You aren’t the one to decide what is and isn’t competitive. A player that is 1600 in arena is still competitive. Just because they aren’t the best at what they do, doesn’t mean they don’t strive for being the best. This is true for all forms of play. Heroic players can be just as competitive and put it just as much or more effort than the best players.
Yeah I really don’t want to have to be a NecroLord holy priest because that’s the vastly more useful Covenant for PvE content, e.g.
If there is to be a “best” Covenant, I hope they err on the side of common sense and at least stick to more consistent theming.
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Wow these are some interesting abilities! I would like to submit some constructive critizism regarding how we obtain and choose these abilities.
To start out, i think its an awsome idea to reward the class specific abilities at the end of the main quest line for each covenant. However, i believe it would be better to let the player unlock all class skills from each covenant and have them be able to swap freely from them like a talent ( this would be 4 abilities) at max level. Only one skill could be active at a time. I strongly believe convenants should be story driven and focus on sets, pets, toys, mounts and unique dialogue as you experience shadowlands and possibly Torgast.
Secondly, I am undecided about wether or not general covenant skills or passives should be locked per covenant of your choice. As long as they are not a game changer then its alright in my eyes to have them locked in with your covenant.
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this x1000
I will not be playing Shadowlands if we are stuck being forced into specific covenants.
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Please change the night fae, Convoke the spirits and tranquility spell to NOT be channeled. 4 second channel for Convoke and 8 second channel for Tranquility is too long. Please make those instant spells 
Man Ion was right when he said this would be an alt friendly expansion! We get to level 4 of the same class to be optimal in different aspects of the game or we can gamble a little and hope they don’t nerf our covenant when they do tuning. Can’t wait for all the content I get to experience on the same class over and over. Good riddance to the days of leveling different classes to experience the world with different spells and themes, I’d much rather have subsets of the same class, you know kind of like specs, but locked behind a grind! How exciting!
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My actual personality would be drawn towards Kyrian or Night Fae, but if I want to be a statistically significant protection warrior, I have to choose Necrolord.
I’ve recently returned to WoW, as a one time Everquest Uber Guild Raid leader and here at the beginning of WoW. It sounds like the major criticism of the Blizzard game design at the moment is not addressing the core of the classes, constantly using these systems to try to flavor each class.
I would question who you are making this content for, as I cannot be “high end” semi-casual and just enjoy what I want to do in the game, and maximize for mythics/raiding/PvP with this system. In other words, I can only play WoW for one purpose with this system, which is fine for me, but do you see the issue? You are either doing a very poor job at selling what could be a good concept, or you are going forward with a poor concept without addressing the actual issues dedicated players are reporting with your game, and should not be surprised when dedication for advancement goes out the window when you expect everyone to fit into the glorified chat room game model.
I hope we see a great expansion. I would surely love to stay in WoW. I fear that Activision may soon find out that squeezing out products for revenue will dry up a well that can only be tapped so much before it will not replenish. Bring back Blizzard, we miss Blizzard.
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I want these to feel like iconic class fantasy abilities we learn as we progress through the story line and our characters grow.
These right now feel like rented abilities that aren’t great.
Paladins in particular feel like they are buffing up current abilities, such as giving Judgement an “AoE” effect, more so than adding new ones. First impressions are truly a let down.
Are we getting just one class ability? These look incredibly underwhelming. It feels like artifact weapons, if artifact weapons were only the on-use you first learn from them.
all i’m going to say is make it so players can learn the abilities class/covenant abilities and be able to mix and match them on the fly like talents which allows players to go with the covenant they want without feeling like they’re hindering their gameplay. in addition to more customization = more fun.
This is super,
but unless the staff wants us players polarized to a single class, maybe some low population realms that are already crossed with populated realms, but not merged, should be changed to merged realms. It would turn the covenant choices into something that would empower activity and not restrict.
I’d love to play my Death Knight on Korgath in Shadowlands because its my prestigiously longer played character, but my Monk is on Bonechewer which is merged with with an entirely more populated realm, leaving Korgath as nothing but nostalgia to check in on.
Maybe Korgath deserves that, but it could only stimulate more subscriptions and ultimately not waste Blizzard resources on dead servers.
Long scenario at the end, main points here;
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The gut pick for covenant people likely made when only shown mostly cosmetics/lore at Blizzcon should not be incentivized to change because of massive differences in player power given.
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The balance of spells will be hard but if it is not within 10 percent of each other for most general levels of group content then it will be worse than both essences and corruption put together because changing will mean losing out on the perks of the one you are leaving and require a “high cost” to do. (History is not on your side with the ability to balance out the combat related portions of the game, Azerite traits, talents, old glyphs, essences, corruption.)
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If you have to resort to making balance changes to the abilities after launch it will cause any players that care about the combat performance of their character to go through the “high cost” system to switch covenants just to maintain the same power that they had up until the changes were made.
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There will always be a mathematical “best” option however, players should not be put into a situation where they knowingly have to give up a large portion (refer to point 2) of player power just to get a cosmetic/lore reward that they really want. Conversely players should not have to miss out on an interesting story line/cosmetic just to make sure that they can perform the best in combat situations at all times.
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Choices should matter, picking a covenant after playing through some story and testing out the spells is good and adds weight to your pick. Finding out that the one you put all that meaning into picking is not the best for combat based, group heavy, endgame character progression makes that meaningful choice not matter. You should have picked the one that allows you to progress your character at level cap. Function beats meaningful choice every time in gameplay based character progression.
For those of you who have read this far, thanks and here is the scenario:
Put yourself in this situation, you really like the cosmetic, profession, mount and pet rewards for the Venthyr so you decide to pick them and get the interesting new ability, it is just awesome and you love the way it interacts with your class, you love it. Then after you have put your time and effort into the Venthyr to get your rewards you look for any non instance finder content with the goal of clearing to around heroic raid difficulty content (8-10 level M+ keys, normal or heroic raiding, rated PvP). You then see that many other players of your same class with the same skill level and gear values is leaving you in the dust in healing tanking and damage, when asked they reply that they picked the Kyrian and that is why they are out preforming you by around 30 to 50 percent and no amount of skill on your part can make up that gap. Your character is worse because you picked fun over function and if you want to fix this there is only the option to incur a “high cost” to change to Kyrian and abandon the Venthyr that you picked in the first place.
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I also hope Blizzard doesn’t go through with this system as it is presented. Covenants should only have lore/cosmetic differences. This would prevent any balance issues. It would allow people to choose what they want lore/ cosmetic wise without having to worry about min/maxing for their chosen content type. It also would prevent min/maxing problems for those that play multiple specs and/or do multiple types of content.
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Ion quote: A section of the community still needing to adapt and get passed the pure simcraft driven mindset that has dominated"
Seems pretty clear that the ones who obsess over min maxing better get out of that mindset or deal with the consequences.
I much rather have heavy meaningful choice of covenant rather than a no brainer because everyone and their mom can ruin immersion by changing spec/talents/covenants at every single boss for le optimal build.
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At the end of the day, I’m still picking Venthyr over the other covenants, and if I do content and people whinge about me not having the “best” abilities for that kind of content, but I still get the job done, then sounds like those people have a personal issue they need to go fix.
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M8 I ve seen people use words like “suffer”, “miserable” if they are not allowed to use max dps covenant xD
def need therapist
pretty sure blizzard is filled with smart people doing some algebraic system to determine the classes balance at shadowlands endgame, then determining the covenants balance based off that. which means it clearly will scale once they put the initial equation of end game classes into the covenant function, and probably is why they haven’t announced all the class covenant abilities/perks.
I’m excited for shadowlands. I just need to decide on a main. At this point it could be any class for me, since I have every class at 120.
DK makes sense for the expansion lore. I just don’t want this to be a death night expansion.
Of course druids, palidans and priests have solid lore also.
I’m not sure about Shaman in this lore and may choose it. My shaman was my first 60 in vanilla.
In my opinion. Covenant differences should only just be purely cosmetic that don’t affect combat.
If you’re going to go through with this. You should just treat these combat abilities as another talent row that could probably only be accessed and changed somewhere in Oribos. Pretty much similar to the azerite trait reset.
I personally just think the system you are going for at the moment is a bad idea but I guess we’ll see what happens.
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Please don’t make me choose a covenant based on the type of content I play! Fantasy-wise, I would really lean toward Night Fae or Kyrian, for example, but I’m a raider and don’t do much rated pvp. As hunter, though, Night Fae and Kyrian seem focused on crowd control and pvp, whereas Necrolord and Venthyr seem much more geared to DPS raiders. I don’t want to have to choose between fantasy vs optimizing for the aspect of the game I want to play. Why can’t Blizzard instead have choices between covenants involve each covenant having a signature pvp talent, a signature movement/defensive skill, and a signature role skill (e.g., dps/tank/healer). By doing that choosing a covenant wouldn’t be forced as much by the type of content you might be most interested in. I pasted in the hunter skills below (Kyrian seems mostly about pvp, particuarly arenas with the focus on ignoring LOS while Night Fae is primarily about crowd control – both of which would be pretty situational and limited in raids). If I wanted to be a vampire or a necrolord I would have rolled death knight.
Resonating Arrow (Kyrian) - Fire a resonating arrow to the target location that fills the area with echoing anima for 10 sec. The effect causes your attacks to ignore line of sight to enemies in the area, and you have 30% increased critical strike chance against them.
Death Chakram (Necrolord) - Throw a deadly chakram at your current target that will rapidly deal [ 50% of Attack Power ] Shadow damage up to 7 times. Each time the chakram damages a different target, its damage is increased by 15% and you generate 3 Focus.
Bristleweed Trap (Night Fae) - Throw a trap at the target location that makes a path of thorny weeds up to 20 yds long between where you threw the trap from and the targeted location. Trap will exist for up to 30 sec. When an enemy approaches the trap, an area of bristleweed sprouts up for 10 sec, dealing [ 20% of Attack Power ] Nature damage every 1 sec and snaring enemies by 10%, stacking up to 5 times. If this reaches 5 stacks on an enemy, they are rooted for 6 sec.
Flayed Shot (Venthyr) - Fire a shot at your enemy, causing them to bleed for [ 250% of Attack Power ] Shadow damage over 20 sec. Each time Flayed Shot deals damage, you have a 15% chance to gain Flayer’s Mark, causing your next Kill Shot to be usable on any target, regardless of their current health.