In building up the new World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion, Blizzard has added a huge amount of changes, some of which have radically altered the mechanics of the game. With the removal of some disliked mechanics like Warforging and the addition of endless content in the form of Torghast, Tower of the Damned, we have quite a bit to see.
Thankfully, the alpha testers that were invited to the friends-and-family testing of the title are standing by to deliver feedback to the developers! Blizzard has called out to all alpha testers to see where they should improve.
Primarily, the feedback they’ve asked for is directed towards Torghast, Tower of the Damned. Even more specific, Blizzard is asking to know the community’s opinion on Covenant Signature and Class Abilities and how they work within the Tower.
These two mechanics – Covenant Signature and Class Abilities – are some of the new skillsets coming to the Shadowlands expansion. Players are granted unique abilities depending on their class and allied Covenant, some of which are incredibly powerful.
At this moment, Torghast is only available to nine classes, with Death Knights, Rogues, and Paladins not yet given their chance to suffer. As such, Blizzard excluded these playable classes from the survey.
Players were asked to pick their Covenant, Class, and Specialization so that the feedback was as specific as possible. The survey asks players to answer the questions for each and every combination of this they’ve experience, assuming they’ve changed Covenants, Classes, and Specs around during their alpha testing.
Regarding Covenant Signature abilities, Blizzard asked if players had found the abilities to be something they had interacted with regularly. From there, they asked:
- Did this ability solve a problem in a different way?
- Where was it the most and least useful?
- Does your signature ability synergize with your Covenant class ability?
- How does this ability compare to other Covenant signature abilities, if you’ve used others?
While these questions are paraphrased from the original wording, the questions remain the same. Blizzard asked the same questions for the Covenant Class abilities thereafter, excluding the third question that we mentioned above.
The purpose of this survey seems quite blatantly to make sure that players were seeing a need to use new abilities or if they were being discarded as unimpactful or useless. By knowing this ahead of time, the developers can work to make the abilities less dispensable, or more dispensable, depending on feedback.
It’s wonderful to see Blizzard pulling so heavily from the community for feedback, something that much of the player base felt they didn’t do enough of until recently. In the last few months, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft team has seemed dedicated to listening and reacting to their community. As time goes on, we can only hope this change sticks.
