Covenant Adventures in the Shadowlands Expansion

One of the features you can access in your Covenant Sanctum, similar to the mission table systems present on the Class Halls of Legion and your Ship in Battle for Azeroth, are the new Covenant Adventures.

The complexity of the current mission table system makes it harder to predict mission results with addons, but the Venture Plan addon has shown the best results so far, and will also change your command table interface in order to show all the relevant information at a glance. Make sure to focus on doing experience missions, so that you can do harder missions later!

Your mission table will almost always have one special mission that grants Adventure Campaign Progress upon completion:

These missions increase the average level of the missions you get for every 4 completions. 4 completions lead to level 12 missions, 8 completions lead to level 24 missions and so on.

While the rewards of higher level missions are better, they are also much harder, and it is easy to get to a mission tier you are not ready for, especially as many of your followers might be low level still as they start at level 1 when you get them.

The takeaway is that you should avoid to complete missions that grant campaign advancement until the average level of your followers is equal to the mission levels you are advancing to. This will allow you to successfully complete most of the missions you get and avoid a lot of frustration!

You can use this script to print the amount of advancement missions you have completed so far to the chat, in case you are not using Venture Plan:

• /script print(C_CurrencyInfo.GetCurrencyInfo(1889).quantity)

Meant to be the new offline progression system in Shadowlands, Adventures provide a way to get rewards, even while not actively playing the game, through a auto-battler inspired mini-game.

As you progress in Shadowlands, you will gather adventurers, who can be grouped up in parties of up to 5 and sent on missions through your Covenant Sanctum mission table, costing Reservoir Anima, which is gained from doing weekly activities for your Covenant.

You can also upgrade your Sanctum by using Reservoir Anima and Willing Souls, once you hit certain levels of Renown with your Covenant. These upgrades allow your adventurers to heal faster and missions to complete faster, once researched.

You can check the progress of your missions at any time on your mobile device WoW Companion App or, when logged into your character, in the Covenant Sanctum Report, accessible through the Covenant Icon next to your mini-map.

Once you hit Level 60 and choose a Covenant, one of the first Covenant-specific quests presented to you will take you through the ropes of the Adventure system, showing you the location of your mission table and guiding you through your first Adventure mission.

After your initial mission is completed, you can start unlocking adventurers that you can send on adventures through the mission table.

Six of them will come from doing your Covenant campaign quests and increasing your Renown, so make sure to maximize it every week.

The remaining ten will be found in Torghast, as NPCs needing help on one of the floors as you climb through. Because of the random nature of this encounter, all you can do is check each floor thoroughly and rerun Torghast until you get it.

There are three adventurer rarities:

• Legendary are your three Soulbinds.
• Epic are Allies gathered from across the Shadowlands.
• Rare are generic Covenant Troops recruited with resources.

While all adventurers have different abilities, for the most part, you will want to have tanks and adventurers who can self-heal with their abilities in the front rows, and the remaining adventurers in the back rows. This will ensure that you do not lose any adventurers early in the fight, allowing for a better result.

If you lose battles or have close wins, your adventurers will be injured or even killed. Killed adventurers are reduced to 1 HP after the battle ends. You can either pay a large amount of Anima to heal them to full instantly or wait a number of hours, as they will slowly heal back to full.

Gaining a level also heals a follower to full, so you can simply send them on XP missions in the back row and they will get full XP even if they die again!

Unlike similar systems from previous expansions, there is not a single best setup for everything in Shadowlands. Enemy threats are no longer directly countered by the abilities of your adventurers. Rather, you will have to adapt to the threats present in each adventure by bringing adventurers with strong area of effect damage abilities against many enemies, strong single target damage against powerful enemies and also through smart positioning.

Take this Venthyr mission example:

Your (up to 5) adventurers are against four Anima Smugglers. Start by appreciating that the ones in the back are ranged while the ones in the front are melee. This does not mean anything by itself, but rather it hints at the types of abilities used by the NPCs. By mousing over them you are informed that the melee ones have no special abilities, and just melee the closest adventurer every round. However, the ranged NPCs attack the farthest enemy and heal themselves in the process.

What you should take from this, is that the enemy attacks will be spread over your front and back line, and thus placing your weakest elements in the back row to protect them will not work. Rather, placing them on the sides of the front row offers the most protection, as follows:

In this example, Kaletar's group wide heal will be useful against enemy split damage, General Draven is the best tank for the Venthyr and is, thus, placed in the position most likely to be hit with double melee attacks every round, Dug Gravewell is placed in the back row to hopefully soak the ranged NPC attacks and Theotar plus Vulca round up the composition by bringing even more area of effect damage, focused in the enemy back row which has dangerous, but squishy, opponents.

Note that the estimated Enemy Power Level, displayed by the numbers in the upper right corner of the screenshot, is higher than that of the party. This is just a rough estimation based on the levels and powers of each side. With this positioning and composition, it is actually possible to win 100% of the time in this battle, which is a huge difference from previous mission table systems, where you could still lose (or win) a battle you were not optimized for.

This setup is not adequate for all battles, however. Take this rare mission enemy setup as an example:

While there are plenty of enemies to defeat, area of effect damage here is almost useless, as there are four extremely powerful area of effect healers available in the enemy side. Rather, you will want to aim for a setup capable of focusing all of their damage in a single target, hopefully eliminating one enemy per round. Enemy damage abilities are all focused on the closest front line targets as well, making the back row a very safe place for glass cannon DPS / Healing characters, but also causing your area of effect healing to have lowered effect.

Enemy abilities and their positioning always needs to be taken into account in Adventures, making it a more complex system than its predecessors.

Once you successfully complete a mission, you will get a mission recap report, which details the experience gained by each of your adventurers from the mission, causalities (if any), and rewards gained.

You can also get small amounts of Soul Ash, the currency required to create Legendaries through Runecarving, once you complete enough adventure campaign advancement missions.

Soul Ash missions can be difficult, so make sure to bring your best adventurers and sort them out on an optimized setup for the fight!

Other loot you can expect to see from Covenant Adventures is:

• Gold and Adventurer Experience
• Reputation Tokens.
• Mounts, such as Warstitched Darkhound, Darkwarren Hardshell, Highwind Darkmane, and Skittering Blightwing.
• Weapon Appearances, such as Glorenzelg, High-Blade of the Silver Hand and Valius, Gavel of the Lightbringer.