… Correct me if i’m wrong but are you complaining about customizable spell upgrades because it makes your spells… less important ?
That’s the exact opposite e.e
… Seriously ?
All covenants have access to the same conduits for now. There were datamining which hinted for covenant specific conduits but i’ve yet to see one in the beta.
Class specific spell upgrades will always be better imo than generic random procs. Being worse isn’t even an option no matter how Blizz mess this up.
Are you her babysitter or what?
Yes! being able to swap them depending on encounter is fun. I love it!
now we can actually agree on something.
I don’t believe that they’ve designed class abilities around covenants. I believe that they’ve designed class abilities around class/spec and then they have adapted them to be related to one covenant.
They can take the core mechanic of any ability and just add any theme to fit your covenant choice. And in my opinion it would actually be way better if that meant that we had to choose first the theme we want and then choose the ability we want.
If this is true then what i said doesnt apply anymore, i thought that each covenant had their specific class spell and conduits too. If conduits are same regardless of covenant, then thats fine, and totaly new to me.
Feel free to check, here’s what WoWhead found so far (somewhere at the bottom, “conduits” category)
A soulbind is 4 conduits, 3 minor perks and one major perk which strongly reflects the role of the soulbind (each covenant having one dps soulbind, one tank and one utility).
The role also affect which kind of conduits you can use (dps soulbind is the only one which can have 3 dps conduits, while both the tank and utility ones will have at most 2 dps and 1 of their role)
Unless there’s a major balance issue you’d expect the dps soulbind to be the best for a dps spec.
You’re assuming they’ll balance the soulbinds against the covenant ability and class ability and do it successfully.
It can go either way, some soulbinds will be more powerful than others, if that coincides with the class/covenant ability being more powerful and i see no reason to think that this will not happen, then that just causes them to be even more imbalanced.
Cancelling any apparent meaningful choice.
Let’s face it, there is no meaningfulness in this system.
It will be just pigeonholing in a covenant that is the most successful. This will only exacerbate the meta strength.
Exact opposite of being free to chose whatever fancies you at the moment for whatever activity you want to do.
Nope. That’s not fun. Not to me.
I would HATE it to ‘have’ to change my stuff for different encounters.
I’ll just tackle challenges with the ‘load out’ I actually enjoy playing. And that works fine.
You see; that sort of thing stops being a choice and becomes a ‘must’. Screw ‘musts’. This is a game. For fun. I already have a real life full of ‘musts’.
I love my streamers and youtubers, but this topic is a prime example of when content creators blow something out of proportion and lead a herd.
The conduit system wasn’t even done, it had “PH” right by the text that said it would be deleted. In the dev update prior to beta Ion said they would be “swappable”, that would imply to me that the finished system would allow you to swap, not replace, your conduits.
But the second streamers got into the beta REEEE DELETE MY CONDUIT!?
Reason why this annoys me is because it was wasted effort and took attention away from other aspects of the beta. It is all I have heard about.
I want updates on classes, zones, dungeons, quest chains, leveling experience, Covenants, Torghast, the Legendary system.
Instead 90% was about something that was very obviously going to be reiterated on anyways.
In what world is being locked in more of a choice than being able to swap?
If you have to pick one then you’re more likely to go for the best performance, not for short term enjoyment or casually select one because you can swap it out.
And if you want you can just never swap them anyways…
This is the same argument pro Covenant people use.
Conduits are a core of the new progression. They’re not a small thing. In fact the reaction to them is what caused Blizz to reevaluate their decision. Their original intention and Ion said that in the interview with Bellular is to keep them destructible. A few days later in his discussion with Preach he said they won’t be.
To me destructible conduits are like destructible gear. Imagine if your shoulders said “if you take these off they’ll be destroyed”. It’s not REEEEE MUH CONDUITS, the reaction is very well justified. Just becasue streamers happened to be right once doesn’t mean our opinion is shaped by them. In fact, I disagree with them on almost everything else.
Mine.
Nope. I’m picking what I like and compliments my spec’s fantasy. 
(in my case Night Fae; spirit beast procs, yes please. Nature theme, yes please. Turning into animals; yes please!)
I won’t swap, indeed. And I’ll be ridiculed/banned/benched/refused etc for it.
And that is wrong. And anyone who doesn’t think that’s wrong is a bad person. 
You can do this regardless of if they’re deleted or not.
Yeah no, you won’t. You’re a casual player who has decided to have the same issues as a world first raider.
Yeah I’m totally delusional. You’re so right. You know me SO well.
oh wait…
A bit obnoxious there with that huge white space section just for a mediocre “punchline”.
But am I wrong?
Do you want to link me to your mains armory to prove me wrong? 
Subjective.
For me personally; no, you’re not. Because I avoid content where group making is a thing like the plague and one of the reasons is exactly the type of situations as I described.
So the fact that I’m being limited in my choices is already proof enough in and of itself. But I’m 100% sure there’s plenty of people who ARE in the situation I gave.
It’s really a horrible ‘trend’.
No that is no fun and it is not only you.
Being able to see your best covenants for each situation and being able to adapt and improve as of swapping is FUN. Being locked behind one covenant knowing you can’t swap so you are being forced to be a sitting duck is NOT fun.
I have Kyrian for PvP, but want Necrolord for Dungeons, but for Raids I want Venthyr but I can’t because i’m locked for literal no reason. this is not fun and it is only logical. This is why Preach is getting agreement from every side of the community with a decent range.
Just saying that if most of the benefits from the SL systems come from the two shared ones (Lego & conduits) then any unbalance coming from the soulbinds and abilities will be in a much smaller scale.
May have missed some but from quickly reading through the conduits it didn’t felt like they buffed some situational abilities but rather core abilities that pretty all builds would use.
It definitely doesn’t feel like “The most broken covenant with the most broken build will receive far more benefits from the most broken conduits” and scale exponentially. It’ll happen to an extent, but still seems reasonable so far.
But hey if you have some time to waste researching a bit what kind of combo you could make i’m all ears, but for now it just feels like the abilities will exist on their own, add a bit of flavour to your gameplay but not have a major impact in term of performances (utility is harder to quantity).
Same for soulbinds, there’ll be some fundamental unbalance between two covenants in part because of the stat weight of your spec and in part because of the content you want to clear. But I have yet to see a situation where one covenant will get broken interaction between a covenant ability, a soulbind, a set of conduits and a specific spec.
If it does happen then we’ll have a big balance issue, but for now I think we’ll have the two main sources of player power being shared among covenants and the covenant specific part will be much less noticeable and impactful.
Agree to disagree I guess, don’t plan to start a debate in this thread about what is or isn’t meaningful in the covenant choice.
Well all covenants have the same conduit types spread evenly.
So between covenants you have the exact same choices for the conduits.
As such you can’t balance this through conduits, since you have the same number of conduits between covenants.
Kyrian soulbinds
Forgelite Prime Mikanikos has: 2 red 2 yellow 3 blue
Kleia has: 2 red 3 yellow 2 blue
Pelagos has: 3 red 2 yellow 2 blue
Necrolord soulbinds
Bonesmith Heirmir has: 2 red 3 yellow 2 blue
Emeni has: 3 red 2 yellow 2 blue
Plague Deviser Marileth has: 2 red 2 yellow 3 blue
Night Fae
Dreamweaver has: 3 red 2 yellow 2 blue
Korayn has: 2 red 2 yellow 3 blue
Niya has: 3 red 2 yellow 2 blue
Venthyr
General Draven has: 2 red 3 yellow 2 blue
Nadjia the Mistblade has: 3 red 2 yellow 2 blue
Theotar the Mad Duke has: 2 red 2 yellow 3 blue
You can see this on https ://shadowlands.wowhead.com/guides/soulbinds-conduits-covenants-shadowlands
What could be balanced are the extra benefits that the soulbinds offer to counteract/improve/balance their covenant.
That’s up to Blizzard to not make them balanced like corruptions are…
It also has the benefits of other than conduits there summarized, so anyone just needs to calculate how much they gain from each.
So relatively to the covenants, the way they designed the options within the covenants, the soulbinds is balanced in regards to the conduits they present. The choice for the player here is which type of conduits do they value and how does the path compliments their spec.
As such, Blizzard actually did a good job on this part in regards to offering options to conduit slotting, as they are actually balanced against each other.
I disagree. And I guess that’s where we end at a stalemate.
Not from me he’s not. He’s being stubborn and unyielding is his, frankly, stupid mindset. But you know… my opinion and all.
This just sounds so tedious to me. It really does.
I would HATE doing that. And the problem is… people would expect you to if you can. Because most people, unfortunately, are stupid.
Just pick one and do all content with that one. It will work fine. It REALLY will.
I don’t know him I never watched him or heared of him until I heared the interview. can’t tell.
Your disagreement however does not make sense because in the next quote you say:
When you want to have success especially in my case in PvP you need every bit of % to win a matchup and these covenant abilites will be completly game changing there is no chance to just pick one and do fine.
My necrolord ability is an brew which does aoe damage and empowers my spinning crane kick and the soulbinds are all focused at “killing enemies”
I don’t need aoe in PvP. “killing enemies” is also useless in PvP it’s only function is really in M+ or World content.
Just to give you an example at which each covenant ability is designed around they literally told that each covenant will have more of a use in specific content.
It might work fine but now i am at 2600 rating in 2v2 and I want to achieve 2800 or higher but I am gated behind a covenant choice I made, because let’s say I also enjoy doing M+.
I’m completly screwed because I can’t play with the covenants I want and I need to success in each content. And as it looks like PvPers will be forced to PvE once again so there is no point.
Ion literally also said that if it won’t work they let us freely swap so they know it is likely to be doomed. But it doesn’t have to come to this point in the first place. That is why people are complaining about covenants now there doesn’t have to be a problem in the first case. No one wants to wait until 9.4 when things perhaps are fixed.
all of the necrolord abilities were designed as class abilities and then made green
venthyr has the same but red.
nightfae has the same but its a bit nature like, and blue
and so on.
as you have been so happy to point out a lot, this is what you personally believe, but there are a lot of people that disagree with you and realistically from a developers standpoint going with the majority would make the most sense, and yeah i technically cannot prove 100% that its the majority but based on everything seen by multiple different people its a safe bet, and also based on the amount of people actually completing endgame content that would be negatively affected.
but you you technically are still able, so they might as well just make it easier rather than making it difficult for the sake of making it difficult.
telling me to just pick one and be happy with it, is akin to telling me im not allowed to play the game the way i want to, this is the root of the entire problem, blizzard and a lot of causal players think that i should not be allowed to play the game the way i want to.
the is a big part of the problem, there is nothing to suggest that this system will work in the way they want it to for a large portion of the playerbase, 60%+ and yet that are sticking by their guns and being overly stubborn about it because they think they are right even though there is a lot of evidence showing they are not