"they want to try to save the system before throwing it out."

Community General Discussion
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From the wowhead article for the interview

They want constructive feedback and solutions to the problems, without sacrificing the idea of the covenants.

I want us all to provide ideas here that’ll help to that end.

One of my suggestions was to choose your first, and earn the ability to swap to others for anima/long cooldowns by reaching exalted in the respective zone.

We pledge to the covenant that we want to, and gain their power, then we earn that power from the others through “service” to them.

Power gains within your chosen covenant are far easier than others, but we can still earn others.

added: It’s real easy to say the system sucks and they should just buckle, but it’s been said before, and I can promise you they’re skipping past posts like that. Think more along the lines of “how would I fix it if I couldn’t replace it”. That would be more constructive.

“Just make it cosmetic” has no doubt been considered in the office before they even put alpha up.

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My suggestion is that we pick it like we pick a class. You make your choice and you get the aesthetics and powers that come with it. No mix and matching!

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Planning for failure, better than pigheadedly sticking to a system that is a failure.

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They can’t “fix” this because it’s not a problem. The kinds of players who are complaining about covenants won’t be satisfied until they can have all the best abilities for each pull without waiting.

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im wondering if a better way of doing this is to remove the abilities from behind the covenants, and add them as either a few new tiers of talent points somewhere or abilities acquired based on lvl.

For covenants you could lock cosmetic items such as mounts, visuals, glows even spell effects and colors this way you get to pick the covenant what you like the look of the most personally and it wont effect your in game performance.

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But there’s a middle ground they can try to achieve, and by being constructive with feedback we can help them toward it

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They want to try and see if Covenants can manage to balance it out. If it works? Great. If it doesn’t? They’ll just throw out the idea and allow everyone to swap to anything.

Let’s hope they keep to their word. They’ve been doing well so far. knocks on wood

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I think that’s what they’re trying to avoid, because it takes a lot of the weight away from the choice

Makes the covenants more of a costume party than an order of great power

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I think that we should be able to unlock Covenant abilities by completing story quest chains and gaining rep with the factions. So a system like this:

Regardless of what Covenant you join, you are still able to choose whatever abilities you want from any Covenant. That way choosing a Covenant is a purely visual choice, while gaining Covenant power is something that takes time to fully unlock but gives you a wide variety of choices in abilities when you have them all. Joining a Covenant gets you the the set of armor, but also an enhanced visual appearance for that Covenant’s abilities in a manner similar to Rank 4 Azerite Essences.

So lets say you have the four factions, Kyrian, Fae, Venthyr, and Necrolord. Just as an example, lets say each has an offensive ability, a defensive ability, a cleave ability, and a group buff ability. You start with one ability from each Covenant unlocked, but you get them in different orders. So you get the Kyrian group buff ability first, but their offensive ability last, while the opposite is true for Venthyr.

By ‘leveling up’ your Covenant rank with Kyrian and Venthyr, you gain an additional ability that you can use until you have all four. You are able to choose one offensive, defensive, cleave, and buff ability from any combination of Covenants. So if you want three Necrolord abilities but the defensive ability from Night Fae, you could do that assuming you have at least three Necrolord abilities unlocked.

This would essentially mean that we have a second ‘Talent Point’ system that is gradually unlocked over time by gaining rep and doing story quest chains. All players would eventually have all Covenant abilities unlocked if they keep getting rep and if they finish each faction’s quest chain.

And they could even fit the Maw in there somehow by making ‘Maw Challenges’ for each faction, like completing certain objectives within the Maw while only using a single faction’s Covenant abilities in order to upgrade them similar to Essences. So if you clear a run of the Maw while only using Venthyr Covenant abilities, you get slightly upgraded Venthyr Covenant abilities.

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Covenants should only be cosmetic fluff differences, then the powers should be stuff you can choose which is the best for you (being able to switch, if applicable, from when soloing perhaps to doing something like raiding/mythic stuff.)

Otherwise, people will just feel locked in with “sites in the know” saying this is the “only choice” for “a raider at X level”/whatever.

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Generally I like to be able to customize my load outs, and Covenants throw a wrench into that. I’m still really excited for them, because they sound like a fun and fulfilling system and I’m looking forward to trying them all out. It also sounds like SL will be alt friendly so that will help.

I am fairly certain no amount of feedback during testing will change that Covenants are going to be a tough, but meaningful choice at launch. I also suspect this choice will be made 5 minutes into playing the expansion.

So my suggestion is that toward the end of beta testing (now would be too early) they give every WoW player a chance to try out the Covenant abilities, Soulbinds and legendaries planned for launch on an open test server, fully unlocked so players that want to see the abilities in action before they make the choice can do so.

Giving people a chance to experience what they are choosing would probably ease a lot of tension, while being optional at the same time so people that want to go in blindly can do so.

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They can’t, anymore than they could just toss azerite gear mid-expansion. By the time it becomes clear the system is beyond salvage, the entire expansion will be irrevocably built on it.

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I just hope if there’s one that better than the rest it’s not the stupid vampires. I hate vampires for some reason. Guessing it’s probably D&d reasons now that I think about it.

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That’s the main concern honestly. Like, it’s great that they’ve said removing it is on the table as a last resort, but I don’t want to have to wait until 9.3.5 for that to happen if it ends up being as big a disaster as predicted.

We’ve seen Blizzard stubbornly cling to dumb ideas in the past. In some cases (Pathfinder for instance) they’re still doing it. Personally I just don’t trust Blizzard to be able to make that call if and when it needs to be made.

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They should make covenants account locked. Every character on that account is tied to that single covenant. Only way to try the others is to have multiple accounts.

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Oh the amount of salt that would cause.

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It’s a talent tier, it shouldn’t be gated behind anything time consuming.

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Dude what?! Ravenloft is dope!

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Or maybe they just separate abilities from aesthetics? You know like a lot of us are asking for even though we are not min-maxers?

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That’s what I’m saying. When I ran ravenloft my character was nicknamed “the vampire dentist” because I loved killing them and taking their teeth to make jewelry. Plus Strahd is the best D&d villain.

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