ability works, and from his discussion, the ability works similar to the coagulated blood trinket, in that when you put it on a dps, 30% of their dps in a window is consecutively added to a pool, which is then added to your targets whether you dps or heal. I foresee this being a huge ability for just about every situation, though it may not have as big of a “burst” as evoke, I think the medium sized heal possibility makes it a very strong “consistent throughput vs burst” option.
I guess I bring this up, because I feel covenant abilities will make a significant change to your simulations, and just wanted to hopefully see some simulations having the ability to alter covenant abilities.
Also on that note, it seems blizzard is going to give us two free changes to covenant abilities, but then to return to a previously used covenant you have to do about 2 weeks worth of grinding. so i imagine that the first few weeks is gonna be full of changes.
Anyways, just thought i’d drop this here for discussion.
I’m working through the implementation of all the shadowlands stuff in the simulator. We have a thread going with progress updates:
I’m working on death knights right now and I might do druids next, so you’ll be able to play around with the covenants in the simulator very soon.
Kindred Spirits is going to be a little tough to simulate… we’ll have to make some assumptions, but I’ll come up with something and then we can adjust it as needed based on what we see happen in-game.
Well again from my discussion with one of the people in charge of that ability, It basically pools 30% of the dps that someone is doing, and is passed out in each instance of your own healing or dps.
If the person is doing 100 dps, then you would get 30 points added to the pool each second and as you heal or dps that 30 is just tacked on to your dps or healing done to targets.
As far as putting it on a tank, or putting it on a healer, obviously i don’t think those would be most optimal unless necessary. so yeah the option to put it on anyone means you will have to assume someone else’s dps or stats. so it might be necessary for simulations to have a “ilvl average” dps built in for testing of such a mechanic. gonna be a tough one for sure. also if your target has a cd going that will change things a lot too.
I have an initial implementation in the simulator already. I’m just basing it off of the your own damage/healing for the time being since that is simplest and should provide a pretty good idea of the relative value it can provide.
We did some testing and found that the most damage you could dissipate from the stored up pool on any one attack is 20% of the damage your attack does. So your bonded ally adds damage to the pool for 10 seconds, but then you have 20 seconds to dissipate that damage. If you put it on an ally using a huge cooldown - you would also need to use a cooldown to be able to dissipate all the damage stored up before you lose it.