No, they were a waste of dev time. That time could have gone towards developing the classes themselves, but Blizzard instead opted to waste time developing temporary systems that could never have any real depth because they would have to be adapted to work with every class.
Also, 4 covenants doesn’t mean 4 times the content. It means the same amount of content divided into 4. You get 1/4th the usual content unless you play 4 characters to play with all the covenants. Suramar from legion had more content than all covenants combined, and what makes it worse is that all the covenant campaigns have obvious padding quests which only exist to stretch out what little content there is.
So your preference is to be forced to make distasteful choices and then commit yourself to playing as you are ordered to play and completely disregard what you like to do? How odd you consider that entertaining. No wonder you don’t understand why people who have been blindsided by this have quit the game rather than feel manipulated.
Ditch the covenant powers, just make it like any other faction where you grind rep for armor weapons cosmetics pets and mounts. And DONT lock story behind covenants or covenant rep, you should gain rep while playing the story not the other way around. Right now to get the full story you have to either grind 4 covenants back to back to back to back on your main or level 4 chars to max level then each one grind out rep. I still don’t know where the naru from the raid came from, or what the story is for going to all but 2 dungeons, and there is a very good chance I never will.
The more they restrict us the more time we spend playing. In Legion is was not enough for them because we ended up just farming AP on our main spec and than swapping to a different one and adding a bazillion AP meaning it wasn’t even really a wall we had to get over.
So they gave us AZ pieces in BFA, which was OK at first because we complained and they gave us a way to change our traits making gold our wall to different specs unless we wanted 3/6/9 additional AZ pieces of gear in our bags, and that wasn’t all that bad once they brought in the TR vendor, but even before the vendor farming a couple of additional pieces wasn’t even that bad.
But than they brought out the HoA essences and now we had to farm this or that and in some cases we had to even farm game mode we didn’t like or were not even very good at, like farming BoTE for 30K honour (which was originally 50K). If you didn’t PVP much that could take a long time and for some it was BiS. Than corruption and we went farming again, and than the corruption vendor and we went farming yet again.
The good thing about BFA compared to SL is that once you had finished your BFA farm you were done, you could swap essences and traits and customise how you wanted to play and that’s great. The farm was long and tedious, but once you were done, you were done. You might not have ever been done done, but you could get to a point and just say “Yeh I am happy with this” and not need to go again.
But with SL? Man oh man if you want to swap powers you have to farm, and farm, and farm. And if you don’t have the iLVL like for casuals or those who just don’t do raids or M+, than renown takes forever and re-farming 40 renown levels? It’s been about a week now on my DH and I haven’t done one raid, no M+ and no PVP and I am stuck because LFG barely gives anything and I can only get 2 guaranteed a week from the weekly quests.
Than there is the mandatory wait period to swap, so for anyone who is swapping it puts you out of action from high level content for as long as it takes to swap and get your renown levels back up.
Covenants were a bad idea.
I see where they were going with it.
I see what they TRIED to do with it.
…
But they ignored all feedback and, unsurprisingly, their new eight-interconnected-systems-nobody-wanted-or-asked-for take on joining a special afterschool club failed.
Blizzard are hell bent of our play time, how they rolled out covenants I don’t think could have been any worse than what it is. Your BiS tank setup could be covenant A, but your DPS is covenant B, and that is for M+, your raid setup could be covenants A/C and your PVP might be B/D. It’s all over the place and this whole meaningful choice crap, the whole “Play whatever you want” garbage, it doesn’t fly with the community.
I am seeing over on reddit and other forums, constant posts, screenshots and videos of people being kicked from groups because they are not the right spec or covenant. Like how a shaman is being picked for SD, but is not be Venthyr and is being kicked in favour of a Venthyr shaman because the groups needs both lust and access to the anima thing.
We warned it would happen, they said it would not happen, but it is happening and it’s all on Blizzard, they give us a system that lets us exclude players and we are using it to exclude players.