That choice should only have to be made once, when you start! Once your at the end game and are establishing your power you should not have to make silly choices between style and abilities any more.
One life time choice is not the same as a choice that lasts 1 expac.
I don’t mind if they are hard to switch or that I have to wait on a cooldown. I mind that they are linked with stuff that should not be with each other.
The quality of my transmog should have nothing to do with the dps I crank out!
In the newest build it seems that it’s finally implemented. Apparently there’s multiple parts of a questline to “Prove your worth” (that’s literally the name of the quest), consisting of filling a bar by doing activities in the covenant zone, like completing 8 world quests, which will likely take at least two days. We should actually see what it really takes to rejoin a covenant in the next week, depending on how long the questline is.
Most… seriously the abilities are minor in comparison to conduits and soulbinds. As bad as not switching covenants are it’s nothing to the disaster that conduits are going to be for players that play more than one spec.
Based on how BFA’s borrowed power worked we could be looking at 50-75% of player power coming from a system that has nothing to do with class abilities.
No we really don’t, sorry but this is a tactic used to delay policy decisions all the time and it really doesn’t have value when we already know the approximate percentages based on beta feedback and the contents of the beta forums. Borrowed power is always the key definer of player power every expansion.
As a fairly objective observer*, I wonder if all this wailing and gnashing of teeth over the covenants is misplaced. Or, at least, premature. It seems like everyone’s reacting as though this were going live exactly as it exists in its current state. But if the powers/abilities are genuinely THAT out of balance, don’t you think they’ll be adjusted during the upcoming tuning phases? This kind of thing is what beta testing is literally for, and the doomsaying because tweaks apparently aren’t being made as fast as some would like is just a bit… over the top.
It’s absurd to draw any firm conclusions until after final tuning has been completed. Save your hysterics for then.
(* I will play Shadowlands no matter what — and I’m barely paying attention to the changes coming, since I feel a big part of the fun is having to adapt to and figure out the new systems. An expansion would be boring if it was JUST a handful of new zones, quests and raids.)
I’m not I’m attempting to get down to the importance of the system in the grand scheme, but no one here has beta or can look up how the numbers go in Systemlands, so we can’t determine how important the choice between covenants is.
See my post above about first impressions, we stand to lose a lot of people as they get frustrated by arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions that don’t actually make the game fun to play. First impressions can kill an expac.