So this past weekend I switched covenants and it finally dawned on me…
…covenants are actually kind of cool and do offer meaningful choice!
The problem in Shadowlands is the choice seems so permanent that most players don’t feel like they have a choice.
I don’t think you can fully appreciate the power of the covenant choice until you actually experience how your character plays differently with another covenant.
Going from Venthyr to Night Fae has been awesome. It’s almost like I’ve unlocked another spec.
The tragedy is most players won’t switch covenants because of sunk cost or because they fear it’ll be too much of an uphill climb to work on another covenant or return to their original covenant if they don’t like their new covenant.
I understand why Blizzard doesn’t want people switching covenants wilily nilly every boss fight, but I think Blizz should be encouraging people to switch covenants early on so they can get a taste of each covenant and really appreciate the choice they’re making and also see which covenant fits their play style best.
So my suggestion is that Blizzard allow us a penalty free betrayal for each covenant.
That is if you leave the covenant, you’ll immediately allowed to return without needing to regain trust.
This would encourage players to try out other covenants without worrying they would be hurting themselves. If they didn’t like their new covenant, they could switch back to their original covenant at a moment’s notice or switch to yet a third covenant.
However, once you’ve left a covenant twice you would still have to go through the current series of weekly quests to return.
I think this update to the system would both allow people to better appreciate the covenant system and prevent a scenario where players are min-maxing by switching covenants every fight in a pull the ripcord scenario.
Or just allow “betrayal” free rejoining once you hit renown 40.
That seems like a better path.
This way players have something to work towards, can still play various specs and content types, and don’t have to feel punished for just wanting to play the game.
Then truly meaningful choices can be made and players can make decisions about their characters for themselves rather than what the algorithms tell them to pick.
As long as theres player power involved, players will always have to choose between being useful/meta and going with what they like, and this choice will never be meaningful on an mmorpg. you’re asking people to deliberately gimp their characters if they want to identify with anything other than the meta. its just stupid. “hey do you want this cool mog instead of 20% more player power?”… it makes no sense
I want to choose cosmetics and power separately.
Imagine if the mount you rode impacted how you played in a raid or M+.
That’s what Covenants are right now.
Also, some class abilities are just terrible or very clunky to use for some specs.
Some only work well in specific situations.
Then you have Convoke and Divine Toll. They are so strong as to almost remove choices outside of a few niche situations.
One free betrayal won’t solve it. The issue is that the top performing covenants aren’t always the most fun/interesting ones. I want to be a venthyr. I have to play as this fairy because it does more damage. That’s bad design.
Except if it was meaningful you wouldn’t be able to switch and also wouldn’t have wanted to switch because your first choice would have been set in stone.
No. this is a social game. not a single player game. if your peers perceive you as useless, that is your value to the community. you are dead weight to your group. again, this is not a single player game. this is an mmo. you are judged by your worth to your group. not what you feel is cool. but what you can contribute. chosing between player power and cosmetics will always be bad
I’ve put weeks and months of anima into the Night Fae. To swap, all of that anima grind, the upgraded Sanctum, will be for nothing. No pay out because even if I purchased the transmog before switching, I can no longer use it. And I have to regrind all that anima without the give me’s like the 1.2k for beating Denathrius, or the 750s for clearing Sanguine Depths/De Other Side/Theater of Pain. I’d be starting over at square one with no easy way to catch up.
No, swapping Covenants and one free betrayal does not cover the feeling of wasting 4-5 months of your life with no pay out.
Yeah, this is something that held me back from switching covenants.
I really miss my portal at covenant HQ.
I will say, overall it hasn’t been that bad catching up and that’s why I think a “get out of free jail” card option would let people try the switch for themselves. Unlocking all sorts of new stuff takes away a lot of the pain. And neutral command table npcs follow you over. Also, it seems the anima buffs I unlocked have followed me over as I’m gaining anima like crazy.
Covenant switching seems so rare that I kind of went into this blind as I couldn’t get concrete info on a lot of the process.
the problem i see is that the devs believe they can force you to pick something and feel that was a meaningful choice by any means. What is meaningful to you might not be meaningful to me. I see this system for what is is. A sad way to inflate game time. It forces you to create several characters to chase all the transmog and mounts and whatever else they add to these covenants.
It was never about having a meaningful choice. thats the lie they sell to make you feel good about choosing one of them.if they detached the covenants from player power nobody would bother messing with them because they are not that interesting to begin with. the story is bad, the cosmetics are bad and farming anima is their way of forcing you to log in. its just lazy design. they have no way to make the game fun so they keep inventing these threadmills to keep us busy. just a bad system overall
