Well hopefully this means they’ll be adding story context for picking a covenant.
Since at the moment it’s only a gameplay feature with no context or reasoning given to it, and actively contradicts the questing experience.
It was a backpack with an anvil in it. Haha pranked.
I always saw these covenant as a choice of choosing between a Sith or being a Jedi, fundamentally different power sets even though the core of what they are is the same with separate view points. If you want to use force lightning when you were a goody two shoes before, it’s gonna take throwing some grandmas around and making questionable choices to get in with the Sith again, not just paying some credits and flipping that aspect of your power on the fly.
It doesn’t happen very often and I’ll be the most excited for fights where people who chose what icy veins told them to do is the wrong decision and that another covenant choice will work better in that situation to give those other covenant choices more chances to shine. I’m hoping this tuning pass they’re talking about will help make things a bit more rounded but it’s also why I appreciate folks who play specs that aren’t simmed the best and still perform fantastically.
At the end of the day, the people pushing for world first will play literally every class and covenant choice down to an exact mix that changes between each fight to get the edge. If it turns out shockadins can do some absurd amount of damage for a specific fight, you’ll see a ton of those in the race.
And if folks are waiting on specific Covenants hoping to find like, a mage with the Venthyr as their covenant, the punishment for those kind of groups being so picky on top of probably waiting on IO scores will be having to wait absurd times to form a party.
I think when there’s a full world of people doing content to feed data back to the team they’ll be able to see where dominance is if the tuning passes don’t do their job.
Besides, lets be honest, if you’re not having Swolekin buddies as your faction, you’re choosing wrong anyways <3.
TBH Im not surprised. After the Azerite gear and corruption debacle players told blizz wasnt gonna work and they did no changes of corse they’ll continue to waste time on borrowed power systems ignore players feedback and refuse to admit failure and push wonky pigeon hole systems. Whats truly negligent is they used up most their time on those systems of the Covenants and left many specs in need of a rework the exact same.
WW monk, MW monk, Survival hunter, ret paladin, and Im sure others. Yeah Spreist got attention but it was far from the only spec that desperately needs changes. The #pulltheripcord I never seen as truth or an option to them. They have this idea and will push it just as they did with many times in the past and once again it will be the players to suffer as they say we told you so. Its getting past annoying and just gotta laugh at this point to keep sane.
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omg they are? i dont pvp but man so many stupid ideas keep popping up from blizz
yes
Dude, i cant even see your goal posts anymore. You had no idea what he said, yet still you come in here, claiming that he never said it existed. Theres a literal quote saying: “It exists”. Now you try to spin this very straight forward quote into something that it is not.
While they might have it completly coded, finished and tested at the time of this quote, you have to assume that this quote means that it is on the roadmap and is able to be used upon release if the need arises. If he now says, that it is not possible, you have nothing left. Not any kind of code, no even the tangible implementation. One can only guess why he said that, but the assumption has to come that he just wanted to “buy time” and calm people so he can come out later and say “well, now its too late”. All of which has already been assumed at the start of this debacle, hence why people started to criticize this this early and this harshly. To try and avoid the situation that seemingly and foreseeable has arisen now.
He’s just saying that, because players started #PullTheRipcord and they want it to stop apparently. 
If their truly isn’t a ripcord then Shadowlands will go splat, probably not as fast as BFA. But it will.
I said it from the start people were debating the wrong thing, that is why they stated it’s not as simple as just giving people access to the abilities.
It was obvious just from looking at the system that all the power progression had to be tied together. Meanwhile people are asking for the ability to change covenant abilities and having a talent row instead etc etc which just wouldn’t work.
It’s why I said from the start, if they want to make it more flexible the only way they could do it was to instead grant access to each of the soulbinds and have the soulbinds for the covenant tie into what abilities your were given.
It’s the only way you get flexibility without messing with the power system interactions. (Although even then they would still have to do something about the covenant conduits, either acquisition or use or both)
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I think this ignores the very real issue of players not wanting to play a particular convenant, wanting to play a different one, but not being able to for power purposes.
This also doesn’t address the issue of covenant abilities being only useful in niche activities.
If anything, I think scrapping the Covenant abilities would go a long way.
So if the issue is mainly the ability, scrap the ability.
Don’t need to destroy conduits and soulbinds, just the actual ability. Give us an extra level 60 talent row to compensate, call it a day.
Yeah, because blindly sticking to their guns with Azerite Gear in 8.0 when everyone was yelling that it was a crap system really worked out phenomenally.
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It’s not, people were just acting like it was.
Conduits and soulbinds affect the abilities, both signature and class, that’s the whole reason the abilities can’t be disassociated from the covenants. It’s all one entity.
If they just came up with a way to open up only the class abilities and the covenant conduits that impact those abilities, I’d be totally fine with that. I don’t need to swap between Fleshcraft and Soulshape.
Honestly that is why I’ve been saying the first soulbind for each covenant should just be universal. You basically unlock them through the campaign quest anyway.
Then just have those soulbinds tie in to what abilities you have.
Soulbound to Pelagos? Your covenant abilities are the Kyrian.
Soulbound to Niya? Your covenant abilities are now the Night Fae ones. Etc.
No matter how you do it soulbinds and abilities have to be kept locked together. Regardless of whether you want to swap between fleshcraft and soulshape for example, those soulbind trees and conduits will affect their specific class ability.
Some of them are things like triggering the effect twice etc.
Unless you had access to them it wouldn’t make much difference having swappable abilities because only having access to one that is able to be “empowered” by your covenant would make it leagues above the other regardless of how much better suited they are. Ie it doesn’t actually address the problem.
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You’ve been able to class-swap for 16 years? News to me.
I don’t think anyone was expecting, or even asking for, a system where swapping the abilities didn’t include swapping the soulbinds. The soulbinds and conduits were on beta when Ion made the ripcord analogy in the first place.
I meant do everything on 1 character and be viable. You could raid or pvp without being pigeonholed into one or the other by some restriction.
And it didn’t failed, so hurray;
It means he probably misspoke.
Yes, the game is never balanced enough, so all you have to do now is chose a covenant.
No it wasn’t, most classes are not good at everything, you usually have to make a character for each content to achieve it.
Classic bait and switch.
Ion used the ripcord in an attempt to calm down people who were anxious about the system on a platform he knew a lot of min/maxy/harder core players.
And now it never existed and it’s fundamentally impossible.
You cannot consider it anything else but a blatant lie.
He said the system exists, it did not.
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Stop being hyperbolic then. Skill, class, spec, gear will all matter far more than covenant for how successful you can be in any given content. Every covenant will be “viable”.