Hello fellow Maw-walkers.
In case you are considering to leave your current Covenant or perhaps go back to your old one, here is some quick info on how it works. I have actually done this myself on an alt, so this is not just repeating what someone else have said.
Swapping to a new one
This is super easy. Head to Oribos and go into the area marked “The Enclave” on the map. This is the same room where you get various quests from Bolvar. In the room there are a few NPCs from each of the 4 Covenants. Simply talk to them and click the dialogue option “I am told you could assist me in joining the X”. You need to select “I am sure” multiple times, in addition to confirming in a pop-up window. It’s not possible to accidentally leave your Covenant like this.
After you have confirmed your choice, you will be sent to their sanctum to talk with their leader. This process is the same as when you picked your Covenant for the first time. To catch up on renown levels you will be given the renown tokens for activities like
- Callings (the token for 1 renow won’t always be visible as a reward when you pick up the quest. You will still get it when you turn it in, assuming you are behind on renown).
- World boss
- Collect 5 souls form the maw. Even if you completed this for your current Covenant you’ll get it again from your new one. The same goes for collecting 1000 anima. You will however lose your progress, so even if you had 999/1000 anima, you will start from zero once you swap.
- Covenant campaign. If you stop getting renown from other sources, it means you need to get the rest from your campaign quests.
It took me maybe 8-10 hours in total starting from scratch before I was renown 12 after swapping. Don’t worry if you have limited time to play. The most important stuff like basic soulbinds and Covenant abilities are available right away.
What do you lose when swapping?
A few things will stay behind when you leave your Covenant. If you return one day it will be right there waiting for you.
- Gear you obtained from the Campaign will no longer be available for transmog
- Followers you got from your campaign will stay behind. Pelegos for example will not tag along from the Kyrian if you swap to Venthyr. If you found any followers in Torghast, they will go with you to your new Covenant and their levels will not reset.
- Any anima deposited into your sanctum
What about going back to a previous Covenant?
This process is quite simple as well, although more time consuming in the sense that you need at least 1 weekly reset. While you are doing this you can still use the spells and sanctum for your current Covenant.
The process is almost the same as swapping to a new one. Head over to The Enclave in Oribos. Talk to the Covenant you want to re-join. You’ll find that they are somewhat salty about you leaving them, so you need to prove your dedication by filling a bar to 100%. This can be done with world quests or dungeons in that Covenants respective zone.
Personally I found the fastest way was to do a 2 dungeon on normal difficulty and then fill in the last percentage with a few world quests (1 WQ=8%)
Make sure the dungeons you do belong to your covenants zone.
After the bar reaches 100% you turn in the quest. This process needs to be repeated once more, but it’s time gated behind the weekly reset. Once that is done, talk to the same NPC and get another quest for filling the bar to 100%.
A few other restrictions:
- You can swap to a Covenant you have never been with before, after you have gone through the quest of re-joining your old Covenant.
- You can not re-join 2 different Covenants on the same week. The NPCs won’t have any dialogue options for you. It requires another weekly reset for.
- If you have started the re-joining process to a Covenant, you can’t start it with another one. The others will just say something like “you’ve already dedicated yourself to others” without any further choices. This means you can’t prepare the re-join quest on multiple Covenants at once.
Overall I don’t think Covenant swapping is that bad. If you find yourself regretting your choice for any reason, don’t worry about swapping to a new one, or going back to your old Covenant if it turned out the grass wasn’t greener on the other side.