Imagine if essences worked like covenants

Imagine for a second if the essence system worked like this: you swap out blood of the enemy minor for focusing iris minor. Now if you wanted to go back to blood you’d have to regrind it.

Then if you had the nerve to try and change your major essence not only would all you essences need to be regrinded again, but your neck level would drop to level 1 and you’d have to grind that back up as well.

Imagine the detrimental effect this would have had on the game. It would pretty much have killed the game at that point.

Well you won’t have to imagine it, because that’s what’s coming in shadowlands if blizzard decide to once again stick to their “vision” and ignore the playerbase once more. Just swap minor essences in the above example with conduits, neck level with soulbinds and major essence with covenant ability.

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b-b-but my PlAYer CHoiCe MaTTeRS

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Essences are not covenants, regardless of what you think of either of them.

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But essences don’t work like covenants.

You don’t have to pose it this way; with a hypothetical situation that didn’t happen. Just talk about covenants and how they work.

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Should I link an article explaining what a non sequitur is? Coz that’s what you just did.

I was proposing a hypothetical situation to demonstrate the problems of a system blizzard is planning on following by using a current system as an example.

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Free ability for the xpac? Seems like essences.

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That sounds horrible!

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Point flew right over your head yeah?
The point is to make a hypothetical where they are the same so it highlights how bad it will be.

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Yep. But people wont get it until they are on their 10th regrind in SL and realize how NOT FUN it is. You will get sick of running the same dungeon/quest etc for the 100th time just for an item you had to replace. People are clueless though until they learn the hard way. Just watch, if it isnt changed before release, then it will be a month or two in once forums blowing up over it.

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Can’t wait for the blasting to begin once people enter beta.

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That sounds ridiculously punishing for paying customers.

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Welcome to Blizzard Entertainment.

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Point flew right over your head didn’t it?

The forced hypothetical comparison is unnecessary.

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My hypothetical is exactly how covenants will work. Its just couched in an existing system to help demonstrate how bad it will be.

you are clueless lol

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they are almost exactly that.

it’s borrowed power in another form with a new name. it’s exactly what legendaries were. it’s exactly what essences are.

this isn’t a slippery slope argument. there are fewer things more painful than people posting fallacies on the forums.

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It’s unnecessary but effective.

Do you not know what a hypothetical is? You can’t have a hypothetical that did happen…

This would make sense in a mobile free to play type of game I suppose.

But I would imagine it would drive away a lot of people from WoW to games like FFXIV.

No, actually, it isn’t.

Essences aren’t covenants. Their design intent aren’t the same as covenants. Ion has said that Covenants are equivalent to picking a class. Essences are not at that macroscopic level of decision-making.

So yes, you’re still wrong.

If Ion wants to introduce sub classes into the game then this is just about the worst possible way to do it

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