You touched on many points that i tried to address implicitly with these suggestions. Those suggestion are meant to include all the “tuning knobs”, as there are no tuning knob that can balance a utility with a throughput.
The thing is, multi-classing gives the game replayability. I would consider the ability to multiclass to be a positive thing. No? (disclaimer. 80% of my game time i play on my main, the lock. only alt relatively casually and a little pvp. don’t do any progression content on anything other than main)
In that regard, blizz had made leveling easier, made spec change at the push of a button, in a way that promote 1 player to play as many different class/role as they feel comfortable with
[insert ff14 reference here, which despite its flaws and the fact i don’t like it, the fact that you can class swap is something wow should strive towards (not copy), not away from]
Not too late yet! Think about it. The option i outlined, can be inserted without touching the grand scheme of how the covenant worked. The first option being the most difficult one to implement, as it probably involve the most amount of changes to quest, rep, story progress or whatever. 2nd and third literal requires no adjustment.
I have 6 characters above 470, of those 4 I play regularly, capping the cloaks, r3 essences, and maxing corruption resist.
My tanks tank all content, my dps dps all content, and my healers heal all content. My Druid is the “obviously” better m+ healer and my warrior is the “obviously” better m+ tank, but I have no problem ding the same content on my VDH and Resto Shaman st the same level.
I do lots of content without needing to swap to what the forum community feels is the best thing to do. Covenants will be no different.
There is a cheap currency that allows us to change individual talent choices on the fly. The days of dual spec are dead and we can change our entire specialization on the fly as well. Gear? Just swap it up. No problem.
What meaningful choice is left? Just class, right? I wonder if the people who can’t handle committing to a covenant have commitment issues irl too. It’s okay to opt into some strengths at the expense of some weaknesses and it’s okay for those decisions to have some weight.
Not everyone plays how you do - nor do they have the time to maintain that many characters.
Many people i know picked Druid/Paladin/Monk specifically because those classes could serve in all roles.
Most of those players do something like tank in raids, heal in M+, and dps in arena.
Right now - for those same players to be setup for pushing challenging levels of the game, they’d need to all of a sudden have multiple characters of the same class so that they could have each specialized in the covenants for each content type.
That just seems ridiculous when it’s not needed at all.
Agreed, thinking that you need to have and maintain multiples of the same class solely to have “the PvP” covenant or the “PvE” one is both ridiculous and unnecessary.
All of these, again, are swappable on the fly. Being able to change your mind with absolutely no restriction removes meaning from the decision. Decision making isn’t compelling at all when you can just run this talent for this encounter or that spec for that encounter.
That’s no different than today. There’s never been a time in WoWs history where a hybrid was the best tank/dps/healer across multiple game modes. If you wanted the forum-approved “best” class for PvP and the forum-approved “best” class for raids, you had 2 different characters.
Today - a person could make a druid and make each of the specs on that druid the best that it could be. Requiring only ONE druid character.
With shadowlands, that’s not possible. In order to play as a resto, guardian, and dps in the best that they could be would require MULTIPLE characters.
There is no situation in which an instant cast teleport on a 90 second cooldown that can cross chasms and go up/down cliffs is inferior to an owl that gives you a health potion.
You understand perfectly what I mean and still you choose to split hairs.
It’s a hard choice between mortal coil and demonic circle. The fact that you can just use one where it’s more useful and the other when the situation favors that without committing to one undermines the decision.
2 - Being able to change things doesn’t remove the significance that choice has or makes on the game. As already noted - if the choice has an impact to your rotation or output in a particular situation, then that choice by definition had meaning.