It’s also going to have a mini-talent tree with other stuff in it from what I’ve seen on Wowhead
I think this just brings up a question the community ultimately needs to answer:
Do you want consequential choices, or not?
A consequential choice inherently demands that you’re going to lose something in gain for something else, whether that’s a strong PvP ability or a weak M+ ability, etc. It means that that ability, by design, can’t be good at everything in every situation.
I feel that the community doesn’t want choice. They want the best, for everything relevant to their class/role/content, and the only way you can get the best is if you have the ability to pick any ability at any time. That’s really the crux of the issue.
The community only wants choices so long as they can choose the best. It doesn’t matter what kind or the difficulty of content.
3 Likes
Soul binds + class abilities At the very least. You get less in the last 40 levels of gameplay now.
They aren’t going to balance the Covenant abilities well, especially not for launch. Which means you can and will pick the “wrong” one for your class/spec, especially after they do a tuning pass. So, this system is essentially guaranteeing you will be sub-optimal dps, unless you guess correctly which Covenant to pick.
I wish Covenant abilities would only be utility, or be the same performance for every Covenant with different animations, but… I don’t think the devs know what good game design is.
3 Likes
Yeah this is going to suck on my monk.
I want consequential choices within lore, thematics, expansion progression and cosmetics.
I want my gameplay to be as open and malleable as possible, whilst still allowing me to make decisions to cater my character towards something before I step in and go do it.
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Specific to Covenants: I’d like a consequential choice from a cosmetic and RP standpoint, and to have that choice make no difference to my character power compared to a different covenant.
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But no one is asking to choose the ability at any time - in particular in combat.
The idea is to be able to make a choice for the combat you’re about to engage in - the consequence being not being able to use the other abilities while you’re in combat.
When there’s so many kinds of content and roles to choose from - it’s impactful and significant being able to maintain this choice through the many variables and combinations of gameplay available to players.
Rofl. I mean that’s one way to do it 
Ok I come up with some good example
Boon of GONK and PAKU(horde side)
For alliance : horde player have a quest to choose permanant Loa for their zandalar city travel
Gonk totem give you running speed , reduce falling damage
Paku totem give you additional flight part to go around to city
After choose you unable to rechoose
What happen is Gonk is completely useless in long run, running speed are slower then mount and when flying is unlocked , blame! The end
When paku in otherhand give you faster travel (faster than flying mount) to moving around the big city
Gonk boon become punishment, its like you got nothing at all.when others with paku boon got quality of life on that zone forever.
How is that fair?
Oh man. Three abilities I cant use. Whatever will I doooooooo?
Yeah personally, safe option for Blizz would be make cosmetics, the generic covenant utility ability, spell effects and dame types, and possibly story line be an important choice, but with the class abilities be more of a talent row that can be chosen between.
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If Covenants are just cosmetics with a different story and “flavor” of the same set of abilities, that would honestly be awesome. I would be really happy to pick whichever one I thought fit the character best.
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I’m only going to address your first sentence.
I feel that that sentence is disingenuous at best. When I say “the ability to pick any ability at any time”, I don’t mean literally, at any time, including combat. I think it’s commonly known that “any ability at any time” is referred to by rest areas, Tomes, etc.
Last I checked competitive running around dazar alor wasn’t a very popular past time.
It doesn’t affect my combat gameplay, it doesn’t affect the content I enjoy, it’s just a bit of flavour that gave me a bonus in my capital city.
Frankly that’s the sort of thing I want to see more of
And that is where the choice can be made - and it’s impact and significance comes into play during combat - you know, where the game is actually played.
Not thinking about that choice and/or coordinating with your team can be beneficial or not.
So you can still have choice and significance. You don’t need to lock someone into one in order to have meaning.
Some of them sounded kinda cool until I realized this system is replacing talent tiers. Again. And after shadowlands, they’ll all be taken away. Again.
It would be akin to being able to give up RoP for Shroud with a tome. What if everyone could do that? What if everyone could just pop a tome and change anything they wanted?
I can’t help but to make the assertion that you’re deflecting (I’m not sure what a better word would be) the reasoning behind wanting to be able to make any ability change at any time by using ‘teamwork’.
Secondly, by virtue of being able to pick any ability at any time, there’s no choice. You’re going to pick the best for whatever role/content you’re doing. That’s not a choice.
If I can go to a rest area and choose the best M+ Tank ability and do M+, and then go to a rest area afterwards and choose the best DPS PvP ability and go do PvP, that’s not a choice.
Do you want consequential choices, or not?
What about if it still required you to go to a specific place but it didn’t set you back to do so.
Most people aren’t necessarily advocating to change their covenant on a whim like with times for talents. More to have the ability to go somewhere and change it back to their DPS one after a day of tanking keys.