Because they need some content for later patches
To be devil’s advocate here OP, but isn’t the same mindset that being stuck to one class is considered ‘content restriction’?
WoW doesn’t have the same class system as say FF14 which doesn’t restrict the classes you can do, granted.
But if the Covenant choice is a content restriction, then so is your class
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“Hey guys, I like to play Kyrian warrior!”
crickets for arena queues after the first week
“Go venthyr.”
I stopped doing them.
Anybody who thinks this doesn’t effect the mid-tier player is just willingly blind at this point.
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Or the infamous “this feature didn’t turn out as well as we expected”.
But it’s always a considerable time after Blizzard said it was working perfectly and “we’re really happy with how it turned out”.
It’s a very familiar pattern, at this point.
In any case, I posted vociferously about this during Shadowlands beta. While others were largely concerned with the covenant powers, my biggest beef was always how they were shutting us off from 75% of the story. And from the extra features like Ember Court/etc.
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No. To give you a good example, I am totally shut off from the story of what happens to Vol’jin and Rezan in Shadowlands.
Because I’m not Night Fae.
That’s dumb.
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It’s the same, yes. It just doesn’t fit the narrative so it’s not brought up.
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But aren’t Alliance cut-off from the Horde story in BFA as well? And Vise-Versa?
It is. However the difference between classes and Covenants are far weightier.
If you don’t like the feel of a class 10-20 levels in you can always go back and make a new one with relative ease.
If you don’t like your Covenant, too bad you’re stuck with it. You can change it but if you don’t do it at the right hour at the right time when the moon has reach its zenith then it could be a wait for up to two weeks.
Oh and if you’ve already made any kind of significant investment in that Covenant it all gets flushed down the toilet.
Not nearly as much as I would have liked. They need to do more to differentiate the faction stories.
And no, it’s not the same, because that’s something we all signed up for starting 16 years ago. It’s expected. It’s a pillar of the game, in fact.
Covenants will be thrown on the trash heap in 18 months.
Personally I feel it is. IMHO you don’t really need to grind 60 levels to know how to causally play a class with all it’s skills unlocked. You can pretty much figure it out just by reading the tooltips of your abilities and mastery.
Even Blizzard agrees, that’s why they sell boosts. 
If it were up to me, you can have any class at Lv59 once you get one to Lv60. That one level is for you to figure out your abilities and keybinds.
Compared to spending two weeks leveling and gearing an alt?
Just like any other expansion when your Mythic purples are worse than quest greens.
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It may not take two weeks as compared to the worse case scenario for Covenant swapping, plus I’d gather working on multiple characters with incremented permeant progress is better than making progress towards shutting down your Covenant choice through chores alone.
Yes but that only happens once every 12 to 18 months.
In Shadowlands the loss is far more significant since it is much more immediately harsh if you want one character to bounce between Covenants.
While I believe the Covenant system was poorly designed, it could have worked if it had not been linked to character power. Had it been a choice players made based on theme, appearances, a sense of personal idenity, etc, then it would indeed have been a ‘meaningful choice’ without it having any sense of being straightjacketed. There was certainly a hint of this philosophy direction with the Legion class halls but at least the really significant storylines existed out in the world and in the dungeons and raids.
I wouldn’t have objected to the Covenants at all if there had been nothing in those choices that was restrictive. Unfortunately there is, and despite everything that was said about them before, during and after the testing periods, they went ahead with them anyway.
To the end of my gaming, I will never understand someone designing a souldbind system with 3 options in a game with a class that has four specs. And then tieing it down even further with conduit power. It’s like they didn’t notice druids existed…
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Not really. Classes are not content restriction because they do not lock you out of an entire zones story.
Class trainers are gone. In Legion there is class specific content but few would argue that the legion zone story chunks were lost for class stories. The class stories were good side content in conjunction with the story. The covenant campaigns are a central part of the story with cutscenes and integral zone stories for each zone that help us understand everything deeply. The characters and zones are just barely touched in the story for two levels and then all we do is world quests there with no interaction with the leaders of these hubs and we have little knowledge of the internal struggles.
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Why isn’t there a mega thread for this by now? Then we won’t have people like the OP who think their opinions are so important they warrant multiple threads vs just a response in a thread.
Who am I kidding people like the OP feel they are so important they would make a thread anyways.
The point is that the covenant restrictions are now an ADDITIONAL layer on top of class restrictions.
But the restrictions aren’t even the same and players would like them to function the same as classes.
With classes you level them up, then you can swap to them freely whenever you like without a 2 week time gate. Thats what players would like with covenants - let players level up the renown in each and be able to swap freely between them without “fill the bar” quests and a 2 week time gate.
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It’s not the same. There’s no delay with being able to swap classes. That’s exactly what players want from covenants.
Also, the work you put into a character of any given class carries forward. Covenants are exclusive to Shadowlands.
People like to say they’re a “sub-class”, but they’re so much closer to a second talent tree when combined with the soul conduits - a couple of abilities and a bunch of passives.
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I’m not a min/max person, so I don’t really care about the Covenant abilities. However you are spot on with the story being cut into 4ths. I do not play alts. I only play one main. So I guess I only will play my one Covenant.
I don’t know how others play, but I rarely leave my Covenant zone. So I have effectively an expansion that gave me one zone. I forgot, I guess I have the Maw which I try as hard as possible to avoid.
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