The covenant system and choices that matter

[Krakan]

The choice will matter. You will have to what the community deems best for your content or an addon will flag you and banish you from pugging unless you have an extremely high raider io or ilv.

Nothing changes stay min maxed my friends.

[sunnycutie]

Not class, character. For example in Skyrim if I choose to focus on stealth and archery that becomes a part of my characters identity, he becomes a stealth archer based on the choices I made. If I could change him into a destruction focused caster from one pack to the next then my choices would become meaningless since they held no weight.

I'm not saying the covenant system is anywhere near that good in terms of identity and immersion but their intention is there and that's what's important. Rome wasn't built in a day, in the next expansion we could get a fully fleshed out really good identity building system like subclasses for example. This is probably just a testing ground for a much larger future overhaul to the entire class/spec system.

Skyrim isn't an MMO. We need to be able to change our choices in a game where every expansion classes are redesigned, in some cases drastically. It's great to make a choice, but if that choice gets balanced to now be inferior to the other options I could have picked, simply because the devs decided that's what they want, that's terrible. And covenants aren't even unchangable. It's just painful to change. So yeah you're not gonna do it between fights, you're gonna have to do something that stretches over 2 weeks, but is that making "character identity" better?

[Katchii]

Skyrim isn't an MMO. We need to be able to change our choices in a game where every expansion classes are redesigned, in some cases drastically. It's great to make a choice, but if that choice gets balanced to now be inferior to the other options I could have picked, simply because the devs decided that's what they want, that's terrible. And covenants aren't even unchangable. It's just painful to change. So yeah you're not gonna do it between fights, you're gonna have to do something that stretches over 2 weeks, but is that making "character identity" better?

It takes one week to change your Covenant, you keep saying two. If what you mean is changing from one and then back to it then yes, it's two weeks, but that's not what you're discussing. What you're talking about is making a min/max choice after you made a "bad" one, it only takes 1 day (once every 7 days) to make the change and go with the covenant you actually want.

The fact that the decision has weight makes it meaningful. Whether it makes character identity "better" is up for discussion, but the fact that this discussion is even occurring means that it in fact DOES give your character identity over and above what class and spec you're playing, because it's now part of what defines your character, what it can and can't do and it's performance in certain situations. I personally think that's a good thing.

[sunnycutie]

It takes one week to change your Covenant, you keep saying two.

You need to do tasks that can't be completed in one week. You need to wait for the next week to be able to complete them. What I said was that it stretches over two weeks. If you start doing something this wednesday, and you are able to complete it next wednesday, then it stretched over two weeks.

[Katchii]

You need to do tasks that can't be completed in one week. You need to wait for the next week to be able to complete them. What I said was that it stretches over two weeks. If you start doing something this wednesday, and you are able to complete it next wednesday, then it stretched over two weeks.

Why can't the tasks be done in one week? All information points to the ability to complete the tasks in as little as two days, and this is only if you're trying to rejoin a Covenant if you've left once. If you're joining a Covenant you've never joined before there isn't anything but confirmation windows to deal with, which takes a few seconds.

And you can do this once every 7 days.

[Soon-TM]

The choice will matter. You will have to what the community deems best for your content or an addon will flag you and banish you from pugging unless you have an extremely high raider io or ilv.

Nothing changes stay min maxed my friends.

Correct. Ion is trying to gloriously soar past the glass ceiling of minmaxing, only to find himself building more and more convoluted systems that end turning class balance into a veritable Sysiphus task... Unless the damage AND utility provided by covenants/soulbinds/conduits is nerfed into oblivion, something they are apparently doing as we speak. Which in turn begs the question of why designing such dev time-consuming features in the first place.

[Krakan]

Correct. Ion is trying to gloriously soar past the glass ceiling of minmaxing, only to find himself building more and more convoluted systems that end turning class balance into a veritable Sysiphus task... Unless the damage AND utility provided by covenants/soulbinds/conduits is nerfed into oblivion, something they are apparently doing as we speak. Which in turn begs the question of why designing such dev time-consuming features in the first place.

I think it draws a lot of parallels to the Greek tale of icarus.

[kaminaris]

It takes one week to change your Covenant, you keep saying two. If what you mean is changing from one and then back to it then yes, it's two weeks, but that's not what you're discussing. What you're talking about is making a min/max choice after you made a "bad" one, it only takes 1 day (once every 7 days) to make the change and go with the covenant you actually want.

The fact that the decision has weight makes it meaningful. Whether it makes character identity "better" is up for discussion, but the fact that this discussion is even occurring means that it in fact DOES give your character identity over and above what class and spec you're playing, because it's now part of what defines your character, what it can and can't do and it's performance in certain situations. I personally think that's a good thing.

This is all that needs to be said, all these discussions on the forum proves that it will be a meaningful choice.

[Krakan]

This is all that needs to be said, all these discussions on the forum proves that it will be a meaningful choice.

It will be. You will follow the strict meta or your progression ends at mythic plus and heroic.

It's a pretty important decision. It's like right now you can choose to play beast master and be a powerful dps spec or choose to be MM and be useless to everyone.

It's a hard choice...

[kaminaris]

It will be. You will follow the strict meta or your progression ends at mythic plus and heroic.

It's a pretty important decision. It's like right now you can choose to play beast master and be a powerful dps spec or choose to be MM and be useless to everyone.

It's a hard choice...

What I will do is irrelevant to 90% of playerbase. What I want is not necessarily good for game, concept hard to understand.

[Katchii]

It will be. You will follow the strict meta or your progression ends at mythic plus and heroic.

It's a pretty important decision. It's like right now you can choose to play beast master and be a powerful dps spec or choose to be MM and be useless to everyone.

It's a hard choice...

I don't think this will be entirely true, unless the numbers show your choice is objectively the worst one by a large margin in all situations, which could be possible but Blizzard seems to be working very hard on ensuring this isn't the case.

If the difference in performance is within a few percent across the choices (which I'm cautiously optimistic they'll be able to do, but we'll see) then I really don't understand why you would be treated like a pariah for having a SLIGHTLY suboptimal choice.

[Krakan]

I don't think this will be entirely true, unless the numbers show your choice is objectively the worst one by a large margin in all situations, which could be possible but Blizzard seems to be working very hard on ensuring this isn't the case.

If the difference in performance is within a few percent across the choices (which I'm cautiously optimistic they'll be able to do, but we'll see) then I really don't understand why you would be treated like a pariah for having a SLIGHTLY suboptimal choice.

I don't believe this will be the case. I think a roughly 10-30% difference will be seen unless they flat out pull the rip cord as it were.

Balance feels like it is still in a alpha state.

[Lolites]

It will be. You will follow the strict meta or your progression ends at mythic plus and heroic.

nope, complete bullshit
in my guild we dont care if people folow meta, and we still cleared mythic raids
now did SOME guilds that follow the meta cleared it faster? sure, but some still havent cleared it despite folowing the meta...
almost like that was not in any way the most important thing, unless ofc you aim to clear it ASAP and then whine you have nothing to do in the game...

[Katchii]

I don't believe this will be the case. I think a roughly 10-30% difference will be seen unless they flat out pull the rip cord as it were.

Balance feels like it is still in a alpha state.

Which is what I'm hearing, but they also delayed the release, partly because of how unfinished this particular piece is, I'm sure.

As I said, I'm cautiously optimistic about them being able to balance things better than they are now. I'm sure there will be discrepancies between the choices, but I have a very hard time believing that they will allow a difference of 10-30% to go unchanged or unaddressed, and the end result will be much closer.

If it does end up looking that way, you're absolutely right in how the situation will turn out. I'm just very skeptical that they'll allow the differences to be that egregious, because even they know that the whole "meaningful choice" thing will go completely out the window if the differences are that profound.

[Krakan]

nope, complete bullshit
in my guild we dont care if people folow meta, and we still cleared mythic raids
now did SOME guilds that follow the meta cleared it faster? sure, but some still havent cleared it despite folowing the meta...
almost like that was not in any way the most important thing, unless ofc you aim to clear it ASAP and then whine you have nothing to do in the game...

I don't believe you full cleared a current mythic tier. I mean it is as simple and straight forward as that.

- - - Updated - - -

Which is what I'm hearing, but they also delayed the release, partly because of how unfinished this particular piece is, I'm sure.

As I said, I'm cautiously optimistic about them being able to balance things better than they are now. I'm sure there will be discrepancies between the choices, but I have a very hard time believing that they will allow a difference of 10-30% to go unchanged or unaddressed, and the end result will be much closer.

If it does end up looking that way, you're absolutely right in how the situation will turn out. I'm just very skeptical that they'll allow the differences to be that egregious, because even they know that the whole "meaningful choice" thing will go completely out the window if the differences are that profound.

Even if they manage that... how the damage is done will cause the same effect with sustained being picked for raids burst for pvp and aoe for mythic +.

They made an impossible system were warned constantly of the issue and are now eating crow.

I can't see how this can be fixed even if you ripped conduits and leggos out of the game.

[Katchii]

Even if they manage that... how the damage is done will cause the same effect with sustained being picked for raids burst for pvp and aoe for mythic +.

They made an impossible system were warned constantly of the issue and are now eating crow.

I can't see how this can be fixed even if you ripped conduits and leggos out of the game.

But if the differences between the burst, sustained and AoE performance choices isn't that large, it won't be that big of a deal except for the truly elite guilds pushing progression and need absolutely every percentage, and the asshole elites that insist on requiring the "best" choice in content that hardly requires it, these people can be largely ignored or at least avoided as not everyone thinks this way, thankfully.

[Baconeggcheese]

You need to do tasks that can't be completed in one week. You need to wait for the next week to be able to complete them. What I said was that it stretches over two weeks. If you start doing something this wednesday, and you are able to complete it next wednesday, then it stretched over two weeks.

From my understanding its tied to the weekly lockout.

So on monday you can decide you want to swap covenants, start the process, knock out that progress bar, and then on tuesday you get your second progress bar and you knock that one out and now you've swapped.

If you want to swap again then you'll need to start that process over, which it won't let you complete until next lockout.

The fact that the decision has weight makes it meaningful. Whether it makes character identity "better" is up for discussion, but the fact that this discussion is even occurring means that it in fact DOES give your character identity over and above what class and spec you're playing, because it's now part of what defines your character, what it can and can't do and it's performance in certain situations. I personally think that's a good thing.

Frankly this has no more meaning for me than talents at the start of legion where they were putting single target talents on the same row as aoe talents and I had to decide which one I wanted to not suck at for that encounter through no fault of my own.

It just feels bad, with no upsides. Thankfully they realized it was a mistake back then and swapped talents around, hopefully it doesn't take them too long to re-learn the exact same lesson. And it seems like with each update they're getting closer and closer to it.

[Katchii]

Frankly this has no more meaning for me than talents at the start of legion where they were putting single target talents on the same row as aoe talents and I had to decide which one I wanted to not suck at for that encounter through no fault of my own.

It just feels bad, with no upsides. Thankfully they realized it was a mistake back then and swapped talents around, hopefully it doesn't take them too long to re-learn the exact same lesson. And it seems like with each update they're getting closer and closer to it.

I just hope they don't "pull the ripcord" and make it possible to switch as often as you want. That completely destroys any sense of identity, meaning or weight in the Covenant decision and just makes it another button or thing to min/max with no "fun" involved. It's mechanical. This feels much worse than whatever performance impact it has (so long as the performance between the choices isn't vastly different). It should be much deeper than a simple mechanical choice.

Granted, if they don't get the balancing right, the issue will occur anyway and everyone will feel forced to go with the "best" choice but we haven't seen their final numbers yet. As I said I'm cautiously optimistic, because they did delay the launch and said that this was one of the things they're heavily looking into.

We'll see.

[Krakan]

I just hope they don't "pull the ripcord" and make it possible to switch as often as you want. That completely destroys any sense of identity, meaning or weight in the Covenant decision and just makes it another button or thing to min/max with no "fun" involved. It's mechanical. This feels much worse than whatever performance impact it has (so long as the performance between the choices isn't vastly different). It should be much deeper than a simple mechanical choice.

Granted, if they don't get the balancing right, the issue will occur anyway and everyone will feel forced to go with the "best" choice but we haven't seen their final numbers yet. As I said I'm cautiously optimistic, because they did delay the launch and said that this was one of the things they're heavily looking into.

We'll see.

You will have one raid character one pvp character any maybe one mythic+ character if you want to play at esports level in it.

Each will have an extremely specific spread sheet build to take.

[Aucald]

There is already glut of threads discussing the Covenant system and choice, we scarcely need another. Closing this.