OK, being honest.
What race you choose to play is a significant choice. It isn’t easily changed, in fact the only way you can do it is to pay real world money and you can potentially lose a whole lot of things - access to racial mounts, incomplete achievements, etc. The race you choose when you start to play is as important a choice as the faction. And even more important is the class that character players because they can’t be changed at all. And those choices continue through all the expansions of the game.
Covenants are one expansion. There is no huge impact on the game of choosing a covenant. And at the end of this expansion they will be done with and we’ll move on to some other temporary power gain tacked on to our characters. Racial choice IS a meaningful one. Covenant choice is a temporary hack.
If it made any logical sense within the currently visible nature of the expansion I’d agree, but where exactly is the ‘meaning’ in this 'meaningful choice? That you stub your toe on the gameplay whenever you come across something that doesn’t work for you because you didn’t happen to choose another Covenant? All that leads to is player frustration. And a whole lot of creating alts to cover every base - which may very well be exactly what Blizzard wants us to do. Y’know, time played and all that.
So no, perhaps rethink your rethink and come up with a logical thematic reason beyond “X works because Y works”. Apples, oranges, different.
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Yes, except that if the Kyrian Mage is geared like you, he’ll whoop you because his ability is 10 times better than yours (giving an example, don’t know which covenant is the best for what content)
Good luck to all the non Necrolord Rogues in Mythic+ on Storming weeks.
That isn’t an automatic conclusion. With soulbinds and conduits there are other factors that can come into play.
Trust me, the difference between some core abilities alone is so big it won’t matter.
Racial abilities are a at most 1% difference with only some higher end pvp examples being relevant. And even at such a minor difference have had major impacts on the way the playerbase is. Hence the reason Warmode is so insanely imbalanced.
Covenants will be much much worse then a 1% balancing ratio with dramatic impact between your prefered mode of play. Rather then picking a race that maybe has a tiny mediocre pvp disadvantage, you could be giving up having any relevance in pvp whatsoever. Same goes for pve, prehaps one ability rules PVP, but is a huge loss for pve.
I’d be willing to acknowledge this as valid if Blizzard was able to balance the abilities. However, right now they’re offering me the option between two ok abilities, one great ability, and one ability that will literally go unused because it has no synergy with my spec and is just objectively bad. Unfortunately, the objectively bad one comes from my favorite covenant.
Again, it’s not just petty min-maxing. If I chose Night Fae, I’d be making a significant sacrifice.
I can’t wait for this to go live and prove you terribly wrong. You have no idea, clearly, the impact this will have. But go ahead, think what you will.
It’s not subjective at all. It’s been proven over and over the impact the covenant abilities will have. Looking forward to this going live for you to experience it yourself. You’ll probably still deny it just for the sake of the argument. But we will all know the truth.
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You should have done all that before you compared covenant abilities to racials.
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Nothing in the game has ever been perfectly balanced, and imo that is fine. It would be pretty stale if we were all the same.
I play Smash Bros occasionally and if every single character fought like Donkey Kong (or whatever the T1 chars are) then what would be the point in having all those other characters?
Not really most folks will be choosing based on how well the abilities do in mythic dungeons
Support for the system makes them think it’s a good system. It’s not going to be a good system. They even told us they have a back up plan in case the system isn’t good. That’s planning for failure. If even more people spoke out against being locked things might change.
You have no real reason for supporting the system. You can’t tell me that it’s going to affect your gameplay, it’s not going to affect the story so what’s left to affect? Your feelings? Is that really the only argument you have to support this?
So you’d rather be gimped than have the option.
Noone is asking for perfect balance, just balance within reason.
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This isn’t about being perfectly balanced. It’s about being even somewhat balanced. It’s not like there’s a 1% dps margin between these abilities. If an ability is so useless that it would sit on my bars mostly unused, how is that even remotely balanced?
It seems like everybody who is insistent on keeping them locked is very dismissive of the very large impact these damage dealing abilities have. If you like the ability that fits with the covenant you choose, there is nothing making you change them even if they do get unlocked. Sure, “BiS mind slot takes over”, but you can still stand by the choice you make. Go to Warcraft Logs and look through the top 100 of any class. While there will be some similarities in talents, you’ll also see some differences. I raid a ton, and have never seen somebody get kicked over a talent choice.
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If the differences are that massively drastic, some balancing is in order, sure. I have no problem with that.
No what will happen is if people aren’t in the “correct” covenant for the content they will be rejected or kicked. Give it a few months and we’ll see the topics start to come in “can’t get into a group because of my covenant”.
but muh parses 
but this streamer said I should have everything available to me in game without making a meaningful choice
but I need to do 10% extra dps or my guild will kick me
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And again, you guys seem to think that it’s just the simple matter of number tuning. It’s not. The abilities are fundamentaly different to each other in the core of how they work. And they work well or badly depending on spec, role and talent builds. There won’t be reasnoable balance between the “best” and “worst” abilities for a class.
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