Yes it was - in Legion and BfA.
In Legion you could swap talents without cost and your tier bonuses changed automatically when you swapped specs.
In BfA you could swap out azerite pieces if you took someone else’s upgrade so that you could have 2 of the same piece.
you mite be losing all your work progress if you switch your covenant xmogs and mount mite be gone if you do decide to switch.
my advice is to pick wisely.
It needs to be super expensive or you have to do a long boring grind. Tbh I think they should’ve stuck to their guns and make it to where you can’t change.
With the amount they retune things there has to be a way to change. I long grind to earn rep with the new one is perfect imo.
I don’t think the OP wants all the options - they just want the ability to change without being charged when they’re just trying to play all the great content available.
The biggest example where people get screwed over is with tanks - if you go with a covenant that’s best for you as a tank - but you also run arena’s with a friend before and after your guild raids, and another covenant makes the most sense for that new role, you’ll constantly be charged just to play all of the game’s content.
Tanks can’t really hedge the way dps classes can.
From what I can tell everyone will have strengths and weaknesses. So people will have to just decide if they want the covenant that is good for arenas or raids on keys etc and be slightly sub optimal in the others.
Do you mean real money?
I was thinking their description about it not being easy to switch meant a long questline or a lot of gold. Maybe a debuff or having to start the covenant process over. It’s not clear yet.
That’s the part that doesn’t make sense - in an already complicated system, why would you want to make a portion of your playerbase play at a disadvantage just because they tank or heal in raids?
Everyone who you play with outside of that content also suffers since you can’t choose other options when you play other content.
The discrepancy can also hit dps classes - but their ability to find a decent mix between covenants is a lot easier than the tank and healer classes; influencing people NOT to play those roles…WHY?
We need tanks and healers - tanks are especially under represented.
Seeing as how progression is so tightly tied to covenants, and you can’t use anything except the transmogs outside of the covenant, it might be a good idea to just roll alts for the different covenants for whatever different roles you’re looking at. It’s probably less work.
People really need to stop worrying about minmaxing. That extra 0.001% extra dps isnt worth it.
Right…and we should start taking xp away from people when they die. OH! And let’s also start letting people loot our corpses for our items.
This approach pushes people away more than it would draw them in. And for no benefit.
I WISH Blizzard could balance things out to be that small of a difference.
However the reality is anything but.
Ion explained it in an interview with Finalboss and i think Preech at Blizcon .
basically its like scryers/Aldor, you lose all progression and have to start over .
Ion admitted that no matter how much they try to balance them one will always be mathematically superior in a given situation , but that when taken over all one shouldnt be better than any other .
even 1-2% is a meaningless difference unless you are in the world first race
Sadly that’s also not true. Especially in Mythic raiding. Month’s into the expansion people were still missing enough dps on Ashvane where 1-2% would have easily made a big difference.
I don’t think Mythic raids have to be tuned that tough - but that’s just how they’ve designed the fights - where 1-2% is easily the difference in a kill or not.
In terms of comparing across different dps specs - that may be true.
But I don’t think that transfers over quite as well for non-dps specs and dps specs.
I don’t see why we’d want to punish and charge the people that are willing to heal and tank for us - especially when they’re the minority.
Considering how each covenant has its own story, questline, etc. I can’t imagine it should be easy to change.
I don’t disagree that if there’s a huge imbalance this solution would be a turn off. I would hope blizzard would do a better job than that. I would think people who are that into min/maxing would have the dedication to level extra alts, because i don’t expect to see huge differences in performance for any given role/covenant.
The idea behind covenants is you pick your afterlife favor and commit to it. For fun.
It seems like some of the abilities change based on spec - I hope they can maintain a decent balance.
Choose one to unlock initially then unlock the others with rep to switch easily? Maybe an increasing gold cost per times switched similar to classic respec or azerite reforging(not as harsh)