My thoughts on how to improve the covenant/soulbind system
I've been musing on the current covenant/soulbind system for a while. I think most of us agree that it has some pretty major shortfalls, if you wish to play different content types or heaven forbid different specs, you can very easily find yourself in a situation where you've hamstrung yourself with your choices. It's bad enough that we're having to collect different gear sets for different content, but throw the clunky covenant system into the mix and it becomes a complete pain in the ass.
My thinking is that it would be possible to slice up the existing system so that it remains flavourful, but not frustrating.
First up the covenant you pick at renown 1 would grant you access to the three covenant soulbinds and your signature ability (Fleshcraft, Kyrian Steward, Soulshift & Door of Shadows). At renown 40 (the point where you've proven to the shadowlands that you can actually be trusted), you can then undertake short quests to open up the soulbinds from every other covenant (nine quests in total).
The soulbind you've "equipped" grants you the appropriate covenant ability for your class (e.g. Pelagos would give Elysian Decree for DH's). You can swap out your soulbinds in a Shadowlands rested area or using a talent tome.
Next up, split out the conduits from the actual soulbind tree. It's a clunky crappy mechanic because not all conduits are equal for each class/spec. Instead add in the ability to create "sets" of conduits that you can name and flick out with the click of a button like we can with equipment sets. You could even have to spend anima to create a set (we're swimming in the sodding stuff after all). Your soulbind would still provide their own choice of options - just you've free will over what you want to pick rather than having to chose a specific one because you want to use a potency conduit.
In my head, the end result would be a fairly flexible system where you can pick and chose the right combination for the content/spec you're doing. If one day I fancied changing from Feral to Boomy for a bit of cheeky PvP action, I could just pick Nya instead of Plague Deviser M and I get access to Convoke without the unnecessary pain of changing covenants
Appreciate this is me as a non game dev coming up with ideas and the likelihood of them ever being implemented is pretty low :D
Posted Aug 24, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC
They need to remove the intentional friction, its excessive. No conduit energy - if you do a lot of different things (arena, RBG, M+ and raid) and want to maximize your specs, you notice the energy all day every day and are punished by it. If you play one aspect of gameplay you probably used like 3 conduit energy in the last 9 months and are one of the people telling others to just "dEaL WiTh iT". It's a dumb aspect of the system, remove it. The reasons for it being in the game are narrowly considered for one subset of players and it shows. (raiders)
Let me swap covenants at will, with the click of a button, with no cooldown whatsoever, no friction whatsoever, no needing to soothe the idiotic feeling of a Covenant I was already in. Catch renown up to where I was in the other covenant, or dramatically increase the catchup speed for all gameplay. Make all the covenant conduits one simple shared conduit that changes based on what covenant you are currently in, so it keeps its ILVL when you swap covenants.
Make conduits setups spec specific and swap within the tree when you swap specs, fuck it. I know I said remove conduit energy, but why not make the system more convenient while you are at it...?