“Ion on Covenants and Being Meta” from an interview with Tonton. This is an abbreviated version on WoWhead of what he said:
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Covenants are set up to be a different choice than specs or talents.
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WoW is a series of interesting choices – from buttons to gear and talents to class and faction
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Covenants are intended to be part of your identity.
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There’s a lot of customization, if you go into a dungeon, you pick the AoE conduits and the AoE soulbind.
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Nadjia which was shown yesterday is more single target focus and you can socket single target conduits and use that as your single target conduit.
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When returning to a Covenant, it’s going to be much harder to prove yourself back to the Covenant since you left via a quest .
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It should be a similar choice to deciding between Mage and Hunter.
Here is the link for all the stuff they talked about
“https://www.wowhead.com/news=316816/shadowlands-interview-with-ion-hazzikostas-and-tonton-open-world-lag-swapping-co”
What are your guys’ thoughts? Even though I think I already know them. 
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Just thought I would put this here for people who weren’t watching. 
Seems that they are dead set on making Covenants a class extension, not a talent choice. The soulbinds will be the talent choice and the Covenant will be the class extension.
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Not going to be balanced by any margin until at least 9.1 and probably not then. So bravo for wanting to make a class extension but sometimes you need to realize the limits of your team and the wow team simply can not balance this.
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Prepatch
Will probably be a few weeks before Shadowlands launch
Level squish and systems will be live.
**Inspired by the Scourge event from WoTLK**
EPIC! \o/
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Ion. Please. Just say “Covenants are advanced classes”. You keep hinting at it and hinting at it, but people still mistake them for simple rep grinds. You need to say it. This community is very thick.
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Yupp that’s basically what he’s saying. Picking a Covenant is just an extension of your class and you from there build your soulbinds for different parts of the game, whether it be Raiding, M+, etc.
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Just because it’s an “extension of your class” doesn’t mean it’ll be balanced.
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Never said it would be. Just showing people what he said because I thought people would like to discuss this.
At this point I’d say there’s a 0% chance the Covenants will not be able to be switched around freely.
Yes but it’s the balance or lack of balance that has people worried.
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They did say in a earlier interview that if they can’t balance them they will be swappable (on my phone or I would find the specific one). So I would say its more 50/50 of if we get swapable at some point.
Hopefully people don’t flip out on this one and make some of it get shut off like the scourge one lol.
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WoW is far from a series of interesting choices. WoW is a series of forced choices.
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I really hope it works out like this. Hopefully the conduits and soulbinds are a strong enough turning knob for bliz to keep the covenants relatively close.
Same. It would be cool if they were actually balanced to fill different roles. But if one is just plain better than the other it’s going to be quite uneventful.
yes, so not in 9.0, which was what people were asking for.
I really hope so. I like the concept but I’m worried about the vast difference in some of the data mined soulbinds. I know its a data mine so it can easily be wrong but if its accurate some are vastly better than others.
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I guess my question for that is “does this mean they’re intended to stick with us past Shadowlands?”
Personally, I think this is a “worst of both worlds” approach. If you want to try out all of them, making it hard to go back but not to leave incentivizes picking the one you’re least interested in first.
If you don’t care about that but want to pick the strongest one, it doesn’t really solve the problem. You basically have to hope that what’s best for your role either stays that way for the entire expansion or doesn’t return to being the best after it’s nerfed.
Plus, to polish it off, you can still switch so I don’t think it really satisfies the “meaningful choices” crowd.
Eventually. I’m betting it’ll be 9.1 at the earliest though. They’re not going to admit failure before then.
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I will enjoy watching people complain though. I’m a bit sadistic.
I do hope they allow some sort of switching though, I won’t bother me in the slightest either way, I’m not switching regardless. They sold me a “5 avengers shields”
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Classes are imbalanced but we don’t realistically acknowledge the idea of deleting the class system. The closest we’ve come to deleting classes is “bring the player not the class” which ended up being a failed design paradigm. WoW is a class based game. Sometimes things are better than others. That’s how the cookie crumbles. You don’t delete core features of WoW like classes simply due to balance issues.
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I want to play my class, not my Covenant.
As for respeccing every time you go into a different kind of content, people don’t like to play that way. If they did, we wouldn’t see Ret and Feral queueing for dungeons.
Just reduce Covenants to aesthetics only; we don’t need another stupid FOTM optimization choice.
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not really
I think they are ruining the game with these systems of theirs. Instead of enjoying the actual content you are on a chore mill for these and for simple things like flying. I wish we would get some people who were actually creative and could add things to the game without taking them away first.
The problem is the game is more complicated, there was a preach video that speculated what was going on and he wasn’t too far off.
Also, this reason is bs in regards to lag. Because guess what we have lag in the city where no one is doing anything that we didn’t have last expansion.
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