Mage Main & Covenant Choice for Shadowlands

Straw Poll Results

The straw poll results are in. Looks like I’m going mage. To be fair, the decision wasn’t just made – particularly given that mage has been leading the poll essentially the whole time. It was interesting to see DK come from behind to tie for second place. Now… I was originally just planning on using this poll for main, but, given that I’m probably going to play 3-4 total characters (alt friendliness pending), AND I wanted to play one of each armor type (mostly for those sweet legendary sets), this poll sets up an ideal top 4.

I’ll likely make a post about the others later, but this one will go into, just a little bit, about my specialization and covenant choices. Information about Mage Covenant choices, specs, with some links to pertinent information and videos are below.

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Last Weekend of Shadowlands Prep

Shadowlands Loading

I’ve been slacking a bit. Both in writing this article and also doing the things that will be contained in it. I intended to write this (and start doing the things) several days ago. I was to be the “last week of prep” and not last weekend, but, here we are. This isn’t necessarily a guide for everyone, because we all have different things left to do, but it could give you some ideas to tackle before launch.

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Shadowlands Release Delayed & Pre-patch Date

Collector's Edition WoW

Wow… so, in the end, while my release date prediction was originally spot on… the pre-patch guess was horribly wrong (it’s now slated for October 13) and with todays announcement, I’m retroactively wrong about the release date too (see wowhead post). More importantly, though, we now have more BFA than we expected and a longer wait until the new expansion… is this good?

I was just today watching this new Bellular video and… well his thoughts on the expansion state echo mine (though, since I just got beta 12 hours ago, my opinions are mostly from streamers, youtubers, and friends feedback) and probably say it better than I could… so I’ll just link the video below.

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What to do Before Shadowlands: A Compilation

Given that the expansion prepatch has to be soon… right?… right!? Every content creator is taking their shot at telling us what to do before then… and it seemed to me that bringing a bunch of these together was better than rehasing the same ideas myself. Here ya go.

Wowhead’s Overall Guide: https://www.wowhead.com/what-to-do-before-shadowlands

Then a bunch of specific things they thought you should focus on:

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Shadowlands: Prepatch Release Date

World of Warcraft Shadowlands

So, it’s becoming quite apparent that, while I was right about the release date for the expansion, I was wrong about the release date for the Shadowlands prepatch. Wowhead has a post breaking down their thoughts for the prepatch date – in a very similar way to how I did. They show more of the examples of time between prepatch and release, but they don’t include the information I did about the time between prepatch PTR and prepatch release. So, a little more of some and a little less of others.

At the time, based on the idea that Blizzard gives 2 week notices before the end of the PVP season (a detail I have not been able to confirm and they didn’t show proof of), the earliest it the prepatch could have been was the 29th of September, not the 22nd as a late option I had suggested. At this point, I’d say the 22nd is almost for sure out as there’s been zero prepatch announcement and the 29th is even starting to look sketchy. So, could it really be releasing on the 6th of October? This would end up being the shortest prepatch in WoW history.

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Shadowlands: Covenants Are Horrible and Really Cool

Covenant Armor Sets

The idea of covenants is a great RPG premise. Going to a new world, meeting the people that live there, finding a group that you connect with and joining forces with them to help their cause and increase your power… perfect role playing game opportunity.

The idea of covenants is a terrible MMO premise. Locking important power gains – that will likely be unable to be balanced from one covenant, class, spec, or even type of content to the next – behind long grinds and with limited access is not the way. Particularly for an expansion that is supposed to be focusing on player agency, telling us that we cannot choose between the pool of options available based on the content we are doing is really against what seems to be the goal.

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