Are you sure you’d not be more at home playing old Facebook games?
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Good lord, never go into game design, you would create the most boring game.
Yes I agree but this isn’t the right way to add impact for several reasons.
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It is attached to way too many other things. Maybe I want to have a cool ability on my warlock but the only cool ability is for the Night Fae Covenant? Meanwhile night fae makes next to no sense for warlocks aesthetic. So either I get a boring ability or a covenant that I am not happy with. It is a Win/Lose situation in either situation.
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I would be okay with abilities being a locked decision if they were separate from everything else AND Blizzard could tune properly. Heres the thing. If someone were to pick an ability that allows them to teleport every 30 seconds because they find it fun then it gets nerfed 3 weeks in to a 2 minute cd that would be extremely unfair for that player. That means they now have to either deal with the nerfs or grind out an entirely new covenant when it wasn’t their fault to begin with. If they had known that it was going to be nerfed they may have made a different decision, but there is no way for them to know that.
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How does locking abilities behind covenants add any impactful gameplay at all? Spoiler alert: It doesn’t
Edit: I can’t space out my paragraphs for some reason. It shows them spaced in the comment section but not in the preview 
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My job is to crunch statistics all day everyday which I enjoy and yet even I find this growing attitude here boring and dry.
You realize 15 years ago nobody picked based on racials. At least use your head before you speak. Being able to resist stuns, fearbreak are massively better than anything the Alliance has on Classic.
Then that’s a choice you have to make, impactful choices are not easy.
So basically the way the game has always been. People have full on leveled and geared the “op class” to have it nerfed into the ground, it’s par for the course in WoW, you either adapt and continue or reroll and move on.
It’s impactful because it’s hard to change, we need things like that again, wow has basically zero things of impact anymore, you can change your talents on a whim, your who spec on whim, etc. Having something with a little meaningful choice to it isn’t a bad thing.
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Insults, grand. Maybe you should learn some tact before you speak.
People picked for racials back in vanilla, TBC, wrath, etc.
I should know, I was there. Hell, the priest specials alone caused strife, with Dwarves having one of the best special spells in the entire game.
And people still do that. I picked horde not because of racials, but because I’ve just always preferred horde /shrug.
I 100% agree with this. I get that its “cool” to have unique abilities tied to each covenant to differentiate them but I really do not want to be put into a situation where I am penalized for picking my personal favorite covenant.
So unless these abilities are about as weak as racials are, IE ~1% damage difference, I honestly worry about feeling shoehorned into a BiS covenant.
Honestly, I am also getting tired of constant borrowed power instead of legitimate character growth that we carry forward.
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This is so wrong and backwards it isn’t even funny. The rest I can live with because its entirely subjective, but how can you even tell a player that an ability they just grinded really hard for is now nerfed and useless and then also tell them if they want a new one to suck it up and go grind another one.
AT LEAST when a talent gets nerfed you can just change it. Nobody should play a game, get to a reward, and then be punished because Blizzard tuned poorly.
If you want to see how that kind of interaction plays out just go back and look at some 8.0 azerite trait nerfs postings. People were furious. I get that things need to be nerfed but this has so much attached to it that it really isn’t fair to make someone do an all or nothing choice because Blizzard tuned poorly.
I can live with a standard nerf but nerfing a covenant ability effectively nerfs the entire covenant
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But yet you play Vulpera instead of Human.
A nerf is a nerf. Fotm or min/ maxers expect to see things nerfed. That is the cycle that has existed since the begginning. Guaranteed the grind to change covenants will be easier than re-rolling and re-gearing.
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It happens all the time though. One second something is OP, the next it’s not.
People put many hours into things that get nerfed, oh well, it has been and always will be. It’s best just to ignore it and play what you like.
Just think about when specs got nerfed in legion.
Again, like I said–
For example, right now I am currently playing Fury Warrior, here are the racial DPS differences for Fury.
The “worst” race only does ~1.5k less overall damage than the absolute best race. Racial abilities are always very low on any classes damage output because they don’t do much.
1% difference doesn’t mean weak, it just means well balanced.
And we don’t even know the full extent of the system yet and people are already complaining. A powerful ability may get balanced out by weaker soulbind choices.
At this point though there’s very little chance anything changes before launch, there’s already too much invested and they’d have to tear it all out and figure out what to do with it.
Human is nearly 1700 more dps than vulpera for my bm hunter. We pretending that’s weak now?
To be honest, I agree that it is. That dps difference is easily less than getting a bad mechanic, mis-timing cds, or just normal rotation/ positioning mistakes.
But in the context of this thread, that difference is more dps than I gained from going from the heroic raid bow to the mythic raid bow with a socket.
That’s like 2% of your dmg if you’re doing pretty eh numbers, so yea, that’s not really much.
~1%
Oh get out of here with that… That is the same kind of defending that got us Azerite Armor, we may not know the fine details but we do have something to work with in examples and what we are told the system overall would be. People have every right to express concern for the system when its being touted as a player choice, has unique cosmetic rewards, but said choice has different power behind it and its not just flat damage. Blizzard is doing some crazy cool things with the Covenant abilities (minus monk so far 
) but that is going to make it much harder to balance.
That is a fair point though, we have not seen the soul binds just yet and who knows how good those will be. Again, a set of unique soulbinds could make a player feel forced into one covenant though they may prefer another.
I think it wouldn’t be as big a deal if there were not such strong, different, visual aspects and story behind each faction.
1.7k when the average quality player does 80-100k? Yes, again, ~1%. That is a drop in the bucket.
Indeed, and I am not complaining about that. The point I am making is that unless the Covenant abilities are as weak as Racials its going to feel like you are shoehorned into a specific covenant.
For example, take the Kyrian Hunter one that lets you attack a target even if you are not in LoS. That to me screams Arena/PvP BiS. Imagine being able to pillar hump while being able to continue doing 100% of your damage.
I know we don’t have all the details yet, but its fair given how BFA turned out to be fully critical and make concerns heard earlier than later when we have reached the point of no return.
Yeah, that is sad to think about honestly 
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I love how you call it that and then agree with the same thing the paragraph down.
It’s because they removed weapon damage from the equation on all abilities, weapons are just another stat stick now.
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Yet its more than the difference between the worst and best azerite from the vendor.
More than going from a 460 bow to a 475 bow with socket.
More than the difference between an average corruption combo and a great combo.
That is what I’m getting at. It’s all perspective. If you aren’t the right race, spec, class, profs and with perfect rotation do we really feel justified complaining about covenants?
But this is an mmorpg. Aren’t we supposed to want player agency and for player choice to have impact?
I don’t even know what the Night Fae can do for her yet, but that’s who’ll Xialla would be joining. She wouldn’t be caught dead (or alive) hanging with holy types, vampires, or a bunch of creepy corpse-raisers. Those are so not her kind of people. But nature? She likes nature. Night fae it is! (…and if the last twelves years is any indication, that’s probably exactly who she should choose.) Same is true for other hunter, my druids, my shamans, my monks.
Priests and pallys of course go Kyrian, because they are holy types so that makes sense.
My rogue might hang with the vampires because she’s completely amoral, but to be true to form, she’ll go to whoever dangles the most power/gold. Horde rogue is likely going to be a vulpera at that point, so she’ll probably also go Night Fae.
Alliance warlock is sweet-natured and a gardener. She’ll likely go Night Fae too, but Horde lock is mean and and stuck up, would probably like vampires.
The only characters I see gravitating towards necrolords are my DKs or perhaps my Demon Hunters…but let’s be honest, I’m probably never going level them anyway so it likely doesn’t matter.