In Shadowlands, players will be able to quest through four new zones ruled by ancient and powerful Covenants. Upon reaching the max level of 60, players will be able to join one of these Covenants as they continue to explore the Warcraft universe’s afterlife and the many mysteries and adventures that it holds.
Please get rid of the grind needed to come back to a covenant you’ve switched from.
Love this wording.
While it will be possible to switch Covenants, once you have betrayed a Covenant by leaving them, they will not readmit you easily.
This system looks really fun.
I have a question about the covenants and it mostly has to do with how the zones, quests, and rates will be handled. Ion said in the stream you can conduct the flow of anima to a certain area allowing you access to that area permanently which could contain rares or quests. Either one being able to drop toys, cosmetics, upgrades, mounts, etc… The question is are my friends or guildies who are not part of my covenant able to help in these endeavors and will they get rewarded for their aid?
If the zone quests worked more like WoD Garrisons where you could pick up quests from other garrisons if it didn’t spawn in yours allowing you and any friends you shared it with to go do the quests together and earn the rewards together.
Really just wanting to make sure choosing a covenant doesn’t limit the playtime with friends because we will all have our own quests and we can’t aid each other and gain no reward for it.
except you don’t actually betrayed any covenant…
the dev’s can’t create nice systems without making them either terrible or just overpowered.
How many hours will I be required to take out of my day in order to study / read everything for the new expansion in order to figure out what covenant I want to be?
Part of the leveling process is exposure to each covenant. That way you won’t have to read anything
This is correct. You’ll get to experience a taste of each zone and their associated Covenants as you level. You’ll even be able to test drive their abilities as you play through. That should give you a better idea of which Covenant is right for you.
So if my partner that I level with picks another covenant, how will that work when we group?
Spawned rares and rare elites are summoned by a Covenant member (within the Anima focused areas), but anyone can take part in killing them for loot.
Beyond that, daily quests, treasures, and the world quest you can get from conducting Anima to a specific area are only for you.
That said, this is only a small portion of the overall activities that are available to you and ultimately, you should choose to play in the Covenant you will enjoy most.
Any discussion going on about how the lack of freedom to move around from abilities might have negative consequences in the future?
This has a lot of the community worried
Lots of discussions are happening. This is why testing and feedback is so important. I can’t address your specific point, but can at least give you that there’s still a lot of work being done on this end of things.
Thank you for reply!
“Earning legendary recipes for the runecrafter in Torghast.“
Will the legendary recipes be different for each covenant?
If so, will you restrict the legendaries to the covenant?
I don’t want to be forced into a covenant just to obtain a certain legendary, then turn around and leave that covenant just so I can play the covenant I want to play, with the legendary from the covenant I didn’t want to play.
A max level of 60?
To me, this sounds like a fancy rewording of things we’ve been doing for the past 3 expansions. In place of earning reputation, we earn renown or favor, or whatever the wording is for the day.
As far as leaving one of the Covenants, it sounds like the old Oracles vs Frenzy Heart Tribe reputation grind from the original Lich King. You did some quests, then had to choose one or the other and do a ton of dailies to become exalted. You’re hated by one for being Favored by another. And sure, you can change but it takes forever if you do to get back to exalted from hated.
This doesn’t sound exciting to me at all. Sounds like a lot more World quests and dailies, just broken up in zones with new wording to try to hide the same stuff we’ve been doing for years. They do look pretty though.
So the word they use is betray, interesting. Well I’m all for betraying all of them since they are puny little things compared to the strengh of the Horde. Let’s hope we can find Garrosh in Shadowlands to make the Horde great again and conquer this new world in the name of the Horde.
Remove all covenant abilities, soulbinds, and conduits.
Allow classes to be fully complete the moment you hit the level cap with no additional grinds for xpac-specific bandaids required. Xpac-specific grinds for passives (azerite/soulbinds), active abilities (covenant abilities/essences), or procs (corruption) should never be a thing. They will always feel terrible because you put in all this work grinding to make your character feel less awful just to have the equivalent of having your paragon rep reset to neutral and all the rewards removed from your character.
Player power tied to covenants has a chance to ruin Shadowlands. Make the base classes fun instead of bandaid (azerite/soulbinds) after bandaid (essences/covenant abilities) after bandaid (corruption/conduits) that gets removed just to add a new set of bandaids next xpac.
Covenants will still have enough to make them “important” without soulbinds, covenant abilities, and conduits because they do gate things like content, xmogs, pets, etc., but they should not have anything that increases character power.