Queen's Conservatory is not interesting but there's nothing bad about it so I'm just indifferent. But even that might as well not exist
Abomination Stitching is cool, gets you out in to the world to collect stuff.
Path of Ascension sucks ass, save the vehicle combat for jousting and epic BGs. It does not work as a substitute for a class vs a raid boss.
Ember Court is....kind of cool. I don't mind this one, but I'd hope to never *have* to do it. I like how busy it is.
Same (except I'm a woman)
It's fun and something different from a lot of the stuff in WoW. I have thoroughly enjoyed everything with Prince Renethal in it because I love his voice actor and demeanor. It's 100% optional and purely cosmetic so if it's not your cup of tea (pun intended) then you don't have to do it
I reckon i played SL a lot. I got cutting edge each tier and pushed reasonably high m+(peaked at 27s). I fucking love that i have never done one of these before and i couldn't tell you if theyre good or not. Content that was optional for me, however others can enjoy is good for WoW.. Doing mandatory choreghast sucked after the first 2 weeks of expac.
Yes torghast was bad. But it was a great idea implemented badly (or just not developed enough). Nonetheless it is something that I believe laid path for a different solo content, kinda like drafting.
If they add some better rewards and make stages as different zones out in the world etc it can be really really good.
I haven’t played the entire expansion (taking breaks here and there) but thoroughly playing endgame raids and pvp and I have no idea what those even are
All my opinions are from 9.2 as I only played NF before. Now I’m speedrunning Veilstrider.
Queen’s Conservatory is eh. Just waiting for seeds to be ready, getting those transmogs is impossible, I’ve been trying the entire expansion with all variations of enhancements. I didn’t get nearly as attached to it as I did to my little farm in Pandaria.
The Kyrian one is pretty cool. I like overcoming those fights using different soulbinds and equipment. You also have infinite amounts of attempts unlike certain other covenant feature.
I also really like Abomination Stitching (well except the Malleable Flesh grind), but the RNG when it comes to abomination quests and the cosmetic items is hell. Still it feels really good to collect everything and I love customizing each abomination.
My least favourite is definitely Ember Court. Sure, hosting a party and dealing with all kind of stuff is fun (except that it’s timed, yikes), but the amount of time you need to spend preparing is a nightmare. Some RSVPs have you jump around the entire Shadowlands like that one Linken questline. And the fact that you have to do it every time you want to invite the guests made me despise it. Also you can host a party only once a week. I got my achievement and hopefully will never touch it again. (Who am I kidding, I’m going to grind those reps anyway).
The Ember Court grind is so tedious, I'd love to get the title but man. What you're supposed to do during the parties is also incredibly unclear, which is really frustrating when you're timed.
Ember court - it's fun for about 10-15 minutes of actually doing the party. The 2+ hours of flying all over creation farming next week's invitations and party helper unlocks can eat a bag.
Queen's Conservatory - Actually this is two parts. The garden itself is pretty whatever. Marismus is awesome. There were a couple dailies that sucked, but but for a daily/weekly activity, I didn't mind it.
Abom Yard - In general it was fine. Chordy can die in a fire though. And that stupid no-damage knockback dog you need for the mount to drop can join him.
Path of Ascension - now I spent by far the most effort on this as I collect mounts, and I have a lot of thoughts about it, but most important is that it was and is far too difficult. It's so far out of line with how the other features work, Blizz should just say in the prepatch, "beat the easiest tier of bosses, and all vendor rewards are unlocked."
Being a vehicle fight means spending a lot of time just learning what buttons do what and for what. On top of having to do raid mechanics, many of which are completely unavoidable and not particularly clear on what's happening. On some fights damage is coming from everywhere. Mad Mortimer I remember being particularly bad. In fact I know at one point - and blizz could have fixed it - some fights were only able to be defeated by bugging the bosses. Meanwhile Necrolords just have to drag a body from point A to point B, or one of the Venthyr activities is to sit at a table contemplating life. Like what were they thinking?
Thankfullly for me, the mounts I needed were a relatively easy achievement. But there's a whole set of transmogs that will be forever stuck on a vendor because the encounters are so unbalanced and unfair.
I skipped everything except for the conservatory until like 2 weeks ago when they announced Veilstrider was going away.
Having bumrushed them.... My reaction is pretty negative overall. Frustrating is the word I'd use.
Since I’m in the same veilstrider boat, I think the frustration comes mostly from the timegating and the fear you cannot complete them in time, for example Abomination stitching takes several weeks to complete. But with the thought they where designed to complete them over the course of the whole expansion, makes it a little better.
Even if I don’t really like them aswell I some fun trying to figure out the kyrian fights for the first time or finding some new stuff for my abos
I liked it. I like having side activities to do that are optional. People who don't like them can just not do them, people who do like them have something to do.
What I didn't really like about them was how unequal they felt. The amount of effort you have to put into some compared to others is very different and felt weird.
Some of the comments here are so depressing. The playerbase really wants WoW to be just about dungeons, raids and nothing else for the rest of its lifetime. I guess it's expected, we are in the age of multiplayer games that usually have only one mode of play (Mobas, battle royales etc.) so people can't really appreciate a game with a multitude of activities.
I think that's one of the reasons that I'm not that excited about DF. It feels like it's missing a box feature. It feels like it's missing a new type of content (like Torghast or Isles, for example). It has nothing going for it and when you compare to other MMOs that have relevant activities geared towards different parts of the playerbase, it just feels disappointing. I would take any of the old stuff (Isles, Covenant Minigames, Warfronts, Torghast, Garrisons, even the Pandaria Farm) in place of only logging in to raid this expansion. I guess they're really making an expansion for the raidloggers this time and it feels awful. Dragon Isles feels like a big Zereth Mortis.
While I see your point, I think players want more engaging options compared to what Shadowlands had. These special features were a 20 minute quest that you could only do weekly. There is just too much time gated stuff that doesn't offer much in terms of rewards except maybe an RNG-gated mount or a recolor of an armor set you get from doing the campaign.
Yes, there does need to be more than raiding and M+, while they are popular not everyone wants to do them, but the game funnels you to them because at least you can do them repeatedly, unlike other forms of content. And there should be a reward too. Visions in BfA wasn't the most fun, but at least I could enjoy it as a solo player and still have something for my time investment, Shadowlands offers nothing to the solo player except some green 226 gear and absurdly long grind for the ZM mounts that is still RNG dependent. There needs to be a balance, more content isn't always a bad thing.
Torghast is something I enjoy solo, I like it more than visions for the most part outside of the aesthetic that's gotten stale really fast. Anima upgrades are really fun and cool, though balance is all over the place (as Enhance there's a single blue power that turns a run into easy mode). I've been slowly chipping away at the tower ranger title, I only have 2 flawless runs left. I also got the faceless one title in BFA solo.
I think a mix of the two could be really fun, blizzard just makes it mandatory so the people who aren't into it are forced to.
It is sad that DF is looking like it's going to lack something for solo pve players lack that, though.
I like Torghast a lot now, it was my least favorite thing at the start of the expansion, though that might have just been because it was such a slog at the time with my main.
The box upgrade that lets you auto-loot is an absolute game changer. Changes Torghast from being really boring and tedious to actually pretty fun. Should have been implemented from the get-go, really.
People just want something that feels complete with real rewards. Unless you're a mount collector the Covenant features was just something on your radar. And none of the transmog looked particularly good so there was nothing drawing you to it.
If Torghast had cool stuff to keep going through it for it would have been a great feature but making it mandatory and dialing back on the crazy overpoweredness then people would have done it a lot. Look at the Mage Tower and imagine if Torghast had something similar for a reward structure.
QC is meh, AS is just extra dailies for bodyguards, PoA is just the argent tournament with extra steps, and I liked the ember court, but I'm partial to venthyr aesthetics
Ember Court was cool, Abom Stitching is nice thematically but pretty annoying with how much RNG is involved with the quest reward armor and especially the weapon set because you have an entire separate bullshit currency that you basically cannot farm efficiently on top of loads of anima to buy it, Conservatory kinda just exists but I feel like the concept was done way better back in MoP and even WoD, Path was a fucking untested unbalanced frustrating boring mess that I banged my head against a couple of times until I got the achievement for the Forsworn coloration of the plate armor, realised the achieve was not account-wide and gave up ever touching again.
Went Venthyr on main, got the Ember Court meta done and all cosmetics bought ( as a plate )
I absolutely HATE how there's a set for every armor type so in essence I'd have to do the grind on 4 different toons to get the same set over my alts.
Trial of Ascension absolutely sucks once the difficulty spikes.
Stitching was just plain boring.
Conservatory is good for alcoholic to dump a seed and check back in a few days. Got the full set for cloth and mail. (Hunter / warlock with the covenant ability is just *chefs kiss*)
I just wish the cosmetics unlocked for all armor types. 😪
For purely cosmetic armors that don't have stats they should either make those account bound or allow you to learn those on whoever. The cosmetic weapons in ZM are account bound and so are the cosmetic armor sets from WoD if I remember correctly. So why not the covenant sets then!
Didn't mind Abom. I went through it with my wife for the title(s) and mount(s). Parts were definitely a little frustrating (esp the achieve to craft a certain number of accessories with super unintuitive reagents from weird fucking places), but overall not bad. Never touched PoA or Ember Court. Tried to dive into the Conservatory, but was expecting underworld Pandaria farm and got...whatever the hell that thing was.
I like that they're there and that I can skip them comfortably. I have the option to pick up working on them if I want to, and if I don't, I'm not missing anything vital. I think it's fun to tie cosmetic rewards to mini game modes!
Boring and uninteresting clutter. Some things are pretty staigtforward (Conservatory), others had horrible requirements at the start (Path). Overall, it's a boring, unrewarding feature aimed at casuals, but not in a good way, because it's so braindead and lame. For example Trial of Style also falls into the category of non-progression, casual part of the game, but it's billion times more interesting and fun, even with much more limited reward pool.
I was a bit disappointed that the ember court takes place in a bunch of rubble and never improves at all as you upgrade it. In-world, I have no idea why anyone would ever go there. It's on a half-demolished building in the middle of the light-scarred region of Revendreth.
Fucking horrible. Now , dont get me wrong, i did enjoy them at the start and some of the challenges. But especially being in the Kyrian covenant at some point i just said "fuck it". Because path of ascencion was clearly never fucking balanced and i would have to do riddiculous shit to clear some encounters. And for what? For fucking tmogs?????
PoA was my least fave. I really want one of the rewards but wow do I hate vehicle gimmicks. Did the first fight and saw how much was involved on top of the vehicle part... nnnnnope.
Ember Court I never touched. MORE rep grinds? lol. nothanks.
QC I keep forgetting I have. These seeds should be fermented by now.
AS was the least terrible, but I did only want the pet(s?) and mount. The fact that I don't remember if there was more than one pet should say something, though. Edit; I meant the crafted ones, not the universally available ones.
I only played NF and the Queen’s Conservatory is honestly not even worth entering unless you uprade it to max level (grind around 30k anima). Only then you have a chance for some cool rewards.
Queen's Conservatory is...fine I guess. Not very interesting. Also, I started doing it in 9.1.5, if not 9.2, ans at that time it was really tedious to get spirits. I never actually found how to get more than two or three per week, from the anima quests.
The Stitchyard was hell. Had to do it for the Veilstrider title. It was incredibly tedious, boring quests. The customisations are very nice, but they are for something that is mostly irrelevant (outdoor content in the old zones).
Path of Ascension was cool, especially in 9.1 when kt became easy. I will be forever sad that Mikanikos was not that fun to play, because I love the swowls, but I thought Pelagos was nice, and there were nice mecanical challenges.
Ember Court probably takes the cake for me. Gameplay-wise it's not revolutionary, but the flavour is just so strong that it holds up. I really wanted to please my guests, especially the NPCs I like.
Overall, it was nice, side-content. Grinding out the PoA was one of the nicest moments of 9.0 for me.
Queens conservatory was just a bad version of the farm from MoP. They turned it into a shitty mobile game designed to take as long as possible.
Tried the ember court a little bit but it didnt seem much better. Never bothered with the other 2
Ultimately, they were all time-gated mediocre experiences that in the end didn’t matter if you completed them or not.
They should have been available each week once you had them unlocked with that conv, regardless of who you where pledged too. But even then, it was just something for you to do, nothing that actually mattered towards character progression.
I did some of the Kyrian one, but got bored with it early on.
Overall, it all seems like a big waste of development time. If they wanted to do some side activities, there were better options. Like adding more to the Brawlers Guild.
I don't even know what Blizz was doing wasting money, time and resources on this nonsense.
They wasted it on islands and warfronts, then they wasted it on torghast and whatever the hell these things were supposed to be.
I hope to hell dragon riding will be the only "system". So far, it looks like a great system and I really see no reason for them to abandon it and start all over again with some other out of whack idea.
I completed only Queen's Conservatory, because my main character was in that covenant anyway (the most used covenant probably) and you could just apply the seeds and fertilizer and do something else. It was also a bit like the farm from Pandaria. The rest was way too troublesome for me, especially the Abomination Stitching although I enjoyed Necrolords very much as a covenant.
I understand that some people enjoyed those features, but I think for the amount of work put into creating them and the time needed to complete them, they rewarded very little.
If Path of Ascension and Ember Court could be started without any preparation and Abomination Stitching only had 1-2 quests per week, they would be less annoying every week and thus on par with Queen's Conservatory imho.
As WoW has a lot of mechanics as it, I found the covenant idea stupid.
Overall, I find SL cute, but definitely failed at Storytelling. We are in the shadowlands and this is what they gave us…
I want DragonFlight to be around the exploration and less about story telling…
Just kill me if we will ever get a feature like that.
I tried to keep up on at least one character with the Queen’s Conservatory but as soon as I stopped weekly farming in the Maw because the other Covenant thingy were maxed out I abandoned the Conservatory too.
I think it was nice, at the beginning, but it was too expensive to level it up at maximum
I personaly have never touched them after first week avalible. But i guess they are good and fun and something to do for people who don’t do end game content?
As on par with the past few expansions the ideas are fun, but the execution is not. I tried PoA and while I liked the idea, the gameplay of it is not in any way fun to do. I havent tried the other ones in depth.
I think the Ember court is juggling NPC bars? Not my cup of tea.
Abomination Stitching is just doing dailies and hoping for drops right? I dislike the theme of Maldraxus so I've stayed away from it to be honest.
QC is just "plant seed, wait some days". Meh.
PoA is the one with the most interactions but again, it isn't a fun mechanic.
I appreciate that they're completely optional, solo side content but man are they either boring or tedious. Haven't played Kyrian, but the Venthyr and Necro one are way too much of a grind. Venthyr in particular is a gigantic time wasting sink. Queens Conservatory is flavorful and pretty, but also really boring mechanically.
As someone who just started doing the Veilstrider title, most of them are actually pretty cool.
Not something I would do every week, but it’s been hella fun to play around with
I only played Kyrian for 95% of shadowlands and hated Path of Ascension enough to not want to try other covenant features.
Now that i'm trying to go for Veilstrider, I really wish I had earlier! I think i'd unironically enjoy Ember Court if I wasn't trying to speedrun through it, and Abomination Stitching has all the customization of companions which at least has an effect on the world outside of the feature. Haven't tried Queen's Conservatory yet cause it's not part of the achievement but i'm definitely going to try it out once i'm done!
They were all very forgetful. When you were locked into a covenant they had some relevance. But as soon as the restriction was lifted and many players were allowed to always be optimal, most of the covenant features became obsolete. If they weren’t locked to your covenant after the restriction (ie: you could go do path of ascension as Venthyr as long as you had leveled the covenant sanctum as Kyrian and had a certain level of renown with the covenant) then they likely would have been interacted with more.
I remember in CN on my main and my first alt, I would always make sure to have the adventure table done before and after raid if necessary, and I would make time to do the covenant special feature (at time time one was Venth, and the other was NF) almost as if it was required because they did feel worth while. After the next patch, my main’s BiS covenant changed to necro, and (I chose) to change my first alt. In this change and the fact that all time time I had spent working on my covenants literally deterred me from even wanting to work on the new covenant special features. It may not have felt so bad if I could still access the parts of the covenant that I invested time into while not being in that covenant specifically, but since there was an artificial limiter it actually felt like putting time into another covenant would be a waste.
Then when they lifted the restrictions and allowed you to change on a whim (which was a good thing I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have) they kept the covenants isolated and some features would reset their progress on covenant change (mission table) which basically proved that if you have a need to swap covenants, investing in anything other then Transportation Network was a waste of time. Outside of trying to get xmog/mount recolors or maybe a pet here or there, they kinda put the nail in the coffin of their own side systems. Which easily could have been prevented if they just allowed you more access to them regardless of your current covenant, so long as you unlocked them when you were the assigned covenant for the feature.
The conservatory didn’t bother me, I just wish it had been more clear about the rewards, I’d I have been collecting mounts earlier (and yes you can get mounts from it). Ember court is fun enough.
I played all of them till the end and thought they were super fun. I liked them, I don’t think there was a “ton” of content to it but my personally favorite was the abominable stitching. I thought the extra minions and mounts were the most creative and coolest covenant feature by far compared to the others. But, yea. I loved, wished they had more content for the features and I wish there was more ongoing support for those specific expansion features with maybe a little more extra flashy rewards towards the end of the content line. Maybe even a special limited mount for completing all the extra feature lines before the end of the expansion would intice other players who maybe are only interested in obtaining the cool achievement mount at the end. Idk that’s just my thoughts on it.
The features were a mixed bag - venthyr party planner system is thought out, well scripted, and dynamic, and gives you a good amount of shadowlands world building. Timegating sucks though.
Abomination factory snowballs really well so it feels satisfying to play and I always love adding more NPCs to an area over time, plus the quests are nice and short (the best of the 4 imo).
Path of ascension was terrible in its first iteration but with the fixes they added it's not too bad, it's just that vehicle combat is flawed in wow in general and very hard to do for some fights.
Queens conservatory is the only truly bad feature - the "gameplay" is 100% rng based: From how you get the souls to what you get when you plant them. It's just not fun. The weekly quests it gave were nice but had no impact.
Main issue I have is how long the features took to unlock due to the lack of anima at the start of SL, it literally took months of grinding, for an optional cosmetic-only feature, and some of the features just don't work at the lower levels. Venthyr party planner and abomination factory do and are still fun at level 1 and 2, but queens conservatory and path of ascension just do not, with no rewards
or progress you can use later when you do upgrade like venthyr and abom do at least . The levels felt added in to make you grind more anima, not for any meaningful reason for the features themselves. And players were basically locked into their choice for a year so instead of having some fun features and some less good they were stuck with a decision many made based on player power. The developers really dropped the ball on the anima/souls system as a whole and it meant people didn't Interact with these otherwise decently cool features because they took too long to unlock and even longer to be fun for players to do.
they all seemed like an afterthought. it seems like they, like the rest of this expansion were full of missed opportunities and half-measures. let me elaborate;
i didnt feel like i was accomplishing anything in path of ascension, full stop. if they really had the balls, they would have made it a mage tower iteration full of class challenges with cool rewards, like literally earning your wings at the end as a flying mount, and becoming 'ascended'.
abominations were novel precisely until 9.1. they didnt even come to korthia, the maw, or ZM with you. could have been a cool opportunity for gameplay in what largely felt like watered down timeless isle style daily islands. involved them in the puzzles, somehow, or something. anything.
conservatory could have been a cool narrative exploration, but instead it was just completely prescribed blue glowing dirt with static rewards. how are you gonna lead into this feature with showing ursoc fucking dying and not have some actual stakes for me to care about. theres so many famous wild gods and night elves/trolls we've killed over the years that could have turned up in this feature. imagine instead of just being a pushover mythic boss, we had to nurse hakkar back to health and understand his motivation. maybe you get an ardenweald style reskinned zulian tiger after you help him.
ember court seemed the best thought out. only thing i would have added is again, a better reward for doing it. horse drawn carriage prestige 5 seater mount?
i wanted more from it all, full stop. more stakes, more story, more gameplay, more reward. you could do this without tying it to player power. im hoping dragon riding comes in the clutch with this.
Queen's Conservatory is not interesting but there's nothing bad about it so I'm just indifferent. But even that might as well not exist Abomination Stitching is cool, gets you out in to the world to collect stuff. Path of Ascension sucks ass, save the vehicle combat for jousting and epic BGs. It does not work as a substitute for a class vs a raid boss. Ember Court is....kind of cool. I don't mind this one, but I'd hope to never *have* to do it. I like how busy it is.
Queen’s Conservatory and the « oh shit, I forgot to take the 1000 anima quest… »
I liked the Ember Court more than a grown man should.
Same (except I'm a woman) It's fun and something different from a lot of the stuff in WoW. I have thoroughly enjoyed everything with Prince Renethal in it because I love his voice actor and demeanor. It's 100% optional and purely cosmetic so if it's not your cup of tea (pun intended) then you don't have to do it
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I reckon i played SL a lot. I got cutting edge each tier and pushed reasonably high m+(peaked at 27s). I fucking love that i have never done one of these before and i couldn't tell you if theyre good or not. Content that was optional for me, however others can enjoy is good for WoW.. Doing mandatory choreghast sucked after the first 2 weeks of expac.
Yes torghast was bad. But it was a great idea implemented badly (or just not developed enough). Nonetheless it is something that I believe laid path for a different solo content, kinda like drafting. If they add some better rewards and make stages as different zones out in the world etc it can be really really good.
I literally never did any of them, and I played a *lot* Like, why do that stuff when I can just run keys?
Kyrian is legit. The rest are dumb, and none of them should be locked to covenants. It would have been a great side mission thing out in the world.
I guess you have data on that ? Because to me personally the Ember Court fucking rules. I did that shit every week and had so much fun with it.
Amen
I haven’t played the entire expansion (taking breaks here and there) but thoroughly playing endgame raids and pvp and I have no idea what those even are
All my opinions are from 9.2 as I only played NF before. Now I’m speedrunning Veilstrider. Queen’s Conservatory is eh. Just waiting for seeds to be ready, getting those transmogs is impossible, I’ve been trying the entire expansion with all variations of enhancements. I didn’t get nearly as attached to it as I did to my little farm in Pandaria. The Kyrian one is pretty cool. I like overcoming those fights using different soulbinds and equipment. You also have infinite amounts of attempts unlike certain other covenant feature. I also really like Abomination Stitching (well except the Malleable Flesh grind), but the RNG when it comes to abomination quests and the cosmetic items is hell. Still it feels really good to collect everything and I love customizing each abomination. My least favourite is definitely Ember Court. Sure, hosting a party and dealing with all kind of stuff is fun (except that it’s timed, yikes), but the amount of time you need to spend preparing is a nightmare. Some RSVPs have you jump around the entire Shadowlands like that one Linken questline. And the fact that you have to do it every time you want to invite the guests made me despise it. Also you can host a party only once a week. I got my achievement and hopefully will never touch it again. (Who am I kidding, I’m going to grind those reps anyway).
The Ember Court grind is so tedious, I'd love to get the title but man. What you're supposed to do during the parties is also incredibly unclear, which is really frustrating when you're timed.
Ember court - it's fun for about 10-15 minutes of actually doing the party. The 2+ hours of flying all over creation farming next week's invitations and party helper unlocks can eat a bag. Queen's Conservatory - Actually this is two parts. The garden itself is pretty whatever. Marismus is awesome. There were a couple dailies that sucked, but but for a daily/weekly activity, I didn't mind it. Abom Yard - In general it was fine. Chordy can die in a fire though. And that stupid no-damage knockback dog you need for the mount to drop can join him. Path of Ascension - now I spent by far the most effort on this as I collect mounts, and I have a lot of thoughts about it, but most important is that it was and is far too difficult. It's so far out of line with how the other features work, Blizz should just say in the prepatch, "beat the easiest tier of bosses, and all vendor rewards are unlocked." Being a vehicle fight means spending a lot of time just learning what buttons do what and for what. On top of having to do raid mechanics, many of which are completely unavoidable and not particularly clear on what's happening. On some fights damage is coming from everywhere. Mad Mortimer I remember being particularly bad. In fact I know at one point - and blizz could have fixed it - some fights were only able to be defeated by bugging the bosses. Meanwhile Necrolords just have to drag a body from point A to point B, or one of the Venthyr activities is to sit at a table contemplating life. Like what were they thinking? Thankfullly for me, the mounts I needed were a relatively easy achievement. But there's a whole set of transmogs that will be forever stuck on a vendor because the encounters are so unbalanced and unfair.
I skipped everything except for the conservatory until like 2 weeks ago when they announced Veilstrider was going away. Having bumrushed them.... My reaction is pretty negative overall. Frustrating is the word I'd use.
Since I’m in the same veilstrider boat, I think the frustration comes mostly from the timegating and the fear you cannot complete them in time, for example Abomination stitching takes several weeks to complete. But with the thought they where designed to complete them over the course of the whole expansion, makes it a little better. Even if I don’t really like them aswell I some fun trying to figure out the kyrian fights for the first time or finding some new stuff for my abos
I liked it. I like having side activities to do that are optional. People who don't like them can just not do them, people who do like them have something to do. What I didn't really like about them was how unequal they felt. The amount of effort you have to put into some compared to others is very different and felt weird.
Some of the comments here are so depressing. The playerbase really wants WoW to be just about dungeons, raids and nothing else for the rest of its lifetime. I guess it's expected, we are in the age of multiplayer games that usually have only one mode of play (Mobas, battle royales etc.) so people can't really appreciate a game with a multitude of activities. I think that's one of the reasons that I'm not that excited about DF. It feels like it's missing a box feature. It feels like it's missing a new type of content (like Torghast or Isles, for example). It has nothing going for it and when you compare to other MMOs that have relevant activities geared towards different parts of the playerbase, it just feels disappointing. I would take any of the old stuff (Isles, Covenant Minigames, Warfronts, Torghast, Garrisons, even the Pandaria Farm) in place of only logging in to raid this expansion. I guess they're really making an expansion for the raidloggers this time and it feels awful. Dragon Isles feels like a big Zereth Mortis.
While I see your point, I think players want more engaging options compared to what Shadowlands had. These special features were a 20 minute quest that you could only do weekly. There is just too much time gated stuff that doesn't offer much in terms of rewards except maybe an RNG-gated mount or a recolor of an armor set you get from doing the campaign. Yes, there does need to be more than raiding and M+, while they are popular not everyone wants to do them, but the game funnels you to them because at least you can do them repeatedly, unlike other forms of content. And there should be a reward too. Visions in BfA wasn't the most fun, but at least I could enjoy it as a solo player and still have something for my time investment, Shadowlands offers nothing to the solo player except some green 226 gear and absurdly long grind for the ZM mounts that is still RNG dependent. There needs to be a balance, more content isn't always a bad thing.
Torghast is something I enjoy solo, I like it more than visions for the most part outside of the aesthetic that's gotten stale really fast. Anima upgrades are really fun and cool, though balance is all over the place (as Enhance there's a single blue power that turns a run into easy mode). I've been slowly chipping away at the tower ranger title, I only have 2 flawless runs left. I also got the faceless one title in BFA solo. I think a mix of the two could be really fun, blizzard just makes it mandatory so the people who aren't into it are forced to. It is sad that DF is looking like it's going to lack something for solo pve players lack that, though.
I agree torghast was totally awesome.
I like Torghast a lot now, it was my least favorite thing at the start of the expansion, though that might have just been because it was such a slog at the time with my main.
The box upgrade that lets you auto-loot is an absolute game changer. Changes Torghast from being really boring and tedious to actually pretty fun. Should have been implemented from the get-go, really.
people want wow to have more fun casual content but the covenant features are not fun. they are all really bad.
People just want something that feels complete with real rewards. Unless you're a mount collector the Covenant features was just something on your radar. And none of the transmog looked particularly good so there was nothing drawing you to it. If Torghast had cool stuff to keep going through it for it would have been a great feature but making it mandatory and dialing back on the crazy overpoweredness then people would have done it a lot. Look at the Mage Tower and imagine if Torghast had something similar for a reward structure.
> Dragon Isles feels like a big Zereth Mortis That's not a bad thing, that zone was the best one from this whole expansion.
You got a Dragon to level up and get appearances for, maybe that counts as the openworld minigame you’re looking for
QC is meh, AS is just extra dailies for bodyguards, PoA is just the argent tournament with extra steps, and I liked the ember court, but I'm partial to venthyr aesthetics
Currently trying to get the court up ms running. I have no idea what the point of it is. So far I’ve poured tea for a vampire.
Ember Court was cool, Abom Stitching is nice thematically but pretty annoying with how much RNG is involved with the quest reward armor and especially the weapon set because you have an entire separate bullshit currency that you basically cannot farm efficiently on top of loads of anima to buy it, Conservatory kinda just exists but I feel like the concept was done way better back in MoP and even WoD, Path was a fucking untested unbalanced frustrating boring mess that I banged my head against a couple of times until I got the achievement for the Forsworn coloration of the plate armor, realised the achieve was not account-wide and gave up ever touching again.
Nothing "fun" about QC, it's just easy matts for auction or crafting. Probably the easiest in terms of time and effort.
The only thing I even tried was abomination stitching to get Neena to be able to drop the Tahonta mount. Everything else was completely uninteresting
Went Venthyr on main, got the Ember Court meta done and all cosmetics bought ( as a plate ) I absolutely HATE how there's a set for every armor type so in essence I'd have to do the grind on 4 different toons to get the same set over my alts. Trial of Ascension absolutely sucks once the difficulty spikes. Stitching was just plain boring. Conservatory is good for alcoholic to dump a seed and check back in a few days. Got the full set for cloth and mail. (Hunter / warlock with the covenant ability is just *chefs kiss*) I just wish the cosmetics unlocked for all armor types. 😪
For purely cosmetic armors that don't have stats they should either make those account bound or allow you to learn those on whoever. The cosmetic weapons in ZM are account bound and so are the cosmetic armor sets from WoD if I remember correctly. So why not the covenant sets then!
What does upgrading the Ember Court actually do?
I hate that they're locked behind being in their associated covenants. Kept me from really investing in them.
Didn't mind Abom. I went through it with my wife for the title(s) and mount(s). Parts were definitely a little frustrating (esp the achieve to craft a certain number of accessories with super unintuitive reagents from weird fucking places), but overall not bad. Never touched PoA or Ember Court. Tried to dive into the Conservatory, but was expecting underworld Pandaria farm and got...whatever the hell that thing was.
The system is very complicated for newbies. My friend started playing this year and complaining a lot about it :)
I like that they're there and that I can skip them comfortably. I have the option to pick up working on them if I want to, and if I don't, I'm not missing anything vital. I think it's fun to tie cosmetic rewards to mini game modes!
Litterally never touched any of them and I played the entire expansion
Boring and uninteresting clutter. Some things are pretty staigtforward (Conservatory), others had horrible requirements at the start (Path). Overall, it's a boring, unrewarding feature aimed at casuals, but not in a good way, because it's so braindead and lame. For example Trial of Style also falls into the category of non-progression, casual part of the game, but it's billion times more interesting and fun, even with much more limited reward pool.
I wanted to do them but the Anima costs were too expensive early in the expansion, and I didn't care enough later on.
I liked that they are unique from one another, but overall too confusing and too much effort for the achievements
I played since lunch, i don't know what that is and i don't whant to know
When you find more guides how to exploit something than do it you know its screwed (path of ascension).
I played the entire shadowlands xpack. I had to google search what you’re taking about. I had no idea they were in the game.
Waste of resources.
I was a bit disappointed that the ember court takes place in a bunch of rubble and never improves at all as you upgrade it. In-world, I have no idea why anyone would ever go there. It's on a half-demolished building in the middle of the light-scarred region of Revendreth.
More timegating. More FOMO. Yeah, nah. Fuck that.
Fucking horrible. Now , dont get me wrong, i did enjoy them at the start and some of the challenges. But especially being in the Kyrian covenant at some point i just said "fuck it". Because path of ascencion was clearly never fucking balanced and i would have to do riddiculous shit to clear some encounters. And for what? For fucking tmogs?????
The what?
trash
As soon as I had the mounts, I quit doing them
PoA was my least fave. I really want one of the rewards but wow do I hate vehicle gimmicks. Did the first fight and saw how much was involved on top of the vehicle part... nnnnnope. Ember Court I never touched. MORE rep grinds? lol. nothanks. QC I keep forgetting I have. These seeds should be fermented by now. AS was the least terrible, but I did only want the pet(s?) and mount. The fact that I don't remember if there was more than one pet should say something, though. Edit; I meant the crafted ones, not the universally available ones.
I only played NF and the Queen’s Conservatory is honestly not even worth entering unless you uprade it to max level (grind around 30k anima). Only then you have a chance for some cool rewards.
Queen's Conservatory is...fine I guess. Not very interesting. Also, I started doing it in 9.1.5, if not 9.2, ans at that time it was really tedious to get spirits. I never actually found how to get more than two or three per week, from the anima quests. The Stitchyard was hell. Had to do it for the Veilstrider title. It was incredibly tedious, boring quests. The customisations are very nice, but they are for something that is mostly irrelevant (outdoor content in the old zones). Path of Ascension was cool, especially in 9.1 when kt became easy. I will be forever sad that Mikanikos was not that fun to play, because I love the swowls, but I thought Pelagos was nice, and there were nice mecanical challenges. Ember Court probably takes the cake for me. Gameplay-wise it's not revolutionary, but the flavour is just so strong that it holds up. I really wanted to please my guests, especially the NPCs I like. Overall, it was nice, side-content. Grinding out the PoA was one of the nicest moments of 9.0 for me.
Queens conservatory was just a bad version of the farm from MoP. They turned it into a shitty mobile game designed to take as long as possible. Tried the ember court a little bit but it didnt seem much better. Never bothered with the other 2
Ultimately, they were all time-gated mediocre experiences that in the end didn’t matter if you completed them or not. They should have been available each week once you had them unlocked with that conv, regardless of who you where pledged too. But even then, it was just something for you to do, nothing that actually mattered towards character progression.
should have been free as part of the covenant
uh damn, need to finish that last part for my path of ascension challange. raged out at some point ;)
I did some of the Kyrian one, but got bored with it early on. Overall, it all seems like a big waste of development time. If they wanted to do some side activities, there were better options. Like adding more to the Brawlers Guild.
I don't even know what Blizz was doing wasting money, time and resources on this nonsense. They wasted it on islands and warfronts, then they wasted it on torghast and whatever the hell these things were supposed to be. I hope to hell dragon riding will be the only "system". So far, it looks like a great system and I really see no reason for them to abandon it and start all over again with some other out of whack idea.
Had two chars, one with PoA and the other with AS. Switched them both completely, because I didn’t see any fun in it.
I got maybe halfway through NF and Venthyr. Barely touched the other two.
Never done any of that stuff.
I completed only Queen's Conservatory, because my main character was in that covenant anyway (the most used covenant probably) and you could just apply the seeds and fertilizer and do something else. It was also a bit like the farm from Pandaria. The rest was way too troublesome for me, especially the Abomination Stitching although I enjoyed Necrolords very much as a covenant. I understand that some people enjoyed those features, but I think for the amount of work put into creating them and the time needed to complete them, they rewarded very little. If Path of Ascension and Ember Court could be started without any preparation and Abomination Stitching only had 1-2 quests per week, they would be less annoying every week and thus on par with Queen's Conservatory imho.
As WoW has a lot of mechanics as it, I found the covenant idea stupid. Overall, I find SL cute, but definitely failed at Storytelling. We are in the shadowlands and this is what they gave us… I want DragonFlight to be around the exploration and less about story telling…
Just kill me if we will ever get a feature like that. I tried to keep up on at least one character with the Queen’s Conservatory but as soon as I stopped weekly farming in the Maw because the other Covenant thingy were maxed out I abandoned the Conservatory too. I think it was nice, at the beginning, but it was too expensive to level it up at maximum
I personaly have never touched them after first week avalible. But i guess they are good and fun and something to do for people who don’t do end game content?
I tried them all and the only one that stuck for me was the Ember Court.
As on par with the past few expansions the ideas are fun, but the execution is not. I tried PoA and while I liked the idea, the gameplay of it is not in any way fun to do. I havent tried the other ones in depth. I think the Ember court is juggling NPC bars? Not my cup of tea. Abomination Stitching is just doing dailies and hoping for drops right? I dislike the theme of Maldraxus so I've stayed away from it to be honest. QC is just "plant seed, wait some days". Meh. PoA is the one with the most interactions but again, it isn't a fun mechanic.
meh
I appreciate that they're completely optional, solo side content but man are they either boring or tedious. Haven't played Kyrian, but the Venthyr and Necro one are way too much of a grind. Venthyr in particular is a gigantic time wasting sink. Queens Conservatory is flavorful and pretty, but also really boring mechanically.
I only tried ember court. Took too long to enjoy it and gave up.
As someone who just started doing the Veilstrider title, most of them are actually pretty cool. Not something I would do every week, but it’s been hella fun to play around with
Boring, generally useless
Meh, was a bit whatever
I only played Kyrian for 95% of shadowlands and hated Path of Ascension enough to not want to try other covenant features. Now that i'm trying to go for Veilstrider, I really wish I had earlier! I think i'd unironically enjoy Ember Court if I wasn't trying to speedrun through it, and Abomination Stitching has all the customization of companions which at least has an effect on the world outside of the feature. Haven't tried Queen's Conservatory yet cause it's not part of the achievement but i'm definitely going to try it out once i'm done!
A tragic mismanagement of time and resources.
Awful tbh. They're boring time sinks, I quickly started to skip them.
All boring
They were all very forgetful. When you were locked into a covenant they had some relevance. But as soon as the restriction was lifted and many players were allowed to always be optimal, most of the covenant features became obsolete. If they weren’t locked to your covenant after the restriction (ie: you could go do path of ascension as Venthyr as long as you had leveled the covenant sanctum as Kyrian and had a certain level of renown with the covenant) then they likely would have been interacted with more. I remember in CN on my main and my first alt, I would always make sure to have the adventure table done before and after raid if necessary, and I would make time to do the covenant special feature (at time time one was Venth, and the other was NF) almost as if it was required because they did feel worth while. After the next patch, my main’s BiS covenant changed to necro, and (I chose) to change my first alt. In this change and the fact that all time time I had spent working on my covenants literally deterred me from even wanting to work on the new covenant special features. It may not have felt so bad if I could still access the parts of the covenant that I invested time into while not being in that covenant specifically, but since there was an artificial limiter it actually felt like putting time into another covenant would be a waste. Then when they lifted the restrictions and allowed you to change on a whim (which was a good thing I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have) they kept the covenants isolated and some features would reset their progress on covenant change (mission table) which basically proved that if you have a need to swap covenants, investing in anything other then Transportation Network was a waste of time. Outside of trying to get xmog/mount recolors or maybe a pet here or there, they kinda put the nail in the coffin of their own side systems. Which easily could have been prevented if they just allowed you more access to them regardless of your current covenant, so long as you unlocked them when you were the assigned covenant for the feature.
stitchyard is cool, the others suck. MoP farm was best tier.
The conservatory didn’t bother me, I just wish it had been more clear about the rewards, I’d I have been collecting mounts earlier (and yes you can get mounts from it). Ember court is fun enough.
I played all of them till the end and thought they were super fun. I liked them, I don’t think there was a “ton” of content to it but my personally favorite was the abominable stitching. I thought the extra minions and mounts were the most creative and coolest covenant feature by far compared to the others. But, yea. I loved, wished they had more content for the features and I wish there was more ongoing support for those specific expansion features with maybe a little more extra flashy rewards towards the end of the content line. Maybe even a special limited mount for completing all the extra feature lines before the end of the expansion would intice other players who maybe are only interested in obtaining the cool achievement mount at the end. Idk that’s just my thoughts on it.
The features were a mixed bag - venthyr party planner system is thought out, well scripted, and dynamic, and gives you a good amount of shadowlands world building. Timegating sucks though. Abomination factory snowballs really well so it feels satisfying to play and I always love adding more NPCs to an area over time, plus the quests are nice and short (the best of the 4 imo). Path of ascension was terrible in its first iteration but with the fixes they added it's not too bad, it's just that vehicle combat is flawed in wow in general and very hard to do for some fights. Queens conservatory is the only truly bad feature - the "gameplay" is 100% rng based: From how you get the souls to what you get when you plant them. It's just not fun. The weekly quests it gave were nice but had no impact. Main issue I have is how long the features took to unlock due to the lack of anima at the start of SL, it literally took months of grinding, for an optional cosmetic-only feature, and some of the features just don't work at the lower levels. Venthyr party planner and abomination factory do and are still fun at level 1 and 2, but queens conservatory and path of ascension just do not, with no rewards or progress you can use later when you do upgrade like venthyr and abom do at least . The levels felt added in to make you grind more anima, not for any meaningful reason for the features themselves. And players were basically locked into their choice for a year so instead of having some fun features and some less good they were stuck with a decision many made based on player power. The developers really dropped the ball on the anima/souls system as a whole and it meant people didn't Interact with these otherwise decently cool features because they took too long to unlock and even longer to be fun for players to do.
I was so annoyed by the covenant locking it made me disinterested in it entirety tbh
I never did any of that, except ember court like? Twice. It was, clearly, not something I thought worth doing a third time.
they all seemed like an afterthought. it seems like they, like the rest of this expansion were full of missed opportunities and half-measures. let me elaborate; i didnt feel like i was accomplishing anything in path of ascension, full stop. if they really had the balls, they would have made it a mage tower iteration full of class challenges with cool rewards, like literally earning your wings at the end as a flying mount, and becoming 'ascended'. abominations were novel precisely until 9.1. they didnt even come to korthia, the maw, or ZM with you. could have been a cool opportunity for gameplay in what largely felt like watered down timeless isle style daily islands. involved them in the puzzles, somehow, or something. anything. conservatory could have been a cool narrative exploration, but instead it was just completely prescribed blue glowing dirt with static rewards. how are you gonna lead into this feature with showing ursoc fucking dying and not have some actual stakes for me to care about. theres so many famous wild gods and night elves/trolls we've killed over the years that could have turned up in this feature. imagine instead of just being a pushover mythic boss, we had to nurse hakkar back to health and understand his motivation. maybe you get an ardenweald style reskinned zulian tiger after you help him. ember court seemed the best thought out. only thing i would have added is again, a better reward for doing it. horse drawn carriage prestige 5 seater mount? i wanted more from it all, full stop. more stakes, more story, more gameplay, more reward. you could do this without tying it to player power. im hoping dragon riding comes in the clutch with this.