9.0 General Discussion

[Nyel]

I agree with monk for sure. I was trying out weapons of order last night and it didn't feel very impactful. My favorite spell is visually amazing and a nother semi regular button to help with the mastery, but it doesn't really add much to the gameplay other than being something to push and being pretty.


The biggest surprise for me is that slappy hands is actually kinda fun and cool looking for dk. I'm not sure if I'm going venthyr or necro on dk. I kinda like dk mist too.

Also for hunters death chakram is kinda fun. Gives a good amount of focus and deals decent damage. I was messing around with marksman and if you pick Chimera shot it's not bad imo. I still don't like the rapid shot but I think some small changes could make marksmen really good.

BM is boring but works well.


I still despise survival.



Rey paladins might have too many abilities now for my taste. I don't know it consecration is really needed anymore. Great to have hammer back though.

That's exactly the problem with Covenants. Some classes have really distinct and well-functioning abilities that fit into their toolkit. Several others don't and you're questioning why you'd even use that skill at all, especially when it's rotation-breaking like with Shadow Priest or semi-useful like Monk (I love Monk's Faeline ability, but what the heck is the use of this? Monks already have to press a lot of skills and where does this visually beautiful but gameplay-wise mediocre skill fit into?).

[Sondrelk]

That's exactly the problem with Covenants. Some classes have really distinct and well-functioning abilities that fit into their toolkit. Several others don't and you're questioning why you'd even use that skill at all, especially when it's rotation-breaking like with Shadow Priest or semi-useful like Monk (I love Monk's Faeline ability, but what the heck is the use of this? Monks already have to press a lot of skills and where does this visually beautiful but gameplay-wise mediocre skill fit into?).

Again though, this seems more like a problem with the abilities themselves, not really with the covenants. Which is why I feel changing the entire system just for this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Nyel]

Im waiting for soulbinds to be ditched for the new covenant like system in 9.1

Yeah, I'm very curious where and when exactly they'll back paddle with Covenants, if they don't do it until 9.0.

- - - Updated - - -

Again though, this seems more like a problem with the abilities themselves, not really with the covenants. Which is why I feel changing the entire system just for this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Nobody wants to change the entire system, just remove a lot of the restrictions / limitations.

And if Covenant = Covenant abilities, I don't see how that are two separate things. If the Covenant abilities are a negative to your class instead of a positive, the system cannot be seen as a success. See, this is one of the limitation I'm talking about. If you're not restricted to one Covenant ability and it would be more like a talent row, the problem would basically not exist. You still have Covenants, but not the limitations. I mean in the beginning you're working for all Covenants. So why not earn every Covenant skill and just make Soulbinds exclusive? There are a lot of things they could do.

[Orwell7]

Again though, this seems more like a problem with the abilities themselves, not really with the covenants. Which is why I feel changing the entire system just for this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

80% of Covenants are about player power, so yes, abilities themselves ARE the Covenants.
You pick a covenant, then you use THAT ability in every combat. You don't be 100% in your covenant's transmog, don't use their toys and shit all the time, do your weekly once per week.. but your ability stays with you 100% of the time.

Abilities ARE the Covenants.

[Sondrelk]

Yeah, I'm very curious where and when exactly they'll back paddle with Covenants, if they don't do it until 9.0.

- - - Updated - - -



Nobody wants to change the entire system, just remove a lot of the restrictions / limitations.

And if Covenant = Covenant abilities, I don't see how that are two separate things. If the Covenant abilities are a negative to your class instead of a positive, the system cannot be seen as a success. See, this is one of the limitation I'm talking about. If you're not restricted to one Covenant ability and it would be more like a talent row, the problem would basically not exist. You still have Covenants, but not the limitations. I mean in the beginning you're working for all Covenants. So why not earn every Covenant skill and just make Soulbinds exclusive? There are a lot of things they could do.

Making the choice of covenant meaningless beyond a visual thing would be changing the system though. The entire point here is that covenants are a difficult choice that will impact the way you play the expansion, and changing that just puts us right back to the current way of doing things, that of minmaxing being easy and opimization at all costs.

Whether you work with all teh covenants or not is irrelevant, the system is predicated on the idea that you have to choose one and stick with it, at least to some degree. There are ways around it if you want to optimize further, but like most cases in gaming, doing so comes at a cost and time spent.

And yes, making the covenant abilities like talents would remove the problem, but the same could be said about class balance if you removed all uniqueness from the classes and made them all the same with a different choice of armor and weapon.



That being said I imagine the conduit thing will likely be changed. The limitations and having to be forced to less choices per spec if oyu want to play more than one is so minor as to be nonexistent already, so removing the cooldown wouldnt really change much.

[Chickat]

The blocks do in fact affect the lower end, it lower the skill ceiling for minmaxing, making it the accepted norm on the lower ends of the spectrum, in turn making the playerbase less diverse.

As I have said before, this is the same as when flying was removed and players said that those who didnt like flying simply shoudlnt fly, which does not really work as an argument since the inclusion of an ultimate option stifles creativity on the lower ends.
For covenants that are easy to change there is no good reason to pick the ability that isnt 100% optimal for every situation besides liking how it looks.

In short, the game has moved further and further away from being an RPG where you have to pick and choose what you can be best or even good at in certain scenarios. For most games it would be perfectly reasonable ot state that a players shouldnt be able to excel in all kinds of damage, but for some reason in WoW it is not just something that is said, but something that the playerbase has come to expect.


Besides, you can have separate specs with the conduits, you have 3 soulbinds that can be swapped infinitely that you can have different conduits on.

- - - Updated - - -



Power progression in Legion was mostly linear though. There was a brief moment during the first raid tier where players had to choose between different good abilities, but after that it was all about getting the abilities in a linear fashion, whether actually linear like the extra traits the artifacts got in 7.2, or worse still the infinite traits.

Well at a certain point getting anima or renown or whatever the particular resource is, you will not need it anymore. Some people like that I suppose, and maybe they want to leave more on alting this time, but I feel like maybe 3 months into the expansion people will run out of things to do. I suppose 9.1 could almost be out by then but I don't think the .1 patches usually add that much.



I do wonder where they go in major patches though. Ik they said they won't add new systems. So expanding the current soulbind trees? Adding new soulbinds? It would just make balancing even more difficult. But they can't do nothing. They kinda designed themselves into a corner.

[Nyel]

I do wonder where they go in major patches though. Ik they said they won't add new systems. So expanding the current soulbind trees? Adding new soulbinds? It would just make balancing even more difficult. But they can't do nothing. They kinda designed themselves into a corner.

They most likely will add more Conduits. What I would like to see is more Conduits or a little talent tree that just revolves around the Covenant abilities and improves them in one way or another.

[Sondrelk]

Well at a certain point getting anima or renown or whatever the particular resource is, you will not need it anymore. Some people like that I suppose, and maybe they want to leave more on alting this time, but I feel like maybe 3 months into the expansion people will run out of things to do. I suppose 9.1 could almost be out by then but I don't think the .1 patches usually add that much.



I do wonder where they go in major patches though. Ik they said they won't add new systems. So expanding the current soulbind trees? Adding new soulbinds? It would just make balancing even more difficult. But they can't do nothing. They kinda designed themselves into a corner.

I imagine that going forward they could add more conduits or maybe another conduit slot on each soulbind.

Though in general I feel that whatever system bloat that is most likely to come to Shadowlands would be in the form of the Legendary crafting. With the first addition I imagine being that you can add 2 abilities, or have 2 legendaries so long as they are not both utility or throughpout.

[Nyel]

I think conduits for a lot of classes can be good, but overall they are boring. And most non conduit powers on the soulbind trees are boring as well. I would have hoped the trees would be longer than they are, but the whole soulbind system seems kinda lackluster to me.

Blizzards Alternate Progression was best in legion imo. Artifacts were fun, and while most bonuses were just % increases, it was exciting to get a new point to spend. I didnt get that excitement with Azerite, and I certainly dont with Soulbinds either. I hope for 10.0 they bring back something simpler like Artifacts. Sure keep the no grinding and only let us get 1-2 points a week, but Artifacts were the best.

I agree. Artifacts were good because they were spec-specific and not spec-agnostic. I think something like that could have been an additional power systems next to talents, if done right. This could have been something they build upon expansion after expansion, but they chose to scrap it. Same with Azerite. The same will happen with Covenants. So much work put into a system that gets removed after 2 years. They could have done so much more with these systems if they had a long-term vision.

[Sondrelk]

I agree. Artifacts were good because they were spec-specific and not spec-agnostic. I think something like that could have been an additional power systems next to talents, if done right. This could have been something they build upon expansion after expansion, but they chose to scrap it. Same with Azerite. The same will happen with Covenants. So much work put into a system that gets removed after 2 years. They could have done so much more with these systems if they had a long-term vision.

I think you are approaching this the wrong way. They are not entirely scrapping whatever system in-between expansion but rather iterating on them.

Artifacts was an experiment, they got some good feedbakc and tried improving on it in BfA with Azerite, when that direction didnt seem like the right idea they instead went back to something similar with Covenants where you get both an active ability and several smaller incremental abilities.

[Eurhetemec]

80% of Covenants are about player power, so yes, abilities themselves ARE the Covenants.
You pick a covenant, then you use THAT ability in every combat. You don't be 100% in your covenant's transmog, don't use their toys and shit all the time, do your weekly once per week.. but your ability stays with you 100% of the time.

Abilities ARE the Covenants.

This still doesn't make sense in context of what you and Nyel are saying about people wanting it to be really easy to change Covenants though, which seems to be this "ripcord" thing.

If the abilities are objectively badly-designed in one Covenant, you don't join that Covenant in the first place, do you? So changing isn't necessary, is it?

The only situation in which changing would become necessary is if you joined a Covenant that had a well-designed ability, and it got changed.

[Valysar]

They should have put the same spell (so, same numbers) for the 4 Covenants, but with a different skin ...

[Revamp Man]

Making the choice of covenant meaningless beyond a visual thing would be changing the system though. The entire point here is that covenants are a difficult choice that will impact the way you play the expansion, and changing that just puts us right back to the current way of doing things, that of minmaxing being easy and opimization at all costs.

Whether you work with all teh covenants or not is irrelevant, the system is predicated on the idea that you have to choose one and stick with it, at least to some degree. There are ways around it if you want to optimize further, but like most cases in gaming, doing so comes at a cost and time spent.

And yes, making the covenant abilities like talents would remove the problem, but the same could be said about class balance if you removed all uniqueness from the classes and made them all the same with a different choice of armor and weapon.



That being said I imagine the conduit thing will likely be changed. The limitations and having to be forced to less choices per spec if oyu want to play more than one is so minor as to be nonexistent already, so removing the cooldown wouldnt really change much.

removing the cooldown would change quite a bit because of how the soulbind system itself works

the covenant choice doesnt impact your gameplay for a vast majority of specs and the only way to make the current system work is to make the abilities so weak they are meaningless but a majority are CDs that you wont notice anyways

its just a way to lower the skill ceiling like you said so it goes from
high end=100
casual=50
to being
high end=80
casual=50

the lowered skill ceiling wont even effect a majority of the playerbase because i doubt many players track things like trinket procs or bother doing a correct opener heck a recent pug didnt even use a pull timer

you make the game less fun for some players because of how other players see the game and thats just bad and its just like what happened with m+ and masterloot

- - - Updated - - -

80% of Covenants are about player power, so yes, abilities themselves ARE the Covenants.
You pick a covenant, then you use THAT ability in every combat. You don't be 100% in your covenant's transmog, don't use their toys and shit all the time, do your weekly once per week.. but your ability stays with you 100% of the time.

Abilities ARE the Covenants.

the abilities are a 2-3m cd taht you barely see

oh plus the 1 conduit per covenant
and the 1 soulbind ability effecting your covenant ability per covenant

dont say its 80% its like 10%

[Alanar]

Been doing some testing and exploring on the covenants and a few things I noticed with only 2 days of testing:

1: they feel kinda empty, including npcs who should have some dialogue or where you suppose to learn something from are not interactable.
2:bland in decorations. Venthyt specially. Needs more bats
3: not much else going on.

I realy dont want to be negative, but.. shit shits seems realy boring. Like I honestly dont know what to send blizz for feedback.. its all intented and most of the stuff works, but its just realy boring.

Renown, conduits.. when you done them, the gameplay is done. Its not very excitinf to go up a rank with renown and get like 1% increase.

Need more testing I guess...


On the plusside, door of shadows is cool
I tested others as well.. , but man was I right about ardenweald.. fairyforest is realy not my thing lol. Its a pretty sexual forest if you done few quests.

[Toybox]

oh plus the 1 conduit per covenant
and the 1 soulbind ability effecting your covenant ability per covenant

dont say its 80% its like 10%

Depends who you ask.

Gameplay is 95% of it for me. A few hours of story where most of your time spent helping your covenant out is doing world quests is about as minor as it gets People will be in for a shock at the scale of covenants on release, because there's really not a huge amount there.

[Revamp Man]

This still doesn't make sense in context of what you and Nyel are saying about people wanting it to be really easy to change Covenants though, which seems to be this "ripcord" thing.

If the abilities are objectively badly-designed in one Covenant, you don't join that Covenant in the first place, do you? So changing isn't necessary, is it?

The only situation in which changing would become necessary is if you joined a Covenant that had a well-designed ability, and it got changed.

the ripcord thing is from when watcher said in an interview they had a system in place to just make swapping everything super easy at a moments notice and "if we have to make that change the ripcord is there for us to pull" and then in a blue post they said it didnt exist

- - - Updated - - -

Depends who you ask.

Gameplay is 95% of it for me. A few hours of story where most of your time spent helping your covenant out is doing world quests is about as minor as it gets People will be in for a shock at the scale of covenants on release, because there's really not a huge amount there.

ok lets say you play whatever spec in whatever covenant you are currently thinking about

now take away the covenant ability....is your gameplay crushed?

[Toybox]

ok lets say you play whatever spec in whatever covenant you are currently thinking about

now take away the covenant ability....is your gameplay crushed?

It definitely affects me more than a few hours of bland storytelling tied to a world quest grind. Is it crushed? No, but if you asked me to pick between Condemn (as Arms/Fury) & the rest of the stuff related to the Venthyr, then I'm picking Condemn (& Door of Shadows) as the overwhelmingly more important piece of the puzzle.

[Nyel]

This still doesn't make sense in context of what you and Nyel are saying about people wanting it to be really easy to change Covenants though, which seems to be this "ripcord" thing.

If the abilities are objectively badly-designed in one Covenant, you don't join that Covenant in the first place, do you? So changing isn't necessary, is it?

The only situation in which changing would become necessary is if you joined a Covenant that had a well-designed ability, and it got changed.

This isn't the ripcord though. The problem is not to have the desire to change Covenants fast and easily.

This thread is quite good in explaining why Covenants at the moment are problematic: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...le-cake/664206

It's a very recent thread and there are dozens of them, but several posts there are insightful why many many testers deem Covenants as not thoroughly designed.

This is one of the better posts that encapsulates my feelings (I want to main a Priest and the Covenant choices are awful, because there's no Covenant that's good for every spec).

They kept saying they wanted us to make a meaningful choice. I’m perfectly fine with having to make a meaningful choice.

But this is not a meaningful choice.

This is me dying inside a little because I now have to choose between aesthetics and functionality.

I now have to choose between having a class that feels good to play, or having a class that looks the way I want.

Theres nothing meaningful about that. It’s just asinine and really makes me dread when the time comes. Already on beta I have two different priests. TWO. Not once in the 15 years I’ve played this game have I ever even thought to have TWO of the same class. Why would I? Oh, it’s cause Mindgames feels GREAT for healing as disc… But absolute TRASH for Shadow. Meanwhile, fairies feels decent for Shadow but isn’t nowhere near as beneficial or impactful as Mindgames is for Disc.

So now I’m torn… Do I go for functionality on one priest? Or so I level two? Am I going to have to level more than one of every class? That’ll quickly turn into me just finding something else to do. Even if I do level two classes, of the four available covenants the one covenant that doesn’t even remotely aesthetically please me as a priest… Is the best one for my shadow spec. Wut.

The covenants should have been tied to cosmetics not player power. We should have tried out each “ability” during the leveling process to fill in a talent row and then at 60 you just choose your talent. Then it would be a lot better. Then I wouldn’t feel miserable knowing I can’t have the sick necrolord cosmetics on my undead priest, but instead gt to watch a rotting corpse run around with butterflies on his back (if I want to hold any sort of competitveness in my chosen sect of content).

I’m fine with making meaningful choices.

Blizzard just has to actually give us one.

Venthyr is my go to choice for Shadow Priest. The aesthetics are amazing and fit the Shadow Priest fantasy very good. However, the Covenant ability is the worst next to the Kyrian one for PvE (granted, it doesn't destroy my rotation like Kyrian). I want to play Disc Healer in raids and dungeons. For that Venthyr is good. So, do I take the worst Covenant ability for my main spec because it's decent for my second spec and I like the aesthetics? Or what am I obliged to do? This isn't really a meaningful choice, it's a bad one because I can choose class fantasy / aesthetics or player power. Thanks for nothing in the end.

[huth]

This isn't the ripcord though. The problem is not to have the desire to change Covenants fast and easily.

Yes, it is. That is specificially the thing Ion mentioned as the ripcord in the original message.

[Sondrelk]

Venthyr is my go to choice for Shadow Priest. The aesthetics are amazing and fit the Shadow Priest fantasy very good. However, the Covenant ability is the worst next to the Kyrian one for PvE (granted, it doesn't destroy my rotation like Kyrian). I want to play Disc Healer in raids and dungeons. For that Venthyr is good. So, do I take the worst Covenant ability for my main spec because it's decent for my second spec and I like the aesthetics? Or what am I obliged to do? This isn't really a meaningful choice, it's a bad one because I can choose class fantasy / aesthetics or player power. Thanks for nothing in the end.

This right here is exactly what makes it a meaningful choice. You are given a choice that requires you to weigh the different aspects of the game, from damage, how the ability looks and feels and the aesthetics of it.
By removing this balancing act you remove a crucial aspect of the decision process, and instead just revert whatever design intent back to the baseline of picking whatever is best at all times.

Not to mention that the idea that it is cruel to ask players to balance aesthetics and playstyle is silly considering that is classes in a nutshell. You get a distinct playstyle with distinct strenghts and weaknesses, not just in what damage they can do but whether they get stealth, immunities, movement speed etc.
Covenants is just asking the players to make a similar choice again on a much, much smaller scale.