I haven’t played the Beta. I have avoided spoilers.
But if someone knows, I would like answers to the following:
Is there any difference between the Alliance and Horde leveling experience in Shadowlands?
Are there any places, events, or characters that you only come across if you play a specific faction in Shadowlands?
Can I play through all the Covenant campaigns to their end-point, one after another, on a single character?
Are there any game systems in Shadowlands where you benefit from having multiple characters (like having multiple Garrisons in Warlords of Draenor to make more money)?
From what I’ve heard, once you join a covenant, you’ll get additional quests from them to progress your covenant-specific stuff. If you only stay with 1 covenant, you won’t be able to experience all the quest-lines from the others. So if you really only want to play 1 character and you want to experience all covenant campaigns, you’ll have so switch covenants which is time-gated and requires a bit a grinding.
I’ll eventually play a couple of different characters which are in the different covenants.
Covenants are “meaningful decisions” apparently so not sure how much flexibility there may be at a later time. You do get to experience aspects of each Covenant, through the levelling process, to help make a semi-informed decision at Lv. 60.
Yeah I’m cool with that. I did the Aldor and Scryer switching back in TBC to get the rewards from both.
So what I want in Shadowlands is to do the whole Campaign for the Kyrian for example, and then switch to the Night Fae and do their entire Campaign. But I’m not sure if that is possible, or if the game let’s you change Covenants without opening up the other Campaigns after you’ve already completed one.
I basically need to know how to optimize for the expansion.
In BfA it was obvious that you needed 1 Alliance character and 1 Horde character to experience everything, since Alliance and Horde had different questing experiences.
In Legion you obviously needed 1 character of each class to experience all the Order Hall Campaigns, and at least 1 character of each faction in order to experience the faction-specific content.
In WoD you needed 1 Alliance and 1 Horde character to experience all the story, and then as many characters as possible to get the most profit out of the Garrison feature.
There is a slight difference for H/A in how the whole Tyrande questline treats you.
If you are a DK, you also get treated slightly differently by the DK NPCs (not H/A related but alt related)
You can play through each campaign by switching on a single character if you wish but only if you aren’t one of these endgame zergers as you won’t be optimal and blah blah blah.
If you are interested in professions then yes, 3 alts could be useful. What else is interesting is they don’t have to play through the whole story again. Once completed, alts get the option of levelling via side quests and WQs. It’s a nice change!
I do have a Death Knight alt I wouldn’t mind playing, so I may have to prepare that.
And I was thinking of an alt or two, just to experience that alternative leveling option.
And seemingly Professions are a matter to consider.
^^ I’m doing this. I’ve got four paladins (does not have to be all the same but I want all the plate and I don’t like playing other plate classes) ready to go for Shadowlands so I can do each storyline through each covenant, there is a fair bit after you reach max level too. There are covenant specific mounts, gear etc that I want to collect.
I’m not doing this for tryhard raid reasons and I will most likely only gear my main for that. I’m hoping that an expansion or two down the line they’ll relax the transmog and mount restrictions and I’ll be able to use all I’ve collected on my main.
I also chose the four based on their profession skill that I feel I will need first and foremost to support my main.
as far as i know there shouldnt be any change between fanctions other than maybe the intro quests.
realistically the only thing that would require multiple characters is wanting to effectively play off specs. considering how much difficulty there is for this with the way that covenants and soulbinds work.
one of the main problems with switching between covenants to see all of the campaigns is that when you swap your character will get significantly weaker as you will lose access to all of your soulbinds and conduits untill you grind the anima again, although you should be able to catch up again as they have said that system should be in place to allow catch up.
