They wer SO CLOSE to nailing it...

[huth]

Except when you can't change covenants when the situation requires it, it has to be balanced.

No, it doesn't. That's where the choice comes in.

[Echocho]

All players are barred from playing 3/4 of their skills. What else do I need to say? "Meaningful choice", I did that when I was rolling a class. Even in Vanilla, you can respec faster. This system is garbage.

It's not their skills. You don't see a mage complaining that he can't use death knight abilities right? You have to choose, elitist minmax tantrums from the gatekeeping community don't change that.

[vsb]

Covenants will of course never be balanced due to them offering different abilities, and so players will min-max that as well. If one covenant is 1-2% better for raiding than others, and that player is primarily a raider, then 99-100% of all players playing those classes/specs will choose that one and it will seem like the other covenants won't exist for that class/spec and it will seem like all other covenants are really bad despite just being very slightly behind. That's just the way it is and always has been. Nothing to see here, move along.

Except it's not 1-2% better. Currently for Retribution Paladins a difference between the best and the worst covenants is 7%. That percent do matter. I switched from Night Fae Discipline Priest to Venthyr one because it was not 1-2%. It was much more for me, basically my logs suddenly improved from green to purple. That's because I can press Mind games during Spirit Shell and 18 players will get 6k shield. It's 108k healing or +1.8k HPS. It's a difference between 3k HPS and 4.8k HPS. It's a difference between dead player and alive player. Night Fae ability is literally useless. It regens some mana, but Venthyr ability regens mana as well. It could reduce my Spirit Shell cooldown if I would not cast a single flash heal for 20 seconds (not realistic), but I need to align it with Mindbender cooldown, so this cooldown reduction is just useless.

Don't blame players. I wanted to make a lore-based choice. Blame developers who did not do proper balancing work. I would play worst covenant if the difference would be 2%. But 60% difference? Not really.

[Malix Farwin]

That's what you want, not what they should be. You're not the sole arbiter on this matter. For the majority of players, you're also seriously overstating it.



Not complaining != not giving feedback. In fact, i'd say for most people complaining = not giving feedback.

Complaining is feedback though rather you personally value it or not is irrelevant to that fact. and a lot of complaints are very useful feedback.

[Grapemask]

Covenants are neat story things, and I'm fine with that whole aspect of it.

But conduits suck and reflect Blizzard's worsening ability to put fun into this game. These trees are all choices between "what thing do I dislike the least in order to eventually get something I actually do like," when they should simply be "which thing do I like the most." Players need to stop defending this using masochistic "bUt BaLaNcE" arguments; a game can be balanced without making you choose things you hate, and we shouldn't be on the hook to defend Blizzard's expanding laziness. Yeah, they'll have to work harder to balance something unique than they will to balance "a button you press once per week is 1.5% better," but that's literally what you pay them for.

Command tables are... bafflingly bad. For one, they literally copy and pasted them from Legion, to the point that you get Legion achievements for doing things with them that don't really match the achievement (or the expansion, obviously). But the whole UI is a weird giant step backwards, as if this was the alpha for the original tables back in WoD. I really don't get what happened here.

But if we kept everything else, Covenants are neat enough. If only they had more of that Scryor vs. Aldor style of tension going on, that was great.

[RobertMugabe]

I am yet to see the choice of the soulbinds having any significant effect on player power.

Everything I care for right now at least are the covenant spells (big impact) and to a much lesser extent the conduits, but the passive abilities from the soulbinds themselves feel so whatever...

Overall I love all the covenants and everything they add (items, quests/lore etc.), but tbh the "meaningful choice" does feel extremely useless. They should've just given us one more talent row and treated conduits similar to how the azerite essences were (you have one interface where you just select a couple conduits you want to use)

[huth]

Complaining is feedback though rather you personally value it or not is irrelevant to that fact. and a lot of complaints are very useful feedback.

No, not every complaint is feedback, or at least, useful feedback. "This game is stupid" doesn't really help in figuring out what the complainer is having problems with or how to fix them, if a fix is needed.

[RobertMugabe]

I feel at least like 85-90% people I see in raids/dungeon content have the same spec/covenant combinations. Definitely doesn't feel like people have much choice there.

People just follow guides 95% of the time and the best covenants for each class also mostly match the theme of their covenant.

[Malix Farwin]

No, not every complaint is feedback, or at least, useful feedback. "This game is stupid" doesn't really help in figuring out what the complainer is having problems with or how to fix them, if a fix is needed.

Yea but not every complaint is not feedback tho.

[Doffen]

As long as I get Abomination Limb built in Baseline next xpac I am totally fine because it just feels Right on my DK.

Love that ability! The utility and the visuals is what makes it so awesome for me. Had no hesitation to choose the Covenant for my Frost DK, Necrolord got it all!

[Tesshin83]

Working as intended.

This is not true as I play a Necrolord holy paladin and I killed Mythic Shriekwing.

- - - Updated - - -

I am yet to see the choice of the soulbinds having any significant effect on player power.

Everything I care for right now at least are the covenant spells (big impact) and to a much lesser extent the conduits, but the passive abilities from the soulbinds themselves feel so whatever...

Overall I love all the covenants and everything they add (items, quests/lore etc.), but tbh the "meaningful choice" does feel extremely useless. They should've just given us one more talent row and treated conduits similar to how the azerite essences were (you have one interface where you just select a couple conduits you want to use)

Problem with new talent row is that they cant theme it after the expansion if you are keeping it forever.

[huth]

Yea but not every complaint is not feedback tho.

And i didn't say it was. So i'm not sure what you're trying to get at here.

[kaintk]

Personally, I'm enjoying the covenant system overall.

It provides a progression system for all players at max level, even those who aren't too bothered about raiding or mythics. It offers nice abilities, and ties together some of the systems they tried in previous expansions - the command table, the proposed path of the titans that was eventually scrapped before it even hit release. The soulbinds provide more playstyle customisation than the artifact weapons did without directly providing players with an overload of active abilities.

In a way, it also ties into Torghast, in terms of storyline (rescuing souls that would have been damned) and gameplay (souls which we can use to progress our covenant further).

There's also the possibility that they can expand the covenant system beyond 40 levels in the future, opening up further progression.

It's by no means a perfect system, but it offers a solid way to tie some of the content together.

This.

Im a casual player with for now 4 character playing a different covenant each, even if im not doing any m+ or raid , i have constanly something to do, even if the stuff outside mm+, raid are hard to get, its fun

So i can tell its a success for casual players, dunno for hardgamer playerd

[Wheeler]

And somehow they came up with covenants. Why? Just give us soulbinds as a skill tree and let us do whatever we want. It's not like more than 2% of the playerbase are roleplaying about these new "friends" and pledging their services. Weird. I'm pretty sure no one gives a fuck about that one butterfly (I think there are 3 actually) in the Night Fae zone.


I love the expansion so far anyways, but it would be honestly better if it simply didn't exist at all. They wasted time and resources into it. They shouldn't have, in my opinion.

It's interesting - People thought covenants and soulbind limitations would be the biggest problems of the expansion.

Turns out, the people screaming that they weren't doing much of anything with the actual classes/specs were right again, for the 3rd expansion in a row. Feels real good to have Frostbolt back on my Fire Mage though - Glad they made such an impactful and meaningful change to the way the class plays as I wait around for Combustion to come off CD so I can play the video game again as I complete my 15th M+ key for the week with 0 drops and wait like a good boy for my 6-9 ring/on-use trinket combos to come outta the great vault.

[Neuroticaine]

Working as intended.

Doesn't paint the whole picture. Thematically, none of the covenants except Kyrian really scream Paladin, and Venthyr/Necrolord are very counter-thematic to Paladins, though a case can be made for RP Bloodknights for Venthyr. It would be more worrisome if an extremely large portion of, say, Holy Paladins went Necrolord simply because it was the strongest, considering how counter the covenant is to the theme of playing a Paladin.

This was a very poor choice to use for an argument, as Kyrian/Paladin is probably the strongest thematic covenant/class combination in the game.

Based off the numbers I'm seeing, overall popularity of a covenant among the playerbase looks to be very strongly tied to how much sense that covenant makes thematically to the spec they're playing.

So in a sense, the system is absolutely, positively, 100% working as intended.

The statistics of which covenant a top-100 mythic raider uses is irrelevant because they will always choose whatever gives the best performance, even if the advantage is 1%, and they are such an incredibly minute part of the playerbase.

[BananaHandsB]

As long as there is some place somewhere were Paladins have reason to use Necrolords, it actually is. Making every Covenant equally strong for everything is impossible and Blizzard knows that, so it wasn't a goal in the first place.

Who said anything about equal. Problem for pally is, they aren't even remotely close.

[Surfacin9]

Blizzard are and will always be idiots. For a game people keep complaining about lack of stuff to do, they purposely keep locking away swathes of content. How about not making it covenants, but factions with their own niches which makes them relevant and with their unique storylines? Less smart people cant envision outside what we currently have, but no one would complain if thats what we go. In fact, people would likely praise the amount of content we got.

If they didn't lock or gate content, most would be done with it within 1-2 weeks and then start crying about having nothing to do. Current system gives you something to do every week. Right now people who raid can focus on that and m+, and Maw and Torghast. Casuals can play with their covenant and have time to do some dungeons. The only people that would complain about having nothing to do are those who are online most of the day. And that's their personal problem, WoW shouldn't be the only game a person plays. Current pacing is pretty good.

How about not making it covenants, but factions with their own niches which makes them relevant and with their unique storylines?

Isn't that EXACTLY what covenants are? Each offers an ability that has a niche, the abilities and soulbinds make covenants relevant. And each has own unique storyline.

[sweatshopkids]

You really be

I be.
We be.
They be.

[kenn9530]

Conduits not changing w/ spec is another blunder as well. (unless they do and I haven't seen how to make that work?)

Each spec your class has can have its own soul binds and pathing saved to the spec your playing, the conduits have to be changed manually but you eventually have 3 souldbinds so you can set 1 for each spec and the conduits of your choice.

[Devilyaki]

Covenants are great, actually.

The abilities should just have been made into another talent row though.

That would of been nice, new talent row with all the covenant main moves on it. You could pick the best move for your class and the covenant you liked the best..