choice would be great if this was a normal kind of mmorpg, but its not - its a competitive game and people are expected to perform, making a “bad” choice will just end up biting you in the behind
casual players will benefit the most from a system like this because they dont care, and rightfully so - then again its not the casual players crying about these type of systems
Min-maxing is not needed, lots of people should understand that. Before 8.3 there were posts saying that specific corruptions will be mandatory for m+ and raid, and you won’t get invited to pugs without rank3 IS/TD/etc… Till this day I have never seen a group requiring any of those.
Also I usually play arcane (you might know that fire is the fotm spec right now) but still I’m doing fine. Even if there will be 10% dps difference between covenants (which most likely won’t happen) improving your gameplay will net you a lot more DPS / HPS than going meta.
Idk how it makes loot problems realy, if anything its just solves them.
Rn if u play warr, and u want to play dps and tank, u need to collect 2 types, in SL, lets say u play both arms and fury, so you just need 2x two hand to fill them both.
U play tank and fury? Dont wory cuz now u can use 2x 1h which u can drop as tank, so u dont have to worry about wepons that much.
Ofc this doesnt change gameplay much, rn fury hits like truck and fast as machine, they should change that, make SMF fast low hiting, and TG slow hard hiting, so u have some kind of “difference” in gameplay pace and rotation.
Also, last time they get rid of SMF it wzs because of balancing issues, so chances are people wont play both according to gameplay/weapons they got, but rather stick to one meta build…
Covenants are no worse than classes and talent trees.
Don’t tie together aesthetics and power
Why? The game has done this thousands of times before. It wasn’t a problem then.
It’s not going to be balanced
Probably not, but if Blizzard treats it as they would treat classes, it’s going to be balanced enough that it won’t destroy the game.
And like with classes, extreme guilds are gonna metagame the heck out of it. But they’re like 15-20k people and they know that they’re doing it. Their screams should not speak for the community at large.
It doesn’t work in an MMORPG. Everyone will be forced into the same covenant
Blizzard have already said that they’ll make raid encounters assuming you have players with all 4. You can’t get away with all picking Venthyr or whatever. Pre-determine your comp and how you wanna do it if you’re that concerned.
This would indeed be the safest and most logical choice in my opinion.
The thing I do not understand is that every expansion now adds something that lasts one expansion and then dies. In Legion it was the weapon and later the crucible, now it’s essences, corruptions and the trait system.
Soon it’s covenants. Why not develop something that lasts instead of starting out from scratch in every expansion - with all the problems that arises with something like this. Make a lasting system instead that can be tunes and perfected through every expansion instead!
If you cant freely choose covenants whenever you want, they will be a disaster.
Blizz says a lot of things.
Not to mention their concept of “tuning” and “balance” is a flaming pile of horse manure, to be gentle.
Just as an example, prot warriors smashing m+ by thunderclapping everything to death is “fine and balanced” compared to poor dk tanks that struggle to simply survive (let alone do real dmg) over a +20.
I get where you’re coming from but i wouldn’t be as cynical as to say they’re just saying this to appease players. This was literally one of the first things they went out with, that if covenants turn out to be a tuning nightmare in alpha and beta they would be scrapped.
Because you can’t have a healthy progression if every past xpacks give you something as powerful as those systems.
If it’s meant to last then you can’t have corruptions allowing you to reach 100% haste without buffs, essences which straight up give you secondary stats and passive procs ect, as you’ll have the same issue we had in BFA : systems stacked on top of each other creating massive increases in performances and basically breaking the game.
So it can’t be that impactful if you don’t reset it every so often… But then again, would you grind something for two years if what you got in return was only noticeable months later ?
That’s extremely shortsighted. Read a bit about what’s coming in SL, it’s not just about the class ability you know ?
Nope, they claimed they were ready to remove the restrictions preventing you from swapping covenant. They never said anything about character power.
Big nuance once you realise that most of the actual power isn’t tied to the class ability.
Gotta love when arm chair devs throw numbers left and right with nothing to back them up. Just as bad as a those claiming it would only be a 2 or 3% gap, you’re not helping anyone with that and especially not your thread.
For all we know a single legendary could have more impact that all of the other systems combined.
How about you just wait until tonigth’s news reveal before complaining about how the systems will work ? That would be the reasonable approach less than 24h before a major news reveal : see if they actually address your concerns before making a thread about it.
I don’t want anyone to be frustrated. But I also don’t want people to approach this game as a spreadsheet because then Blizzard has to keep that kind of ‘gameplay’ in mind; which is at the expense of the game itself. Covenants are proof of this. And that’s why I feel they shouldn’t budge. It would only promote more of that kind of behaviour.
Also; I just like it when you have to make choices in games. No re-do’s.
It makes the choices matter. Not to be taken lightly.
Biggest problem in mmos in general are the players, becuse they come in 3 cathegories.
you se the minority are those who complain a lot, and unfortunately for every game theese are the ones, that are the loudest also, it would not matter what a game developer does, and they would still complain.
like covenants now, they could be realy good, and fun to have, maby not totaly balanced, but due to the big complainers, it most likely gona be ruined for everyone instead.
Tbh I like end game but I also love player choice and customization.
Since I did not play alpha and the full picture is not out yet I can’t say how to judge the system.
Some Covenant abilities need to be looked at, like the Night Fae one for priests but overall the system seems okay to me.
Time will tell I guess.
It’s not and it wont be.
There is a huge difference already between the main covenant powers, and soulbinds adds even more.
You can’t have that much gap in things you can’t easily swap, considering the average player does widely different things every week.
And no, the rpg choice element can’t be used as excuse, it’s ok talking about minor utilty or flavor, not on dps difference.
Based on track history they usually regret things.
I just wish they would make a solid system and stick with it - they have had enough practice now.
If that will be the case to the point that I will hate the system I will gladly change my opinion 
I think Covenant main problem is caused mostly by Blizzard late design direction with classes.
A lot of classes feels lackluster and incomplete without things like Azerite/essences or whatever bandaid they will use.
And while this is a problem that will reflect on covenants too I think that the power spike would be way less evident if classes did work from day 1 of the expansions.
The main problem is that a lot of classes are bad and boring until late into the expansions cycle. This need to be adressed imo.
I stand by covenants should only be lore, aesthetic and cosmetic rewards. Its still a meaningful choice imo.
Gameplay related to these choices is ridiculous and most people will have to pick between a power they dont like and a covenant they dont like.
For those who don’t understand where the OP is coming from then the latest Allcraft episode (it is on YT) with Amson, Rich and Preach spend a lot of time talking about this. Preach in particular has some very well researched views on this. He believes It will not end well if it stays like this and it will not just be the ‘min-maxers’ who will suffer, it will be in fact the casual that will suffer the most.
Sure, if a person who earns his livings from drama says this will ruin WoW, we should 100% agree on it.
Was expecting such a reply, some of you cannot see beyond your hate for streamers etc to actually listen to them. Preach has played 100’s of hours of the alpha I’ll take his views over people on here (positive or negative) . I hope he is wrong (he hopes he is wrong) but the opinion from pretty much every alpha player (and there are not enough) is this is bad as it stands.
You need to decouple streamer from WoW player, many of these people you all seem to hate have played over 15 years and are very active players often at the highest levels of the game.
And the whole ‘drama’ thing is a nonsense, constructive feedback is not ‘drama’ it is what an alpha is for