Companion missions return World of Warcraft Shadowlands in the form of Order table, and you'll need to collect Anima and Redeemed Souls if you plan to use them. The Command Table isn't as essential to your progress as the older Mission Tables in Draenor, Legion, and Battle for Azeroth, but it's still worth unlocking.
The Command Table in Shadowlands is unlocked as a Sanctum upgrade.
Once you gain access to your Covenant's Sanctum upgrades in Shadowlands, you'll notice that one of the options is the Adventure Command Table. Building will cost you 1000 Anima and 1 redeemed soul, but you'll farm them during the first chapter of your Covenant's campaign as part of the general tutorial. Once you have selected the Command Table and decided to build it, you will have to wait an hour for the build to complete.
Once complete, your Command Table will become accessible in your Sanctum (the large vertical diamond with an orb in the center of your map and minimap). Your first Soulbind will act as your first companion, and you can recruit more by completing Covenant campaign quests and from Torghast. They still level up as you send them on missions, but the Command Table has a more “tactical” setup that you need to take into account.
Instead of a percentage-based system based on sending companions with recommended abilities, the Command Table in Shadowlands features a miniature auto-fighter. You'll see a field of enemies above, and you can place up to five companions alongside you. Each companion has an ability or two, and you'll want to know how each works, and how many turns it takes to get out of cooldown. Command Table missions are still time-based, but each round will run in the background as the timer runs out. You want your team to be last.
Remember that you need a named companion to even undertake a mission. You can send a few generic companions, but you can add as many as you want to a mission. The mission will cost more anima for each added companion, so you don't always want to stack the deck, but as long as you have enough health to survive enemy attacks, and enough damage to kill them all before they cannot, you succeed. It's always important to consider the battlefield (if your enemies have a healer in the back row, you'll want someone who attacks the enemy farthest from them in your lineup).
You can earn anima, gold, gear, and even soul ashes from your command table, so make sure you always have your companions on a mission, if only to improve them. You can track and control your Command Table through the official World of Warcraft mobile app if you can't log in for the day. Upgrading your command table will cost more anima and redeemed souls. The first upgrade will increase the recovery rate of companions by 25%, and the second will reduce the mission completion time by 25%. Nothing is required, but these upgrades will make your command table in Shadowlands more efficient in the long run.
