Shadowlands: You should be able to choose ALL covenants

[Ishayoe-frostmane (Ishayoe)]

Choosing them all means making no choice.

There’s this mentality going around where everyone thinks they need to min-max everything and therefore everything needs to be optimal at all times and they need to copy everyone else and on and on it churns.

Meanwhile, on the flip-side, everyone’s always complaining about FotM and not having any customisation and never being able to pick what we want and constantly having to respec for every fight and all that jazz.

These two desires are diametrically opposed to one another.

I want you making a choice based on aesthetics first and foremost, and I also want some cool powers that go along with that choice. It’s no worse than racials or the old talent system. The problem here is not that we’re tying powers to aesthetics.

The problem here is that these abilities are very powerful and will have a profound impact on your damage rotation. Simply picking one over the other can give 5% DPS variances and things like that.

That isn’t what they should be, and I’ve said that since day 1. See here:

Shadowlands: A Look at Covenant Class and Signature Abilities *Updated 5/13

I am very, very concerned about this for a huge number of reasons. As has already been pointed out numerous times before, this will lock you into a covenant. Worse still, different game modes might attempt to lock you into different covenants, meaning a lot of people will have to make separate characters for PvP and PvE or even M+ vs raids just so they can have different covenants on them. Many of the abilities are these sorts of cooldowns that add nothing. We’re back to this again. Others ar…

I like the idea of Covenant abilities and these more meaningful semi-permanent choices. Deleting it because you can’t understand why people want to make decisions that stick in an MMORPG is an idea that can only be born in the mind of an obsessive min-max’er who couldn’t care less about the world and the social elements.

And that’s exactly what Preach is, and I respect that he wants to be that guy, but most people aren’t that guy, and they want some RPG back in their MMORPG. The fact that you could even respec at all was considered a necessary design flaw in the vanilla iteration of WoW.

I think the solution, the one where we get fun abilities that tie to aesthetics and a semi-permanent RP based choice, while also not requiring obsessive min-max’ing, is to nerf those abilities to the point where they become like racials. Another advantage of this is we also avoid the crazy CD stacking and broken utilities problems like those we had in MoP.

That way we tie abilities to Covenants, but we don’t break the game for min-max’ers, either. What they’re doing right now will spawn way too much QQ from a minority but vocal part of the playerbase. It isn’t going to work.