Haven’t really been following, but what incentive would Night Elves have to go with the Night Fae if they already have Shadowmeld? I thought that would be their natural pairing.
It’s pretty depressing that SL’s only new feature is already full of more holes than swiss cheese. 
Well… that depends on which class you are, which spec do you play and which type of content you want to do. Do you play multi specification? Do a bit of everything. The bottom line is it is a mistake to gate power behind the covenants
They’ve removed the Shadowmeld covenant ability.
The shadowmeld was removed from Night Fae, it’s a hot now.
Sad indeed.
Imo Torghast alone generates more hype than everything BFA had to offer at launch, and yet I loved 8.0 for the weirdest reasons tho (discovered the economy, earned my first million through skinning alone, started playing with professions and my ah…)
It doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, it just has to be viable.
Legendaries and conduits may be a balance issue but they are completely unrelated to the covenant choice thus irrelevant in this discussion.
There are 4 things to keep in mind for the covenant selection :
The signature ability, which turned out to be much less one sided than initially thought (kyrian pot was expected to be useless and yet is currently seen as very strong by the testers)
The class ability, with some of the outliers being updated to a more reasonable state. This can still be a major balance issue but we’re not talking about a +20% dps gap between one covenant to another one.
The Soulbind perks. While still impactful the most broken ones have been removed, leaving the soulbind treees in a much better state. Every tree has 3 DPS conduit slots making it much easier to play dps only specs
dungeon buffs : each covenant has one or two dungeons (one confirmed, dunno for the second) dungeons (the ones in their zone) where they can grant powerful buffs to their party. I wonder how it’ll turn out, it may make a undervalued covenant more attractive on some weeks as you only need one player in the party to activate the buff.
So will it be perfectly balanced ? Nah no way, but viable for most content ? Perhaps. The conduits and Legos will have a much bigger impact than the covenant stuff imo, so a 5~10% gap in performances from one covenant to another or one soulbind to another is manageable imo.
Of course it’ll come down to the final balance updates but the covenant related features do not seem nearly as powerful and unbalanced than the BFA systems.
Hell, I’m fairly sure that one furious gaze azerite trait in BFA had a bigger impact on the havoc performances than any DH covenant ability in SL…
I’m already decidedly annoyed with Shadowlands, between the covenant system, soulbinds, ‘legendaries’, and the tower that just feels like a mix of island expeditions and Horrific Visions, Rent-a-system where leveling is basically ignored and end-game meta is basically the only thing that gets focused on.
Trying to get into M+ as Spriest, feral, enhance sham etc in BFA was already bad enough. Now imagine you’re not a ‘great’ spec, but you’re also not the right covenant groups need? Especially when the balance of those will change and will be different likely on what SPEC you play, so it will make switching specs even worse… It will make ALTS even worse trying to keep up with what covenant to play for what spec/role, it just… ugh. It’s already a headache and the expansion isn’t even out yet.
Not to mention, so far from my testing on the PTR, leveling feels worse than BFA though faster so nothing really got fixed there.
Fair point. It really does look like a system that’s only harmless to people who will pick based on aesthetics, casual or not. But the game doesn’t really favour aesthetics… it’s long been a writhing mass of pre-learning content before it’s out, theorycrafting the life out of everything and minmaxing even for a +2.
I genuinely hope they’ll fix it, it doesn’t sound sustainable at all. More like an Azerite armour 2.0 type of choice.
I think everyone who is even semi-serious about the game expects Covenants to be a big fail, but I’ll give it a chance.
Among all the other insane things that have been going on this year, why not.
While some players are doing this I think Preach stated that none of the top guilds are really planning on gearing multiple alts of the same class.
It’s way more reasonable to gear alts from different classes.
You can pull my ripcord if you gimme the tentacle nzoth mount 
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