wow Legendaries, Covenants, Conduits, M+, Splits and More: Race Preparations in the RWF

[Starym 3,787]

 

The Castle Nathria Race to World First starts tomorrow and is one of, if not the biggest WoW events each tier. But while the race starts with the regional resets, the top guilds get started long before that, especially with the first raid of an expansion. From the leveling and gearing of many, many alts, to the new Shadowlands systems, preparations for the RWF started with the expansion's launch and haven't really stopped.

From legendaries and the choice of whether to focus on 1 and get its item level up or to make more and have options for the different fights, to the actual impact of Covenant choice restrictions, with Conduits playing a big role, the new RNG factors in gearing, with Mythic+ taking a bigger role and a lot more topics, I talked to players from 4 top guilds over on Raider.IO (Complexity Limit, Pieces, Aversion and BDGG) to figure out the importance of the individual factors in the race preparation.

Here are a few of the more interesting answers, first from the legendary-focused interview:

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Starym: How difficult/complex of a choice is it to decide whether to go for 1 legendary and upgrade its item level or to have more variety and go for 2 or 3 with lower ilvls?

Preheat - Complexity Limit: Item level on legendary items is a small fraction of the actual benefit of the items. If there is no chance you will need to ever have another legendary then it makes sense to upgrade instead of get another, but I doubt that will be the case for many classes, since a lot of the legendary items are generally good but amazing under specific circumstances.

Lozy - BDGG: 1 legendary if you can get away with it, although some might have to do 2. There’s 2 parts to this question I’d want to address:

As stated before, only a few fights really matter. If you think a specific legendary is vital to one of your strats on an earlier boss, you can probably just put that on an alt or two and power through. If you think you need to run a different legendary for Generals and Sire, they better both be massively OP in their given situation (and near useless in the other), otherwise you’d probably just lean towards what you’re running on Sire. I know this doesn’t cover people that aren’t just raiding and want to do M+ or PvP in tandem, but those come after the raid. ?

You’re really at the mercy of Blizz buffs/nerfs. If we hard commit all of our mages to legendary A and upgrade, then that gets nerfed and another legendary becomes better, you’re just SoL. There’s not too much you can do about that other than wait until the last moment to make your decision. Multiple legendaries would cover this but if something at level 1 becomes better than whatever you committed to at level 4, you’ll have access to that soon enough. For us where we only have a week or two to make decisions, it mostly comes down to theory/feelycrafting. We can only really make decisions based on what we know and if it changes for us after the fact, it changes for everyone so it’s not like it puts us at a disadvantage as a whole.

And then from the general race prep/Covenant and Conduit interview:

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Starym: Have you already had a case of a player choosing the “wrong” Covenant and having to switch? Also, Do you think the 10 base + 1/day Conduit change limit will affect you at all during the race?

Siory - Complexity Limit: We’ve had a very small number of players decide that they should be a different Covenant on either a main or alt after feeling out their first choice in various areas of content and talking about how both would play out in progression. Switching right now is fairly painless and all of those who did change are fully back on track. I don’t really expect the limitations on Conduit swapping to affect any player here during the race, largely because of how few Conduit slots characters will have access to in Mythic progression. Conduits will certainly be swapped, particularly on the more difficult fights, as players test things to find what works best for the demands of the fight - but with only two slots to swap around the first week, and less than ten potency options for most specs, I don’t think anyone will be limited by the system. It will, however, grow into a much larger concern as the expansion progresses and players gain access to many more Conduit slots and presumably new Conduits in future raid tiers.

Impakt - BDGG: Yeah. At least a few of our players regretted their decisions pretty quickly and wanted to switch, but assuming your initial Covenant was not the completely wrong choice, switching before Mythic is the wrong decision. It’s better to wait and see to make 100% sure you know that you need to switch before doing it. A -> B is free, but B -> A takes two weeks, so if the switch is wrong you cannot go back during progression for the most part.

Most of us keep very well informed on where everything stands in terms of balance though, especially for something as significant as Covenant choice. When I say a player is unhappy with their choice it’s more that something else was slightly better or enabled them to play a different build, not that it was just “oops I picked Night Fae and it is completely unplayable.”

Starym: How hard will you be going at Mythic+ in comparison to Heroic splits?

Siory - Complexity Limit: Because of the relatively high difficulty early in the week of trying to do large Heroic splits with unoptimized characters (saving Soul Ash and not crafting legendaries and not doing much M+ beforehand) compared to prior raid tiers, we did scale back some of our Heroic split plans for the sake of time efficiency. We also didn’t get as many weapons as we were expecting from the runs we did. This naturally has pushed us more towards more structured M+ groups as a way to gear up all the characters we want to have available. The changes to the rate of loot drops in M+ has made that also a bit slower than in the past but it’s still a consistent way of gearing characters.

Saltad - Pieces: This is obviously a question that can’t be answered in full detail. All I will say is that comparatively Mythic+ during SL Season 1 Heroic week is worth more than previous Heroic weeks.

Impakt - BDGG: Heroic splits will not be nearly as valuable as they have been before. Mythic+ will be a bigger deal this time compared to at any point in BFA I think. You’ll still see Heroic splits happen, but I think it’ll mostly be to gear targeted characters quickly. Mythic+ should be much more valuable overall.

There's many more details in the two interviews, from thoughts on the the Covenant switching drama, the differences in the legendary systems in SL and Legion, the World Boss rotation and the lack of some BiS legendaries for certain specs making them weaker, the actual importance of having the correct legendaries, maxing out Maw reputation for the sockets and much more. So head on over to Raider.Io and check out both interviews!

• Legendary Items in the Nathria RWF: Complexity Limit, Pieces and BDGG Discuss

• Meaningful Choices: RWF Preparations

[Ragingwolf 295]

This will be like the bare minimum starting out from gear, conduits, and covenant abilities.  Should be a rather interesting/entertaining race to watch.  I can see later in the expansion where the soulbinds will play a bigger/complex role for future Raids.