Allow players to spend Torghast currency to craft Conduits once they’ve obtained the corresponding Conduit. This will keep Torghast relevant the entire expansion and should ideally avoid degenerate play patterns while still rewarding players for loyalty to their spec.
Allow players with a high Renown level with their main Covenant to become an Ambassador to a second Covenant, enabling a form of “dual spec” for Covenants.
After progressing your main Covenant and becoming familiar with its unique features, perhaps starting to even become tired of your primary Covenant, at a high Renown level you’d have the chance to become an Ambassador. Becoming an Ambassador allows the player to progress a second Covenant’s garrison, followers, Renown, and other Covenant-exclusive features. Players can swap between their main Covenant and secondary Covenant through an embassy in Oribos, swapping all garrison features, zone features, soul-bind powers, Covenant abilities, and other side features from one Covenant to another. Players can only be the Ambassador to one Covenant a time, and have a length cooldown period (two weeks?) to become an Ambassador to a different Covenant.
I feel like such a system provides a nice middle-ground and actual fantasy and in-universe feel to how such a system could work, preserving a level of choice, and creating an incentive to stick with one Covenant, while not shutting players out of RP they’d be interested in pursuing and allowing additional gameplay options.
Additionally, the other bullet point about Torghast seems like a no-brainer. I like Conduits, I really do, but the essence system was a horrible mistake and now the community is entitled. You will encounter so much unneeded resistance from the community when you could make the choice important but not so punishing by allowing the most hardcore players to eat their cake and have it too if they grind for two cakes. In Classic WoW, 50g is a lot of money for a casual and creates incentive to stick to a spec, but it’s not insurmountable - hardcore players are willing to grind out the respec costs. Instead of rewarding degenerate play patterns by forcing conduit grinding, just allow them a more natural outlet. Yes, Torghast might become island farming for the 1%, but they grinded islands. As long as the majority of players who aren’t OCD aren’t obligated to grind for strictly linear power progression, it will be fine.
They already have some sort of system where you can leave 1 covenant and join another.
Make it reset every week or something, so that if you want, you can switch it once per week.
that way, its not really something that can be tactically swapped for each encounter, but allow you to try different things at your leasure, have decent room for optimization, and provides ample protection vs nerfs and other bad lucks.
The alternative solution of freely swapping Covenants at the drop of a hat is way more complicated. There are four Covenants with four garrisons, four sets of unique followers, four sets of soul-binds (twelve in total), dozens of different zone features, four unique gameplay systems, and so forth. One player juggling four garrisons at the same time is too much. You can’t have “free swapping” without overwhelming players. It’s just too much, people whine about World of Systems and that’s going to completely confuse people. And how does that look in the UI? No. Absolutely not.
The Ambassador system meanwhile, as a concept, is meant to force you to learn one, and then slowly allow you to learn another. It’s something that the expansion can slowly roll out over time and more competitive oriented players can feel rewarded for sticking with one Covenant long enough to open the Ambassador system to swap a second.
There are people who want to swap on a per-encounter basis though. Or they want to RP as Venthyr but their raid BIS is Night Fae and they’d only be able to RP half the time.
Yeah, I’m not sure what’s new here. We know that it’ll be possible to move from one covenant to another with the understanding the moving back will be very difficult. All of the grinds involved here just sound anti fun.
Yeah. I’d want per encounter swap as well. But as this is compromise, i thought that’s something i can work with. I want this to be swappable with a tome or at rested area, or like a spec swap.
What i am suggesting is, basically, that “moving back” would be reset every week.
Why do I get this feeling that the “winning” covenant will be like Tokyo at rush hour every day, and whatever one I enjoy for lore reasons will be like Wyoming in Winter.
More build flexibility. Access to more content without forsaking content you enjoy. What if I like Night Fae but I also like the Venthyr party system? RIP, I can give up all my power in Night Fae to socialize for a week.
How would that work? So let’s say we don’t want to give players access to two garrisons or have to progress two bars of Renown. Understandable. So this guy we talk to, he gives us access to all the other soul-binds of all the other Covenants, right? Do they actually use the Renown level of our highest followers? How does that work? Also, we have to socket in all the Conduits for all twelve trees? Seems like a lot to juggle. I don’t know anything about what is happening in this alternate tree. Who is this character? What does this mean? I guess I need to check icy-veins and this follow their meta-build?
No, I don’t like it. Seems anti-RPG. Very arbitrary, defeats the point of making a tough choice as well if we have free access to all other Covenants and will just be confusing and frustrating.
I like the idea of slow-rolling this feature out. We already know we’re only getting one legendary, but eventually we’ll be able to equip two. I like this design philosophy applied to Covenants as well.
I was referring to Sentenza’s idea. I’m not sure about the 1 week timing. It’s not like we’re Goldilocks searching for the right bed. Different content requires different abilities, talents, etc.
It would basicly be for all abilities, not soulbinds.
It would let you hold another covenant abilities that isn’t yours.
And let you switch once day, which for me is the metric I prefer to use.
as they should. We were asking for and were promised Class Identity, not Spec Exclusivity. Being tied to one spec puts you at the mercy of Blizzard’s spec balance and encounter/dungeon design lining up with that one spec’s strengths. Anyone that actually plays the game knows how awful that is to depend on. And if your spec isn’t good in that encounter or dungeon, you won’t be getting invited to it. Really takes the “game” out of Role Playing Game if you don’t get to play.
You’re really overestimating the influence of the abilities alone, ESPECIALLY when you’re removing them from the corresponding soul-binds they belong to. Venthyr blink without the instant-cast modifier from the soul-bind tree is suddenly massively clunky in comparison. Other abilities are tuned around getting a pay-off when used frequently with a corresponding soul-bind. Lastly, the flavor is just really weird.
Look, I get it. But World of Warcraft should have some elements that make it feel like an RPG, where you’re rewarded for committing to a playstyle. Nobody wants (or very few people want) World of Warcraft to feel like Diablo, where your character has no sense of identity and is just an empty husk that you press one button and transforms into a completely different character.
I feel like this idea is a compromise, rewarding you for sticking with something, locking down some part of your character, while also allowing you to change part of it more easily. You can’t have it all, but you won’t be quite so pigeonholed. Getting 2 out of 4 is a big improvement over 1 out of 4, literally 100% more soul-binds to choose from, as well as a choice to swap to certain mechanics as required. If one Covenant is meta in M+ and one Covenant is meta in raids, most players will be covered. Not everyone, but most.
I mean I’m looking for a compromise. I’m willing to live with a casting time on the venthyr thingy if it means I can use it. Also I think that’s only a soulbind doing that, 2/3 soulbind won’t do it.
Well the answer certainly isn’t “make the abilities a talent row”. It’s probably the worst way to could go about doing it, pissing everyone off and making no one happy. At least the way they are (no swapping of any meaningful kind), the RPG flavor and essence exists.
When did players with less time to farm conduits being stuck playing one spec when your class allows you to activate 3 to 4 freely become an important aspect of this RPG?
Role Playing Game is not and never has been “1 spec playing game.” There are so many parameters that define what an RPG is, you cannot honestly say that restricting spec fluidity is an important one for this game.
What spec “specialization” should be about is someone one who plays a spec more will be better at that spec than the spec he doesn’t play.
Not only does the philosophy stink, but actually physically playing a spec tailored around single target feels TERRIBLE to try and force into a multi target spec, just like playing an AoE spec feels TERRIBLE to force and try into a single target spec. Players that wanted to do that always could, but now players that didn’t want to are going to have arbitrary restrictions placed on them pretty much forcing them to also do that.
World of Warcraft to feel like Diablo, where your character has no sense of identity and is just an empty husk that you press one button and transforms into a completely different character.
How does allowing people to play multiple specs do that? Classes share many of the same utility across all three specs - that was the whole point to them bringing back things like Corruption to other Warlock specs for example. Class Identity is not a threat to the game
Until you realize that your soul-bind for Night Fae is best for fight 1, and your soul-bind for Venthyr is best for fight 2. And then you’re upset again. And the RPG “meaningful choice” fans are upset. You’ve watered the expansion down and not really accomplished much.
Mate… this is just like every system they’ve implemented for the past 2 expansions. They’ll mess about with it and ‘experiment,’ then in 9.1 they’ll loosen the restriction, then in 9.2 it’ll be even looser, and in 9.3 it’ll be how people like myself want it, but behind a currency/rep grind.
They’ve done this repeatedly.
At this point, people just have to ask themselves whether they want to put up with it from launch, or if they want to return in 9.3 when they can finally just use the abilities as they originally wanted to.
It happened with AP and the artifact weapons (multiple times…).
It happened with Azerite (multiple times…).
It happened with Essences.
It happened with Corruption.
To quote Vaas: “Did I ever tell you… the definition… of insanity?”
At this point… it almost feels like a business model. I’m 100% sure they’ll have a new system for 10.0 that they’ll “want to try.” Then we’ll respond with its faults, they’ll ignore our concerns, it’ll go live, we’ll balk, they’ll cave, then we’ll grind more…