Shadowlands: You should be able to choose ALL covenants

Community General Discussion
1

I’m not talking about switching here … the covenants as far as I know are not at war with each other … there is no need to choose any, you choose the one you wanna level up first but you should be able to get them all and just swap between their talent trees.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t … you get to experience all the stories, campaign quests, zones … and you get to test all the cool new abilities. This whole “choose one covenant” is like making a product and telling players you can only use a quarter of the product … you’re creating content and then you’re denying players experiencing the content. It’s just lose-lose. There is nothing that is gained by forcing players to “choose”. Nothing at all, you’re just butchering the game by denying the players content.

And no covenants are not an “extension” of the class, the class is not going anywhere … when the expansion is over, covenants will be dead but the classes will be there. It’s just expansion content, and when the expansion is over no one will touch the covenants or experience them … so why make your expansion worse? Why make it “smaller”? This is just wrong.

If I had my say, I would encourage players to play all covenants, it’s just more content regardless of what is “best”; that doesn’t matter to me at all. The whole game is about quests and character progress and here Blizz is just chopping off 3/4 of their game for whatever reason. They struggle to create meaningful content and then when they create meaningful content they don’t want you to play it!!!

Edit: I wanted to add a point regarding switching vs creating new toon … the thing is we already have a system where you end up leveling a new toon due to various reasons. Do we need to add another reason for you to switch?

Maybe you didn’t like the class changes for the expansion and you’re not having fun. Maybe, your spec or class is not well tuned: bottom 50% of the logs or you just realized that your DH vengeance tank is just too squishy cause its healing doesn’t scale with the damage taken unlike other tanks where their AM or passive mitigation scale better (this is yet to be fixed …) Maybe your class turned out to be very bad for M+ … or maybe your guild need you to play a different role/class … or you’re fed up with tanking/healing/dps and want a new class with a new role.

Do we need to add to those another mechanic that can cause you to abandon your toon and create a new one?

17 Likes
2

Doesnt maldraxus invade kyrian in one of the dungeons?

Honestly i like having to dedicate yourself like this. I always found it really weird how in skyrim you were simultaneously an archmage, the thieves guild leader, a companion, an assassin, the dragonbourne, a jarl etc.

11 Likes
3

Aesthetically and open world wise, i actually like the idea we all get to pick something that represents our Style, Likes, Dislikes and more to kinda Make our characters More of our own.

i think that the Soulbind/Ability system which actually grants these convenants Actual Power progression may become a imbalancable mess and Some of us sacrifice the First half (Which is actually meaningful Choice. as its a Choice on that game that doesnt stab u in the back every other balance wave) and Run with what a Sim tells us to do.

Its not a Meaningful Choice, when your litterally forced by Numbers to run a Convenant. it is a Meaningful choice when ur Choosing the enviroment Of your character.

Power progression Nullifys “Meaningful choice”… as a Choice to Minmax, is something you read and copy. Not choose.

your just gonna end up with clumps of Specific classes in each convenant, which are there not because of a RPG Sensation, or a Feeling of pride in their “Meaningful choice”… but actually disreguarded their meaningful choice to be able to participate in content.

Power progression, Causes MAJOR issue among PuGs. and even in Some cases if bad enough progressing guilds.

2 Likes
4

This here is the part that I don’t understand why some are so opposed to.

That’s exactly what they are. The amplify/alter/add to your abilities. Although it’s true they more like extensions of a spec, not the entire class. Different covenants fit different class specs/roles and some just straight up don’t fit certain specs at all.

What they are not is “sub-classes”. Specs are sub-classes in almost literal sense. But for some reason, Blizzard is advertising them as such and that’s very missleading. It’s just one extra ability that is completely unrelated to your class, one ability related to your class/spec, and then a bunch of passive effects stack on top of each other from soulbinds, counduits and legendaries. A “sub-spec” would be a more fitting name. Which by the way goes against their class focus philosophy they’ve been pushing lately.

I’ve had someone say to me that locked covenants give them more content to do as a casual which I still can’t wrap my head around. Unlocked covenants would literally quadrupple the available content and possibilities. Instead of progressing one path, you could move on to the next once you’re done with one.

Well you could say it’s meaningful, but not in a sense of choice. This system makes you take a meaningful guess instead, because you don’t even know what’s ahead once you pick, unless you’ve researched extensively on the internet, which takes aways form the game experience imho. There is so much things tied to a covenant that the chance you’re going to end up hating some part of it eventually is almost inevitable. And once you realized you guessed wrong, you have to lose everything in order to fix that, and grind everything from scratch, catch-up or not.

That is weird from a story perspective and I don’t like it either. But the difference is that in Skyrim, most of those don’t drastically change your character’s skills and power and overal feel and in the case they do, you are not stuck with just one and have some freedom in using all of them. It’s mostly focused on story and rewards. And it wouldn’t make too much sense from gameplay perspective to only be able to do one of those because there’s just too much story to be told and you would basically have to replay the entire game as many times as there are different possible paths. But skyrim has hunderds of hours of story which is not the case of a single WoW expansion. And single players RPG and an MMORPG liek WoW just aren’t comparable in this way.

In what you mentioned, the main selling point is the story. With covenants, the main selling point is the abilities and gameplay altering systems.

I agree. But It’s not even a min maxing issue and that’s the problem. Let’s say I only like Venthyr thematically and nothing else but I hate everything else about it, the way is alters my class and such. What do I do? When I choose a class, I have 12 classes and a total of 36 specs to chose from, I can find my theme much more easily that from just 4 predetermined thematic choices.

1 Like
5

The same could be said about class halls, though. There’s 12 campaigns in Legion and if you want to see them all, you need 12 alts and there’s no getting around that. In Shadowlands if you want to see all the content, first of all you can do it on one character, and second you need a max of 4 alts.

If it was just picking what type of content you want to do nobody would really mind covenants. It’s the tying of power and active skills to them that seems to be the biggest problem. Picking all of them at once will turn Shadowlands into BFA, where you have to do so much garbage that it’s just not fun.

2 Likes
6

Except it’s not. You can choose. And then you can choose another if you wish. And another. Etc. Or… You can make an alt and choose another. You can ‘experience’ all of them, you just can’t switch ‘on the fly’ or go back and forth just willy-nilly.

7 Likes
7

For the record, I think gameplay should be separated out of thos covenant choice and it should just be story, cosmetics, aesthetics and that bonus mode thing.

I love the covenant choice, the powers should absolutely not be part of it. Sure we use all the powers leveling anyway, so it makes sense we could learn any of them

2 Likes
8

Yeees man you finally get it. Keep the story and main power progression separate. It’s never been this tied together before.

Well it doesn’t have to be that way. You could just as easily progress one covenant and move on to the next once you’re done. It only depends how it ends up being designed. There’s so many posibilities to make this work without sacrificing everything. I’d starts with reducing the amount of progression systems. This is like artifatcs, legendaries, azerite, essences and corruptions all thrown in the game from day one.

9

the system has been designed with alts in mind, so thats why you shouldnt be able to get it done on one character.

i think there is a lot of confusion with the reasoning behind people wanting to “change” covenants, its not a matter of wanting to swap between kyrian and venthyr or whatever, its just a matter of the power that you get from it, they should just change the abilities so its an independant choice like an extra talent row and then there would be no problem at all, people wouldnt feel forced to take a covenant they dont like the theme of in order to get the “best” ability.

10

I always got it, but I still agree with at least experimenting with it. Trying this out is more worth it than not doing it at all, even if it’s just for the beta. Ion has already said if covenants don’t work, they always have the option to make them freely swappable, but let’s have them first try it out in the beta. As I said in the other thread - if it’s garbage, I’ll say so. It all hinges on how swapping back to a covenant will work.

When Ion says it’ll be hard, we have no idea what he means. Because he’s said he doesn’t want people to switch between covenants for different dungeons. But if it’s a quest that takes like 30 minutes to do to switch back to a covenant, then… I dunno, it might be alright. To me it all hangs on how they implement the switching.

11

Well you don’t have to do them all on one toon, but you can if you want. Maybe you just only 2 of them and leave the rest for the alt. There is nothing to gain by throwing away 3/4 of the content just to enhance your alt experience.

12

Switching is not an option because you lose all your progression made in that covenant. And you have to regrind the new one from scratch and the old one even more if you want to go back.

Not an option either because of the nature of the abilities and how they tie into different specs. Different covenants often work well with different specs of a single class. So to experience all of them you potentially have to create another character of the same class just to try out the aother covenant on a different spec. And not this is not for min-maxin purposes, this is about how it feels to play and how well it fits. It’s just for the sake of more satisfying. It’s satisfying when things go together well, when they just click and it works.

1 Like
13

I wonder if there’ll be the possibility of not choosing any Convenant, like that guy who never picked a faction on his Pandaren and leveled it to max on the island anyway.

14

Has that officially been confirmed?
Also; then switch after you’re done. :blush:
If you want to experience it all, you’re going to want to ‘finish’ a Covenant before moving on.

Yeahhhh this argument is a bit silly. If you start nitpicking like that there’s LOADS of ‘content’ in the game that you never ‘experience’ unless you roll every single class, of every single race with all the different profession combos, etc… It’s silly.

1 Like
15

That’s what the beta is for. I hope it gets resolved before release.

He’s recently said specifically that currently, the idea is in terms of weeks so it’s possible to swap between raid seasons. But you’d probably lose progress while leaving a covenant so you have to count that in as well, teh regrind.

16

I can guarantee you OP there’ll be a Feat of Strength achievement for having joined all Covenants [doing their Campaigns thoroughly ofc] on one Character, similar to the Scyers and Aldor of TBC.

1 Like
17

It’s likely that you lose it because there’s transmog and mount rewards. Unless they just make it unavailable until you rejoin the covenant. Then all the better.
Also why would I want to throw aways something I’ve completed. I don’t delete my character once I reach my goal item level or whatever. I don’t uninstall a game just because I’ve finished it.

I don’t see how it’s silly. You have your character everywhere you go and playing a spec with an ability that essentially a dead useless button for it is not fun. You want your character to feel good to play no matter what type of content you’re doing, don’t you? I don’t want to experience everything, I want to experience all my specs to their full potential because that’s how I’ve always played and I don’t want to have a button that just doesn’t fit into my rotation or just doesn’t really do anything exciting, but is very exciting to use on another spec. It’s again the case of doing what I’ve always been doing.

18

well yeah, the power gains should defintly be unlocked.

but the optional and mandatory Content from all 4 convenants on you on every character you make?

this would add truck loads of mandatory chores for every one of your classes… currently this system 1/4ths the grind, which is why i say… on the Abilities Yes defintly a Minimum (im not too concerned with the Soulbinds)

the abilities are class Impactful, it can ruin the game for oyu as a Player. as effectively this becomes apart of your toolkit. atleast the SOulbinds are just a bunch of passives that dont actually affect gameplay.

If for example i wanna be Night fae do blizzard just expect me to take a Major DPS Loss from not picking condemn and Be Happy for my choice? but, the aesthetic etc etc would make 0 Sense for a Night elf to be in.

19

No? I often do. As do many people. :grin:

You wouldn’t ‘throw it away’. You’d ‘put it on hold’. I think that is the likely scenario. If you lose all your progress that’d be bad game design indeed.

That has basically always been the case already! I have always had skills that often I wouldn’t even put in a bar because I essentially never use it.

So if I go by your logic, playing any class was never fun.

Like I said; that has ALWAYS been the case in WoW already. No real change there.
Those abilities you’re getting, why not view them as EXTRAS? Bonuses. They’re not part of your base class/spec.

But here we are again; our views on gaming are just so different, we will likely never agree on certain aspects of it. So let’s just stop here?

1 Like
20

as i understand it if you dont unlock a covenant then you will not be able to access the end game content, so no torghast and no callings and world content and such