Covenants are sucking away attention from the rest of Shadowlands.

[Jinpachi]

So after hearing a lot of interviews and seeing a lot of videos from content creators in the last few weeks, i have begun to get really worried.

All that people are mostly talking about, are Covenants. Its the main focus currently and it seems to taking a lot of the on-air time when it comes to asking questions to WoW devs. It seems like many aspects of the game are being forgotten or not focused on, just because Covenants fill so much when it comes to new content.

But as time goes by, i think Covenants are being a worse and worse element for Shadowlands design, cause it seems to be extremly complicated and yet not really adds much to the game. Its just adding 1 ability afterall when it comes to gameplay and outside of that, it just cosmetic.

I feel like we are seeing the start of a new Garrisons situation like in WoD. So much focus is put on this single feature, that we forget to talk about, you know, the rest of the game. Aside from Torghast, it seems like much of Shadowlands is not getting the feedback it needs and it might be already be too late. With the beta starting, big changes are not gonna happen and i fear, that we have completly missed many things, that could have used "big changes".

so you post this with no personal experience of the game yourself, based on what someone else may have said, and from streams...find something else to do.

[Dalinos]

And your set bonus, which had a direct impact on rotation etc in many cases, and your legendaries eventually get replaced - which existed as far back as Classic.

"Just gear" is just a cop-out for people trying to make a point full of hyperbole. The basics of the expansion loop never changed. You lost all character power that you worked for, no matter in what shape or form that comes, and every expansion starts anew as a blank slate. In the past often with completely re-designed classes, which maybe obscured that fact a bit. It just feels different if they take stuff away while at the same time re-designing the other stuff. On the other hand many people also didn't like having to re-learn their classes on patch day.

Dunno about you, but our healers who had Naxx gear replaced their T3 with T4. I replaced my SWP gear with T7.5 from Naxx-25, cause it was perfectly itemised with triple sockets. Never has my char lost power while lvling before Cataclysm, cause at that point, power progression was linear, not exponential.

[Flurryfang]

so you post this with no personal experience of the game yourself, based on what someone else may have said, and from streams...find something else to do.

Did...Did you completly miss the point of my entire post?

The reason why im worried, is exactly because that only a few people have access to the game and most of them are seemingly focusing their feedback on 1 feature, the Covenants, instead of bigger scope of the game. Blizzard have come out and said, that Alpha is where the big changes happen and with the start of Beta, where more people get to test the game, fewer and smaller changes are gonna happen.

So when so few people have focused on so few things, we might be too late in making big changes to the game, that might have been needed. In the follow-up comments i have made on this thread, i have talked about how much important gameplay features are. Covenants, while being an interesting feature, is not filled with gameplay. Its a struture and systems feature, not something that actually creates gameplay or adds to stuff you can do as the game lives on.

Its a missed focus in my opinion. We keep talking and talking and talking about something, that in the long run, matters very little. Yes, Azerite sucked in BFA, but if the game have had more stuff to do and OTHER interesting features, the game would have stood much better. Instead, Blizzard just focused too much on the Azerite system and the game fell hard because of that.

[Kaver]

And this is what azerite gear also did in BFA. They had to use a lot of resources to fix azerite gear and create the essence system to compensate. So instead of focusing on new content they had to put a lot of focus on something which should already work from the beginning. They need to start the expansions on a strong note. Having to spend the first half of an expansion purely fixing errors is not good.

[Flurryfang]

Beside raids and dungeons covenants are literally "the" Shadowlands.

Which is kinda sad.....

I believe good expansions are built upon a broad portfolio of features, good or bad, while bad expansions are built upon one or few features.

If im done with Covenants and i then only have raids/dungeons left, im gonna feel quite disappointed with the game and play it very little.

[Nyhtt]

Which is kinda sad.....

I believe good expansions are built upon a broad portfolio of features, good or bad, while bad expansions are built upon one or few features.

If im done with Covenants and i then only have raids/dungeons left, im gonna feel quite disappointed with the game and play it very little.

Most expansions have raid/dungeons and then one or two other feature to keep you interested outside of raids. We will have covenants, the maw, and torhgast.

Even Legion only had class campaign and Suramar then raids/dungeons. BFA has islands and war fronts just those features sucked.

- - - Updated - - -

Class design is for the most part the same with small changes. We still have all the basics like WQ, Raids, M+. Besides from Torhgast and Covenant what else is there to talk about?

Legendary items and Soulbinds but all those just came up for testing so I assume most people are still testing them.

[Kralljin]

Blizzard have been open about how much work Garrisons took and that it ended up changing 3-4 times, each from individual working builds, which took the primary focus of the expansion.

Besides the ability to change Garrisons locations, i'd love to know what was actually cut from Garrisons itself.

I mean, unlike the other systems, Garrisons were not directly tied to player power in the same fashion as its "successor" system, it brought you loot every two weeks and gave you crafting materials, that's it.

The problem with WoD and the Garrisons, was that the entire expansion was built upon one single feature. All the eggs was put in 1 basket and the basket fell apart. The same thing is happening right now with the Covenants. Every single new power thing, aside from the legendaries, new features and cosmetics, are put into Covenants. If the Covenants sucks or start to be boring as the expansion goes on, the game breaks. The primary value-source goes null.

I Agree with the covenant parallel, but i'm not sure if Garrisons were the sole reason why WoD was gutted.

Like, i said it above, Blizzard seriously fucked up the planning of WoD from the get go, they had to rework Gorgrond because it originally focused on Orcs as well, that's why Gorgrond is half finished and most of the XP gained in Gorgrond is not gained via actual questing but bonus objectives.

The abandoned Orgrim / Durotan plot was actually supposed to take place in Gorgrond, for example.

On top of that, Nagrand suffered a similiar fate, there is so much random stuff in this zone that was never touched besides some random quests.
The "story" in Nagrand doesn't go beyond "yeah, we gotta take out some Iron Horde forces to attack Garrosh's holdout", compare that to the far more fledged out zones such as Frostfire Ridge, Talador, Spires of Arak and Shadowmoon Valley - it's day and night difference.

While it could be true that the Garrison feature caused far more issues, i still think that the overall planning of the expansion was just fucked up.
Even if Garrisons sucked, you could still have another raid, the Garrisons were not that tied to a character's power like future systems (at least nothing like that was ever hinted at) - something that both Legion and BfA paid dearly in their own right.

Maybe they saw their fuckup shortly after the planning stage and the realization that Garrisons sucked on top of that were the coup de grace in a way.

[Flurryfang]

Besides the ability to change Garrisons locations, i'd love to know what was actually cut from Garrisons itself.

I mean, unlike the other systems, Garrisons were not directly tied to player power in the same fashion as its "successor" system, it brought you loot every two weeks and gave you crafting materials, that's it.

Garrisons was one of my favorite "expected" features ever, so i have a good knowledge of what was changed for launch from what was initially thoughtout.

So, they wanted garrison location to be changeable to each zone, which can be seen in the "build your own base" feature, that there is in all the zones.

It was supposed to be completly customizable, with you being able to choose a theme for the entire base. Don't know how far you could go with this, but you would be able to change the "skin" of the base buildings.

The follower system was supposed to be much grander, with it being much closer to a "raid-team-manager" mini-game than what we actually got. You would be able to gear you followers out and send teams of 5 or 10-15 followers out to do mini-dungeons or mini-raids, which would give you legacy loot and different resources.

To support this follower system, the base buildings in the Garrison were supposed to have much more to do with your followers, making them heal faster after missions, making gear from scrap or buffing them, than actually being about supporting the player in their activities.

So, before the beta launched for WoD, the Garrison was much about creating a closed system, that focused on a mini-game like manager game. Instead, they choose to make it the home base of the player, making most of the expansion focus around it and create a number of features, that happened only in the garrison.
While there was no power connected to the Garrison, the focus of the expansion was there, since there was no power-system in WoD, like we have in Legion and BFA. This focus made it quite clear, that once Garrisons failed, the expansion had very little value left.

I Agree with the covenant parallel, but i'm not sure if Garrisons were the sole reason why WoD was gutted.

Like, i said it above, Blizzard seriously fucked up the planning of WoD from the get go, they had to rework Gorgrond because it originally focused on Orcs as well, that's why Gorgrond is half finished and most of the XP gained in Gorgrond is not gained via actual questing but bonus objectives.

The abandoned Orgrim / Durotan plot was actually supposed to take place in Gorgrond, for example.

On top of that, Nagrand suffered a similiar fate, there is so much random stuff in this zone that was never touched besides some random quests.
The "story" in Nagrand doesn't go beyond "yeah, we gotta take out some Iron Horde forces to attack Garrosh's holdout", compare that to the far more fledged out zones such as Frostfire Ridge, Talador, Spires of Arak and Shadowmoon Valley - it's day and night difference.

While it could be true that the Garrison feature caused far more issues, i still think that the overall planning of the expansion was just fucked up.
Even if Garrisons sucked, you could still have another raid, the Garrisons were not that tied to a character's power like future systems (at least nothing like that was ever hinted at) - something that both Legion and BfA paid dearly in their own right.

Maybe they saw their fuckup shortly after the planning stage and the realization that Garrisons sucked on top of that were the coup de grace in a way.

Planning was clearly the problem in WoD and i agree with nearly all of your points in this matter. The whole expansion and all of its non-starting zones took a huge hit from being rushed and not being planned out correctly. It almost feels like, that they had to scrap an entire build and then had no plan how to make the next build. Nothing is connected in that expansion and its really a huge shame.

But putting the planning aside, agreeing that the expansion already had little chance as it was, i think Garrisons really did put the nail in the coffin for WoD. Because instead of having used time on giving life to the different zones of Draenor, making content here and there to give the players a reason to explore the world, which the art department atleast had done an alright job on, they put everything into the Garrisons. We might have gotten more content this way, but the content ends up mattering little, if the spine of all that content is connected to the same boring body.

That is what leads me to have a bad feeling about Covenants. Covenants are all about giving structure to quests, giving you systems to work on and a space to call your own. It is the catalyst for power progression, story and customization in the expansion, making it the primary support beacon in the entire expansion. Instead of spreading the love, creating features all over the different zones, making neutral reps and points of focus, everything seems tossed into the covenant homes and the main city.

I see the Covenant systems quickly losing its charm and then we are left with very little in the end.

[ClassicPeon]

You used to lose only crit, haste, mastery and so on. Now you are straight up losing abilities.



Nah, its getting embarassing for you.

See? I can do it too, and it has about the same weight as your patronising fanboyism.

So you got salty that i called you out for being wrong while arguing against you and you reported my post. Real classy there lol