The balancing of the covenants in WoW Shadowlands is just beginning. Isn’t that way too late? Some players are very concerned.
There are less than four weeks left before World of Warcraft Shadowlands is released. While the beta is still in full swing, some players are unhappy with the progress. Only now has Blizzard announced that the covenant abilities will be properly balanced. This is far too late for some players, and they are calling for: Delay Shadowlands before it becomes a disaster. In the meantime, one could engage with the 10 biggest mysteries of WoW …
What’s going on? Blizzard has announced that they finally want to take care of the balance between the covenants and their abilities. With the latest update of the beta, significant changes have already been made, and more are yet to come.
It’s about making the covenants with their different bonuses, such as soul bonds and covenant abilities, equal to each other. No covenant should be the best in every situation. All should offer strengths and weaknesses that make them strong in different situations, but always at least sensible.
This is how the players react: In the comments on wowhead and the WoW subreddit, there are many loud voices. With less than a month remaining, the concern is growing that there might not be enough time for comprehensive balancing. Some even believe that Blizzard should postpone the release of Shadowlands again to take more time and present the expansion in a polished state.
- “And they still won’t succeed by the launch of the game.”
- “Damn, way too late … Just delay the game already …”
- “I mean, come on, Blizzard. Less than a month before release and it’s not even close to being finished. Please delay the expansion and finish it first.”
Why are the players so dissatisfied? Covenants are one of the biggest features of Shadowlands, and the associated possibilities for character power are considerable. That such an essential feature is only to be balanced towards the end of the beta phase is met with a lot of misunderstanding and fuels the fears that Shadowlands will become an “unfinished mess”.
All completely normal – really now
To be honest, I can only understand the worries of some players to a limited extent.
The fact is that balancing precise numerical values is usually the last step. First, the abilities were created, tested for their usability and fun, and now it’s time for fine-tuning. Essentially, “only” the numbers need to be adjusted so that all covenants are approximately equal. This is, of course, a challenging task with so many abilities and interconnections with individual classes, but a typical one.
This time, unlike with the Azerite system, it is not primarily about a system being completely broken. Essentially, these are just fine-tuning adjustments. Individual numerical values that need to be adjusted. This is exactly the work that you should expect at the end of a beta – detailing adjustments.
Yes, Shadowlands will probably not appear in a perfect state. But that has never been the case – for any single expansion of WoW. Even after balancing, one ability or another will be, at least temporarily, too strong or too weak. However, the developers now have good options for applying hotfixes within a few hours without the player needing to download a new patch.
Cortyn Nightshade
WoW specialist demon from MeinMMO
But how do you see the whole thing? Should Blizzard delay Shadowlands again? After all, patch 9.0 has apparently also been postponed …
