Like… everyone during the whole debate of “pull the ripcord”. I thought the whole point of them nerfing covenants constantly during the beta was so the abilities wouldn’t be more than 5% of our total dps regardless, and each ability would be 0.5% total dps of each other (ideally, obviously that didn’t happen).
But if they’re actually 10-15% of our total dps that’s nuts, that not a small difference at all if one ability is 33-50% worse than another.
The Covenants are like the United States Armed forces. You select the branch you want to go into.
The Air Force is not going to provide food, clothing, Uniform and Weapon (I.E. Power) to another branch member.
The point of the expansion is making a tough decision like what a RPG game is, making decisions on how your character is going forward.
Your not totally stuck in one Covenant if you decide to change to another. You can do so but at the expense of a penalty or questing like an RPG game.
Shadowlands is an RPG expansion and it has RPG elements, why take that uniqueness away? The replay value in Shadowlands is good, especially for the folks who have alts by taking a different direction in Covenant choice.
My 2 cents
Because it interferes with how players have played the game for many years.
I honestly hope that for the second year of the expac we move on from the Shadowlands and away from Covenants.
I don’t even know my covenant that well. And what I know of them doesn’t give me any pride for being part of it. I’m just here for the cosmetics basically.
Not trying to be a D word here but
World of Warcraft = MMORPG, RPG… RPG!!!
Have you played an RPG game before, just curious?
Also choices are supposed to interfere (Affect) with how you play the game going forward.
Not trying to be a D word here but, when have we ever had a restriction this bad before?
Since the beginning.
You choose your talents, race (Racials), Class, crafting, server, and the list goes on and on.
Some of those things you just couldn’t swap on the drop of the dime, I realize somethings have changed but WOW has always had RPG elements in it that is related to power.
He might’ve implied it, but I don’t think he said that word to word. Besides, didn’t Ion said something along the line of “skill issue” recently? Knowing how to prepare for an encounter is part of the skill. Not to mention they could’ve simply allowed switching soul binds / conduits with tome.
Don’t buy into illogical nonsense, please. Think a little.
Sorry. None of those things equate to the same thing in my eyes. We’re talking about a basic mechanic for the entire expansion versus something that if I wanted to do could make it to where I have access to all of those things and not have to worry about restarting all over again. And just to be clear, when I say restart I mean obliterate this character in the process of doing any of those things you’ve listed.
The restriction makes no sense. We can say “But muh RPG” all day but it interferes with many different playstyles in the community. The biggest one being players who want to optimize their performance through multiple specs or avenues that the game has to offer.
Go watch the full interviews the past 6 month on Preach and Icy veins.
He specifically said that the ability to respec talents between bosses or for trash “encourages degenerate behavior” HIS WORDS and that conduit energy and the cooldown on cov swapping is intended to limit that behavior.
Talents are probably going to be phased out of the game, especially since so many specs have 90% dead talent rows.
Edit: Part of the reason blizzard doesn’t fix dead rows is so there’s no incentive to switch talents often.
You see the irony here, do you not? So covenant lock exists in place because “degenerate behavior” should be discouraged. And in order to discourage “generate behavior” talents should be removed, which is part of the RPG aspect of the game. Therefore, covenant lock is an RPG element.
Does that make sense to you? Sure doesn’t to me.
It doesn’t matter what he said. If it’s a problem we should voice our opinions. That’s what the forum is for. If we all just conform then why are we even here?
I agree it’s a problem and I think Ion is worried about what the top 0.1% of players MIGHT do and it ruins the game for everyone else.
That said, Blizzard’s dev team is either 100% sure the players are wrong about what they players want… Or they intentionally make these systems bad in order to have content updates that they can label as “quality of life improvements” that show they “listened to the community feedback.”
IE: Releasing every system in BFA in a terrible, RNG and grind heavy state only to add vendors and account-wide unlocks the next patch for each system… three times in one expansion.
Releasing bad systems and then hyping patches that slowly improve them might actually be Blizzards business model.
You are not wrong, but on the other hand you can’t slap the RPG label on every choice in game and call it good. I am sure there are better way to approach this without compromising either side. Let me try to explain.
Imagine for a second that covenants don’t come with any additional ability. What do they offer to the overall plot? Really not much at all. You won’t see a different ending to SL story. You won’t see a different dungeon or raid because of your soulbind. The jailer doesn’t care what covenant you are in. It’s not important in the overall plot.
The intent (I believe this was actually brought up somewhere by Blizzard) was for players to “identify” with their covenant. In order to identify with a covenant, players should feel like they “belong” to that covenant, which usually implies alignment on the covenant’s philosophies, principles, or ideologies. But instead of that, players are picking covenants based on the abilities provided. That’s as poor of an RPG element as you can get, because it’s labeled as such for the wrong reasons.
When you see a post in forum labeled “fire mage OP” you automatically assume it’s nightfae fire mage. When you see a DH tank topping the meter you automatically assume it’s a kyrian DH. When you see a holy paladin doing the same DPS as DPS you assume it’s venthyr. Go to any of the statistics website you will not see classes labeled with covenant. All these are signs that whatever Blizzard intended to do with covenant failed in the most fundamental fashion, because it’s temporary, it’s impactful for the wrong reasons, and the identity part is not there for the most part.
Well, I’ll have to agree to disagree with you.
I believe it undermines the player choices and direction you take your character in and it cheapens the RPG element of the game.
My 2 cents 
My experience and thoughts: I’m sad my Warlocks have to be Night Fae. (Or at least had to, unless there’s been some change and they can be Venthy now 
). Soul Rot is a lot of fun and once I tried it, it was hard to leave it behind for a Covenant that was more thematically fitting. I stopped playing my Warlocks because I dont like the choice between what’s “good” and what fits my character theme. I started playing classes that work well with Venthyr. And started playing Classic a lot more.
Talents can be changed easily without a 2-week timegate, even back in vanilla.
Class is actually an example of how players would like covenants to work - you can progress through each one, and don’t have to go through a 2 week timegate to swap. You can swap as many times as you like and you pick up right where you left off.
The biggest issue with covenants is that the restriction of them is now ON TOP of class/race, not independent of replacing one of those.
To me, one of the saddest parts of the covenant restrictions is that they don’t even make sense from a role-playing perspective. Limiting the “heroes” here to help your world with a 2 week time gate makes no sense for the covenants to do.
I’d agree if there wasn’t a strong focus on harder content like raids, pvp and m+. And players just want to play with the toys granted for the expansion. I don’t think it’s right for someone who enjoys playing multiple specs being told that essentially they’re playing the game wrong because of “RPG” elements.
RPG elements that I appreciated in WoW was actually in Legion. For example if you were a DH or a Prot Paladin, exposing the demon took no time at all. I identify with my class, not the covenant choice that’s going to be gone by the end of the expansion
True. The restrictions make sense is a single-player RPG. Not an MMORPG with various types of content.