The correct choice is always “the most”. “Cake or death” is not a meaningful choice.
“Err, cake please!”
“VERY WELL! Give him CAKE!”
Meaningful choices are RP choices. Like keeping your Eye of N’Zoth or being a Sylvanas loyalist or choosing a faction in Sholazar Basin or Shattrath. And considering that one of the options is the best and most powerful movement ability in the game, there’s really no choice whatsoever.
Make Covenant abilities optional in instanced combat, and make the Venthyr portal something anyone can learn, regardless of Covenant. It’s literally impossible to balance that choice. I think locking access to an off-Covenant ability behind Honored rep for Signature abilities and Revered + a quest chain for Class abilities would be reasonable, but PLEASE do not try to make player power a permanent choice from the beginning of the expansion.
I don’t consider pretty aesthetic things anywhere near as meaningful as what powers your class obtains.
If there’s a significant issue with balancing, then just like with any class ability, you rebalance it until the power difference is reasonably minimal.
Fleshcraft just seems so wrongheaded even before you compare it to an almost required pick. It has a cast time, and it’s being designed around mechanic soaking rather than QoL benefits like being able to stand in fire when the fire is atop your Rune of Power.
When has this ever successfully been done? I guess that’s why Blizzard was so quick to make Shaman viable? … Ever?
They can’t even manage that with a single talent row. But that’s ok because you can CHANGE your talents at will. And when they “rebalance” and another ability becomes most powerful, what then?
Tying player power to permanent choices is a bad idea. Nothing else in the game does that. There was no “you did the wrong thing so you lose your artifact” mechanic in Legion. Never a “you did the raid bosses in the wrong order, so now you can never get your BiS trinket no matter what you do.” Blizzard has never done such things, and has stayed as far away from them as possible. Because some players WILL make the wrong choice or do the wrong thing, and it will be horrible for them.
Even IF they could balance things so that there was no “wrong” choice, then HOW IS IT MEANINGFUL!? If it doesn’t affect your dps, hps, survivability, mobility, or ability to complete mechanics, then how is it anything other than a “pretty aesthetic thing”?
Also, no serious raider will want to be without the Necrolord Signature ability that gives you a shield for up to double your health. Otoh, no M+ player will ever want anything other than the super-broken teleport that lets you skip mob packs at will.
What do players who want to do both choose?
World first races will be 100% Necrolord. No ability to skip trash can possibly compare with a massive damage soak in the boss fight.
The real fun comes when they get “Balanced™” later on, and suddenly everyone needs to swap.
They can’t design bosses such that you get benched for not picking Necrolord. The tuning on the boss’s damage HAS to be such that people can defeat it as any of the four covenants.
It doesn’t matter. Fleshcraft is still going to be a huge boost to completion. If you can complete it without it, you’ll complete it faster, at lower ilvl, and with less concern for mechanics with it. Meaning every World First team will be running it exclusively.
Except classes are useful in any content because they have depth and lots of choices. Covenants have two abilities. And between Door of Shadows and Fleshcraft, you’ll be able to choose either raiding or M+, but not both.
And that’s the problem isn’t it? It’s another hard-to-balance layer on top of already hard-to-balance paths. Over the years, we’ve been steadily moving away from locking people into specs, profession perks, etc because the stacking of choice upon choice ends up creating a deeper maze of “wrong” choices people can become trapped within.
(I’m about as far away from being a competitive player as one can get so I can live with making a “wrong” choice, but I also don’t see what I gain from it)
Covenants could have been fun for the sake of fun. You know, like that “metric” Ion talked about. But they had to make it stupid with combat skills, and then they had to make them painfully unbalanced because that’s the stupid BS Blizzard does. They’ve ruined this idea before it even began.
Not all classes are equally viable in all content. Balancing has always been imperfect. The answer isn’t to homogenize them such that they all do similar things with aesthetic differences. It’s the same philosophy that runs covenants, just at a smaller scale.
I don’t have any sympathy for the extreme minority that go for world firsts and push Mythic+ 27 keys. If you want to play at a level where other players dictate what race, class, and covenant you play, then that’s your decision.
All Covenants will be viable for Mythic raids and Mythic+ 15, and that’s all that matters.
That’s literally the problem. Classes, which have been around for 15 years, can’t be balanced. Neither will this. And one unbalanced system on top of another isn’t additive, it’s multiplicative.
You should talk to someone about that. “Screw people who work hard!”
No, they won’t. Fleshcraft will make your guild raid team clear the raid a couple weeks sooner. Door of Shadows will push your group that does M+ 2 or 3 keys higher, and then the better gear you get from that will allow you to get another 2 or 3 keys higher. As I said, the benefits are multiplicative. Possibly even exponential, if the best choice is powerful enough.
EVERYONE will get serious, concrete benefits from making the “right” choice at every level of play. And so, everyone making the “wrong” choice will be at a serious disadvantage.
We’ll just have to see which classes turn out unviable for what content. Blizz can always flip the switch if it turns out harder to balance than they initially thought.