My best guess at Shadowlands

The following is my best guess at what shadowlands will be like for the main features known so far, and how classes and specs might be in general after the level and probably a stat squish.

I’ll break it up into nice sections for people to read only the parts they might be interested in.

Covenants

we all know from the known info that all the 4 covenants will give 1 movement ability fixed to the covenant, so these are easy to choose which you might prefer out of them.

The choice from the class specific ability you can get will be the major factor affecting covenant choice, as
most people will want to have the ability that makes them perform the best rather than going for which theme they find most fun.
for classes with multiple roles, these abilities will naturally be harder to balance, for example
druids they could end up with 1 ability for tank, healer, caster and melee, where as a pure dps classes will have a choice of 4 dps abilities, which might be single target burst, st dot, aoe burst, multi dot or another form, so it will not be a straight forward choice to make per character and it will affect a characters performance positively or negatively depending on the type of content you intend to play the most, but they should probably be fairly balanced so that no single ability will be massively ahead in several or all aspects of game play hopefully.

the main form of power progression at endgame (other than gear) though will be the soulbond npc’s from each covenant, these will probably be basically reskins from covenant to covenant, with an equivalent in each so no matter your choice of covenant you’ll be able to progress with your new buddy npc’s with probably more npc’s unlocking throughout the expansion/covenant story, and these soulbonds will primarily be upgraded through conduits which seem like a new item, hopefully not similar to some alt unfriendly essences and more just dropped or bought or low easy rep gated at like friendly/honored.

Torghast

This Rogue-lite tower, will operate as a type of M+/visions 2.0, with an end of run chest at death, that will reward a main currency (runes) related to crafting legendaries, a piece of gear and the expansion currency (anima), it probably a weekly loot lockout based on highest level cleared for gear and the main currency, but you will probably get the lesser currency and chance at pets/flavor items with every run, probably till a cap point, but you could always push to a new highest level which will net more/high level main rewards, so it will always be worth trying to go better similar to M+, I honestly think Torghast could be an excellent addition to the game, it’ll be like a mage tower/visions/M+ super combo.

Endgame and Alts

we know outside of the new Torghast tower mode, endgame will be 4+ raids over the ~2 years, M+ and pvp modes will be the same, just in new dungeons and hopefully a new battleground/arena, if the content patches and mid patches for story are anything like legion and bfa the game will be in an alright place content wise,
the problems with bfa mostly stem from the grindy alt/break unfriendly systems of azerite, azerite gear and essences, with those systems gone, and hopefully most if not all classes and specs tuned up so they work without needing outside factors, and new/returning players or alts can catch up just by doing a bit of story questing then going into the game modes they prefer to gear up, not being forced to do game modes they don’t like to get something they need to make their class/spec work/compete.
this will come down to how they choose to implement covenants, soulbinds and conduits, but hopefully they have truly learnt the lessons and nothing major will be locked fully behind big grinds or certain game modes, this is easily avoided by having a singular currency reward across game modes, that is used towards this progress that is locked at a weekly cap, but will have an increasing cap for catch up for alts and people who might miss some game time on holiday and so on.

Classes, specs and stuff

The level squish bringing us down to 50 from 120, with 60 being the new level cap, screams to me that all classes will probably drop from
the current 7 talent choices down to 6 (1 every 10 levels), but this shouldn’t be a problem considering all the dead talents currently in specs, either because they are must haves for 99% of players for some specs and class, and hence they should probably be a spec or class baseline ability, or either because it’s the 3rd choice that has no use because the other 2 cover all the aspects better already.
I don’t play all classes and specs, but i have played a fair few over the years, but pretty much anyone can see which talents are and aren’t used for each class and spec, with just a quick search for talent use % on all logs for each.
I main as an outlaw/assassin spec rogue mostly these days so for me
it would be easy to say just remove the level 60/4th row of the talents, Cheat Death should be a class baseline ability like it was in the past, Elusiveness should forgotten or just be baked into feint, as it will only really help with reducing some raid aoe dmg in most cases, as for the spec specific talent on that row, leeching poison, iron stomach and soothing darkness, either move them to another talent row or make them baseline for the respective specs.
looking at the rest of the rogue talent trees, i would still make some changes with most of the very used talents probably getting baked into
the relevant specs/abilities, and hopefully with a bit of playing about with the remaining lesser/unused talents and some new ones can get a chance to shine.
the next most obvious examples for this sort of treatment from different classes, are posthaste and wild mending talents for hunters and demonic circle for warlocks which i think is already planned to be made baseline for all warlock in shadowlands.

I’m sure between the returning of some old abilities, making some current spec abilities into class abilities, and with a re-jig of the talents to make them more interesting and fun, i.e have more divergent uses for some of the talents so you want to change them depending on the content your playing from pvp, raids, questing, M+ and so on then the game will be more engaging and satisfying to play.

Gearing/Loot

As much as i would love a return of tier set or something similar, i feel that it would probably be too soon to bring them back in fully at the start of Shadowlands, as it would take away from how the raw rotations and playstyles of the revamped classes/specs will be, and it would be best to give them some time to breath a bit more away from too many other features, the 1 ability from covenants and 1 effect from a legendary item shouldn’t change it that much.
so having gear that is basically all stats, will be a good thing, but we should still have a few pieces with effects and small 2 piece set bonuses and fun trinket effects same as we’ve always had.

some random bonuses on gear can be great, the random leech/avoidence/socket ect, as they don’t add a massive bonus and is
just a nice random extra thing to have, unlike the corruption effects now on live where 10-20-30% of your damage can be down to getting lucky with which corruption effects you get, prior to corruption we had
warforging and titanforging, and thunderforging before that, i remember a time when you could use valor points i think it was to upgrade your gear so even if you didn’t get a drop that week you could still improve your character, so a system like that wouldn’t go a miss but only for a max of 10 to 15 ilvls, you needed things like this in the game to help characters keep progressing in the past, less so now with
2-3 guaranteed weekly items from M+/pvp/visions, and with the change to picking your item from a pool of items potentially in shadowlands (about time we used to pick our quest rewards), the need for an extra boost to your gear isn’t needed as much if at all, but it would still be nice to have the option to upgrade gear by a small amount just to help, in whatever content you may be doing.

the main changes to gear I’d like to see is more of a return to more sockets on gear such as on neck, waist, rings more regularly/fixed on drop.
the rest of this bit is more for professions than it is gear but so what,
enchants for more types of gear to help make professions feel more relevant again, maybe by having each profession be able to craft more boe gear or items that can give players other things to do to make professions more relevant, outside of the first 2-3
weeks of a patch for leatherworking, blacksmithing, tailoring, engineering and jewelcrafting, as other wise all you do is make the 1 item that is somewhat needed from your profession that lots of others are trying to sell after getting your own profession gear pieces.

some of the sections started off well but i think i ended up just sounding/getting a bit wishlist-y.

I honestly would love to know what peoples thoughts are on the classes/specs they play, and how they would go about changing/balancing and so on, the abilities and talents of them for 9.0

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That is one super tidy post :ok_hand:

I agree, the poster deserves a kiss.

Plus it’s a very pretty flower.

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