Hear me out, while the power systems were atrocious and tiring, there was merit.
I loved how unique each covenant was and how they had a lot of side quest content you could do at your leisure. Cosmetics are never a bad thing. Zones being so detached though…not so intriguing.
I still stand by working in Class Halls into the major capitol cities and using class halls as a main hub for your classes content feed for the majority of the time.
New campaign quest? Pick it up in your class hall.
New expansion coming? Pick up details from your class hall
Want to see the names of the best class players in your hall for X content? Read it on a board in your class hall.
Want to go on zany and detailed and wild non story related quests for class transmogs? Pick it up in your class hall.
class specific weapon designs? your 3D modeler was on a tear…put a fun quest in the class hall, hell put it on a vendor even.
I mean I can honestly say, I really enjoyed (in the beginning of SL) feeling like I belonged to a faction. After trying them, or learning about them, Necrolord was my thing…fell in love. The issue was implementation. If one covenant was 1% dps better, then so be it, but some were 20% better than the others…meaning that if you wanted to remain competitive, or at least contribute as much as possible to the group you were in, your “choice” was already made for you.
i agree actually. i just wish they hadn’t made it take such an absolutely abysmal amount of time to collect every single thing from each covenant. i’ll still be working well into DF and probably after to finish it all if i choose to, because without running group content, anima has been really scarce for me. i was hoping they’d increase anima drop amounts more when DF launches but i won’t be holding my breath on that
Ehm… there’s plenty:
To establish this we need to look at the criticism going all the way back to Legion
Legion
Random legendaries is not fun, deterministic gear is better, but the effects were incredible, make more types of gear relevant without titanforging being as utterly ridiculous as it was
BFA
Keeps the mentality of adding powerful abilities into deterministic gear you can target by making Azerite armour and makes it available to get from any and all types of content, but the game feels a lot less ‘meaningful’ and the systems of your necklace wasn’t well liked but the idea of progression was, corruption was both a disaster and a tremendous success at the same time
SL
Covenants are meaningful options to tie your character to the world, maintains progression without an infinitely scaling number but a pre-deterministic set of renown levels and legendaries are crafted to make professions matter; ultimately, too many borrowed power systems, too many ‘locked’ choices, and players felt like their ‘choices’ were made for them both in terms of legendaries and covenants
So what do they do?
Keep the powers and make 'em into talents
Keep progression but make it COMPLETELY cosmetics based
Add progression to non-player power mechanics (Dragonriding both having talents and requiring practice to get good at it)
Professions receive a huge overhaul to add meaningful choices (specializations) that doesn’t hinder players
Keep the Creation catalyst for deterministic gear
Offer more gearing options
Increase time limits on world quests to make 'em more optional and feel more relaxed to do
DF is built from the design philosophies that each expansion took the criticism of and tried to fix, didn’t do a great job at it, but they did try; so they are keeping that mentality but going one step further by effectively redesigning the core components of the game using all of the borrowed power systems and what they have learned players like and what players doesn’t like from Legion and onwards
Everyone has, in good faith, good complaints about Legion, BFA, and SL … but when you break down the primary criticism of each expansion, it is crystal clear that BFA was an improvement to Legion, but that the improvements ended up creating a worse overall player experience despite design-wise being an improvement, and the same thing with SL towards BFA (note: design-wise elements doesn’t mean that they are successful at creating something ‘good’ just that they succeeded at what they meant to create in terms of the feedback they received)
But … DF is a continuation of this mentality and design philosophy, just that its been cranked all the way up to max or close to max with how they went about redesigning everything (oh and, its possible to make the argument this mentality stems from MoP and may have started to take root as early as in Cataclysm, but those arguments are weaker so I’m opting to not make 'em - but I’m saying it is possible to make 'em)
And yes DF factions took a lot of good ideas from shadowlands covenants. There just isn’t power from them like in Shadowlands so it doesnt feel forced.