10% damage increase on the entire raid is the difference between another 100+ wipes and multiple weeks of gear or going to chill easy farm. You have 16k achieves stop trying to claim others are no life when you have managed to get 16k achieves while literally not doing current content.
Seriously dude this is the biggest load of bantha fodder. It’s extremely easy to make happen. Just remove the cooldown between swapping covenants boom done still have to grind up to 40 in all 4 but it’s not a massive pain in the butt to swap. If they were real nice they could also remove the rando quest that you have to do to reprove “loyalty”
Tharnn runs up, pulls Juri’s Ripcord. His parachute deploys. “Surprise, Ripcord Pulled.” 
Have a Great Day.
/#Stay Safe, Stay Healthy
My opinion: Don’t pull the ripcord, instead buff all of the “non-meta” abilities to be equal in power. So you’re still getting a substantial buff, but because every choice and everyone is also getting buffed, it doesn’t matter as much which choice you make (thus you can choose aesthetics).
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Its easy technically, but not possible given the design goals.
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Thdlock of Limit roasted the covenant system throughout beta on his Twitter and still roasts it to this day. The covenant system is largely reviled among the mythic raiding scene.
I’m a mythic raider, and I can tell you I despise it because it feels needlessly limiting. I like talents because I can try out different playstyles to suit the situation I’m up against. I would love to try out Resonating Arrow or Flayed Shot but I simply have to be Night Fae for Wild Spirits; it’s such an essential part of a raiding Hunter’s toolkit entire boss strategies can hinge on it. I’ve actually gone and made a second Hunter just to try out Venthyr in PvP; should I also make a third for Resonating Arrow? It’s ridiculous. Talents are such a better way of expressing this sort of thing and experimenting with a diverse set of playstyles is something Blizzard should be encouraging.
Are you talking about Timbaeslice? I actually know him, and he’s far more knowledgable on this topic than you could ever hope to be.
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There is less diversity now since you are punished more for experimenting. So everyone just goes with what the top players says are the best.
100% agree this is how I feel too.
I like a mix of abilities you can change to fit the situation and abilities you choose once/infrequently and make the best of them in all situations. Covenant abilities feel fine to me as the latter.
Though it would not bother me at all if they were not tied to cosmetics. I also wish we had been given a new talent row on top of covenant abilities.
Lastly, in practice the balance between abilities is still pretty awful. So I don’t blame people for wanting the choice not to matter.
[quote=“Rorrand-wyrmrest-accord, post:192, topic:938274, full:true”]Cosmetics and theme aside, both of the covenant abilities and the soulbinds contribute to this feeling. It wouldn’t feel as impactful if it was just a talent you could swap at any rested area.
[/quote]
This “feels over reals” tripe is breathtaking. The game would absolutely be better if you could more freely switch between covenants because that allows you to get more variety out of one character; you know, so you can actually invest in that character and not have to level multiple of the same class to get the same variety. “Impactful” is nothing but a lazy buzzword used to justify bad design choices.
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to late now… instead of pulling the rip cord 9.1 is cutting up and giving you more crap that wants you to wish there was a rip cord to pull.
Ok, then what’s the point of restrictions at all? Should you as a hunter be able to learn healing spells so that you can take on the role on dungeons? Or will you admit that there is some inherent value in the exclusivity of class-specific abilities?
Which is not to say other games can’t and/or don’t facilitate that sort of gameplay, but that’s never been WoW’s design path. The argument that impactful choices should be removed and WoW classes should just be like CoD loadouts just feels really weird to me.
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My biggest gripe with covenants being locked is that it takes away the fun. I get bored of using the same ability over and over. It would be nice to swap to different covenants every day or week or just because. Not about min maxing or being meta or anything. I would just like to try out different abilities at different times and in different situations without feeling punished for it, because I find that fun. But apparently fun isn’t allowed…
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Why is “ripcord” the term everyone landed on? Makes no sense…
As it turns out, there’s a middle ground between “no restrictions at all” and “absolutely all the restrictions” and pretending it needs to be one or the other is disingenuous; as is extrapolating and pretending that I’m arguing that classes should be loadouts, so you can put a stop to that right now, thanks.
Classes being permanent choices make sense because they are intrinsic parts of the character’s identity; even more intrinsic than the race, even. When we want the experience of a different class we make a new character because they are one and the same. Covenants aren’t that. They are borrowed power specific to the Shadowlands expansion that you get at max level, and their scope is just a couple abilities and a bunch of passive effects. The most important part, the ability, is much more in line with the scope of talents. The different abilities make the covenants specialise in different things (ideally) in the same way as talents on the same row. It makes natural sense to be able to freely swap between them to get the full experience.
Now, because of the dumpster fire that is the Conduit system, it wouldn’t be sufficient to just put all the abilities on a new talent row. The system could have started that way, but we can’t really dial it back to that now. But at a bare minimum they should have NO cooldown for switching covenants and a substantial catchup mechanism for soulbinds in the different covenants. They should be facilitating gameplay variety and choice, not restricting it.
There’s also the matter of extent, here. Yes, we committed to a permanent choice when choosing our class. Do we really want that to branch out into 4 more (semi) permanent choices on top of that? Remind yourself that you’re defending a system that necessitates levelling multiple of the same class. I don’t know about you, but I’m quite attached to and invested in this character. I do not want to have to level multiple nameless alts of the same class just for this expansion’s ephemeral systems design nonsense that demands that if I want to get the full experience. This Hunter is my main and is irreplaceable; I should be able to do all Hunter stuff on this Hunter and this one alone.
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I personally enjoy players being punished for playing the game in a way that deviates from how I want it played.
I like the restrictions. I’m sad they even implemented the ability to change covenants at all.
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Heres how I would have done it. Get to renown 40 and finish the campaign and be able to swap back to that covenant without issues.
It takes about 2 weeks now to get there now…and honestly could probably be done in a week.
After that, want to swap covenants, go to oribos and just select it, or simply start working on another.
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This idea that it’s those awful, no good min-maxers who are being punished by the Covenant system is headscratching to me.
Min-maxers aren’t losing in the Covenant system.
Roleplayers are.
Nevermind that the term “min-maxer” appears to have gone the way of “Mary Sue” in having lost all of its original meaning and is now applied to any character the user doesn’t like, statistics show that the vast majority of players with any focus on progression have chosen their Covenant based on their spec’s BiS, and then come here to complain that they don’t like the Covenant that has their spec’s clearly strongest ability.
What makes an RPG an RPG is that it fuses roleplaying and game mechanics together to enhance one another. In an ideal RPG, the game mechanics reinforce the roleplay, and the roleplay invests more meaning in the mechanics. The RP and the G work together to make an experience greater than the sum it its parts.
The Covenant system breaks that idea over its knee. By locking mechanical power with significant imbalances to roleplaying choices, instead of making the RP and the G work together, it forces them into conflict against each other. It forces players to choose a single answer to two completely different questions: what will help me play the game better, and what is true to my character’s identity? And if a player’s objectively best mechanical Covenant and their preferred roleplaying Covenant aren’t the same, they’re just SOL.
The statistics show that the vast majority of players doing any kind of content where power choice can make or break their game are choosing based on the dreaded “min-max,” not roleplay. Because of course they are. Video game RPGs by their nature lean more heavily on the mechanical side of RPGs than their tabletop counterparts because the computer can’t fudge mechanics the way a living DM can to account for differences in character power. The game is balanced assuming a certain level of character power, and then it’s up to the players to reach that level. Of course the majority are going to choose the power option that most helps them reach that point, especially in an MMO where knowingly choosing a weaker option puts them at a disadvantage for not only the content itself, but for preference in group building to enter that content in the first place.
Min-maxers aren’t the ones losing in the Covenant system.
Roleplayers are.
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Not just Role players- casuals who don’t care much about RPing also lose out hard.
Instead of having the freedom to test things out on their own and have fun playing with all the different combinations, they’re restricted from doing so. This then has the consequence of just pushing more and more people towards the “meta” that sims the best because if you don’t have the ability to make meaningful choices from content to content, you might as well just pick what’s algorithmically the best.
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If people in the game want to have any hope of progressing through the content such as raids, the main content Blizzard ever cares about, they will follow whatever the meta is or bis.
Blizzard were made aware of the concerns about the covenant abilities and we were told to, “trust them, it will be relatively balanced.” Oh look at that. They werent. Anyone still believing they have any intentions or capabilities of balancing the game remotely after corrupted gear… In sorry, are just plain naive.
There is no meaningful choice with the covenants. Telling your players to choose between cosmetics or the best abilities for their class is not acceptable, nor meaningful. Its giving them no real choice at all.
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Care to elaborate on this?
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