Alright friends, I’ve played the Beta. This post is not to start a war on whether or not covenant powers should be locked to covenants, simply a reality check for those hoping for changes:
I don’t think they’re coming. You might want to fast forward to “acceptance” and save yourself months of grief.
Here’s my observations:
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The covenant system is filling the exact “War Campaign” mechanism in the quest log, and begins when you pick one. It looks like it has 8(?) sub-achievement steps similar to the early BfA campaign, and it looks very covenant specific. This is not unlike playing the War Campaign as Alliance or Horde; it is entirely different for each covenant.
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The core spell granted to you (DoS, Fleshcraft, etc) are tightly woven into the Soulbind system. Layers of abilities that tweak them, spread across the three characters you can soulbind, aligned with various typed conduit slots. This is definitely not changing heavily between now and launch.
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Covenant choice appears to dictate (effectively) your “garrison” for this expansion. It is where your garrison table is, where you’ll get quests to get more covenant-themed guys to send on missions, the quartermaster, in addition to the heart of the campaign itself. You’re likely to spend a lot of time wherever you pick.
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Renown appears to be exactly covenant-specific rep and is tied to various plot points, campaign points, etc. There’s no way they’re going to let you “share” / unify / transfer this.
Based on these observations, we’re getting this on launch, period. It’s happening. They’re not going to give us an additional set of covenant abilities so each one has a movement and a utility spell, as they’d have to completely rework the soulbinds (to which there are many). Other than perhaps changing the cast time or CD of some of these, their design is pretty much locked in place.
Opinion time:
I don’t love it. Seeing these abilities and soulbinds myself for the first time today spiraled me right back into analysis-paralysis on which classes I was going to actually play in SL, and who I’d want to pick.
In a weird way, some of them aren’t even about the abilities themselves but the side effects of the tweaks from the conduits. For example, Soulshape is a pretty lackluster “sprint” and an even worse “blink”, but the first choice you can make with a soulbind has you enter stealth when Soulshape ends. This behaves pretty much identically to Shadowmeld, which gives any Night Fae players a vanish (!) and stationary stealth. It was quite the roller coaster to go from “wow, this ability is awful” to “oh, this might be the reason I pick this.” I happen to like Ardenweald, so that helps a lot too.
TL;DR: This stuff is locked in, y’all. For your own sanity, you might just want to pick the covenant whose home you can tolerate standing in for 2 years. Picking based on these abilities is just going to burn you out really fast. If this post makes you sad because it shattered your last hopes of getting these decoupled from covenants, it might be time to take a break from the game. Sorry.
Edit: To argue with myself, I could see getting them to “suspend” your progress on a given covenant instead of “losing” it, so people without alts could see all four campaigns. They’d probably tie this to some super-hefty cooldown, so either way, you’re going to be stuck with one of these across all of your specs for any given week/month.
