I’ve been seeing all the hyped articles and youtube videos about the upcoming changes in 9.1.
Honestly, I’ve been very disinterested because of how the system plays out in practice:
Step 1 - check with your preferred source for what performs the best.
Step 2 - select that option.
All sense of meaningful choice has gone out the window. This was reinforced with the experience of 5 friends and 2 family members that tried WoW for the first time with Shadowlands. When it came time to picking their covenant, the asked me “what should I pick?” I responded with “what do you think would be most enjoyable for you?” Their response in one form or another was something like “Well, this is a team/guild based game - so what would be best for playing in that environment.”
The nature of WoW being an MMO drives people to want to perform their best - not always because they want to top the charts, but because people want to give their groups/guilds/raids the best they can.
Couple that with the fact that players can’t effectively even try out all the different combinations of covenants/soul binds/conduits in end-game content to make a truly informed choice, and players are left void of so much meaning and fun that the systems could otherwise have.
The best change to coincide with the current covenant/soul bind/conduit additions is to make them easily and freely swappable.
Give players the ability to make meaningful choices instead of just resorting to what some 3rd party calculated they should pick. Even if there’s still a “best” option - players can at least try out the other options for niche situations and have fun experimenting on their own.
This is so made up. That doesn’t even sound like something a real person would ever say. “This is team based game- so what would be best for playing in that environment?” Like what? No one says that my man and its a huge indication you are making stuff up. I don’t see anyone in any other game type ever acting like that, and they sure as hell don’t do it in WoW either.
Great point- making covenants as easily swappable as classes are now would fix a lot of the issues.
You can work for one covenant and gain renown for them and then swap to any other covenant freely to pick up where you left off and continue progressing.
Theres no 2 week time gate for swapping to another class/spec - there no reason to have that time gate for covenants either.
Depends on how much you play and who you play with.
A lot of us can get alts geared in a matter of 1-2 weeks. We all have to work together and put the time in, but’s its possible.
The main point is that you can always freely swap classes and pick up where you left off without a time-gate.
If they did that with covenants, not only would players be able to make meaningful choices and be allowed to experiment on their own, they’d also have 4x the content all of a sudden.
Changing your spec and class is already easy and free.
The point is to make covenants the same way - you can change them whenever you like and you never have to deal with a 2 week quest that delays you. You just have to put the time and effort into progressing each one, so you still have to earn the rewards but you get access to more content and choices for gameplay.
That’s one of the parts that boggles me. If they opened up covenants for everyone to switch between without obstacles, it would instantly give people a ton more content to experience.
Not only would players have more quests/lore to go through, but they’d also have a lot more rewards to earn.
I don’t know if I’d call “restricting content and player agency” novel. It also doesn’t really take a whole lot of resources do create those restrictions.
The content is already there. They literally just have to remove the restrictions and content is increased by 4 fold.
It makes sense lorewise why the restrictions are in place, i just think this lore concept should be abandoned with how bare bones it made this xpac feel.
I’m a huge fan of role-playing and I couldn’t disagree more.
We’re essentially a super hero there to save their entire existence. Not just one covenant, but ALL of them. Combined with the fact that once we pick a covenant, they have us going off to help the others, there’s just no lore/role-playing reason why we (as The Maw Walker) wouldn’t be taught and allowed to use any and all abilities that they can teach us in order to kill the common threat.
Imagine if Green Lantern showed up to Earth and was willing to help all humans against the fight against Climate Change. This country specializes in wind energy. This other country specializes in Solar Energy. Another in water energy, etc. And then we told the Green Lantern “ok you can help us, but you can only align with one of us and use one of our types of technology at a time. And if you ever want to use another countries technology, you’ll have to go through an arbitrary 2 week grind to ‘earn our trust back’ even though you’re the one doing us a solid by trying so save our entire planet.”
The whole lore/RP argument FOR the restrictions is as sad as arguing that smoking tobacco is good because it helps us inhale/exhale more. It’s a joke at best and disingenuous at worst.
You have played more then 1 coven right? They talk as if you are only part of that coven and that covens issues, and other covens u talk to during the compaign dont treat you as one of their own like they do when you join them.
So yeah, the lore as is set up right now wouldnt make sense.
There is even casual dialogue from npcs that remark on what coven u are and might even diss you.
That dialogue is what’s out of place from a role-playing perspective.
Again, if some super hero came to help save all humans on earth, it wouldn’t make sense for us to make fun of them just because they’re currently using some technology of a different country.