There’s no need to go backwards when this already occurs.
Certain classes and specs are highly desired to cover weaknesses in the game right now. Some boss fights favor classes with immunities, or burst AOE. Some M+/affix combinations favor classes with AOE stuns/CC or even hybrid classes that can help with group healing.
You don’t need to force people down paths that create weaknesses when the game environment already does that for the population.
Here is what I think. I’m not stating this as fact, but would bet money on it since I’m that certain of it.
Ion and team has seen how successful Classic release was at bringing back unsubscribed players. He likely realizes that the 10’s of millions of players that have played over the years aren’t all lost; just unsatisfied with the direction WoW has taken over the expansions. The best times in WoW to these 10’s of millions of players is the Vanilla to WoTLK era, where choices were meaningful and had consequences. This next expansion is bring part of that back.
You and your ilk may prefer being able to choose a “loadout” for your class/spec that’s best for the content you’re doing, but a far great number of players (subscribed and unsubscribed over the past 16 years) prefer otherwise.
I’m one of those players with one foot in and one foot out of the door at all times with modern day WoW due to their design decisions. This next expansion sounds like it could have me with both feet in and actually committing to the game as a full time hobby once more. I wonder how many other players Ion thinks he can attract back to the game by making it more like Vanilla - WoTLK?
My worry is how many it will drive away.
Classes have never been more homogenized than they are now. Also, if you bring a class/spec to your group, it’ll play the same way as every other player who brought that class/spec to the group due to being able to choose the most optimal “loadout” for the content being done (and that’s expected from the player). Compare this to before when people had different variations of the 3 specs provided. Yes, some people played the “optimal” build and yes some teams required this, but far less so than these days.
That’s fair, but from my experiences with the community and how they treat each other, I don’t consider that a bad thing.
To clarify what I mean by how the community treats each other. I will refer to the many examples where players who have busted their butts over the years to work alongside others to clear content are treated as like they want everything handed to them because they don’t want to grind boring WQ’s for rep to fill up rep meters they never had to fill up before to have things such as new races, flying, and an increase in character power. Or in other examples, raiderio to play in mythic+, aotc to to start raiding in a raid the aotc achievement is for, or the community charging money to run players through content they’d rather group up for and tackle that challenge.
That’s not true.
That would change based on your composition.
A quick example - you wouldn’t need to have a boomkin spec resto affinity if you have a paladin that uses the glory (healing) talent on weeks like bursting/grevious.
You also wouldn’t need to have one class/spec use an AOE CC talent for weeks like necrotic if you’ve already got a class that can assist with that.
And the options to interchange and alternate who would need to pick up the talents needed would exist in a system where you could swap things around.
I think you have a very limited view of how the game is actually played and are only focusing on specific scenarios that suit your argument.
I’m not going to bench someone because of their racial choice. At most they’re within a 3% margin of error and not enough to worry. However if someone has made a specific choice to be 25-30% worse at their role by picking the wrong covenant, I will actively choose to not bring that player.
Lets look back to the massive horde vs alliance raiding imbalance from the years where racial choice WAS a large % effect, which is STILL impacting raiding to this day.
You have a bunch of people in here believing Ion when he says they’re going to be balanced to within 1% 
But that is actually impossible. What possible metric could even be used to balance anything to a reasonable accuracy if the abilities are going to affect completely different things, like the aforementioned resto druid traits, one does massive AoE healing, the other does huge single target healing? How can one argue that if the majority of damage taken by raids is AoE that one is not better, no matter the tuning? Different tools for different jobs, a numbers pass on healing logs won’t matter either way.
This is obvious to most people. Unfortunately you get a certain breed in the GD forums, and they don’t understand that things like that are impossible to tune and so they believe blindly
The literal only way I can see Blizzard coming to this design choice in the first place is that they believe it’s going to make them money, since you know… it’s a company.
The only logic that this could lead to that is that tying ideal gameplay in different fields will increase ‘played hours’ by forcing players who wish to play multiple fields ideally into investing time into multiple different characters all with their specific purposed covenents.
Looking back at the errors of BFA, all ended up shafting people because of the same thing. They were all designed to extend an ‘hours-played’ metric, and after receiving the severe backlash EACH TIER, they just shifted it into a new system of the exact same method.
This feels just like another extension of that whole thing and they expect us to not notice… To be fair it feels like there are definitely people in this thread who are those ones who don’t.
I will agree with this… there is no way I believe they can balance it within 5% even. 10% if we are lucky.
I am supporting Blizzards decision assuming balance will be a big issue and that whatever I choose might turn out to be crap (nerfed later). I just want them to try shifting more toward the Classic model to some degree.
If this was Classic the covenant system would probably work. But the game has changed too much and come too far to go back… it just wouldnt work.
I mean look at azerite… you basically had the same lock in and because of that classes just had a bis trait that they used the entire expansion.
Did you enjoy that? It was a meaningful choice - you lost aoe by choosing single target traits. There were Shaman ones that were actually a big upgrade in aoe but you never took them anyway because the other ones were so much better.
Which part of the Classic model do you want them to imitate?
I’m affected by the decision if they leave the abilities tied permanently to covenant choice. Here are some examples:
I will only play my Paladin with Kyrian, because their order is the most Paladin of the bunch. I like their ability, so it’s not a bad thing for me.
My DK and Warrior were up in the air for Necrolord or Venthyr, since both classes could fit in thematically with both. Since I hate the banner ability more as a Warrior than I hate having an extra appendage as a DK, I have my DK going to Necrolords and my Warrior to Venthyr.
I’m happy with those choices, just as I’m happy to not choose the breath spec for frost DK even though it’s the superior spec. While I usually make choices that optimize my character, I won’t sacrifice fun for being optimal. In the case of covenants, our characters identity is tied to the covenant we choose, so choosing the right theme for each of my classes weighs higher than the power level of the ability.
I wouldn’t mind too much if they made these abilities into talents, but I’d require that the soulbinds replace them as meaningful choices. There still should be pros and cons when choosing a covenant, and I know you all won’t like that. You’ll just come back to the forums and complain about one covenant having better soulbinds for the activity you want to do and you don’t want to be limited.
I enjoyed the azerites because it gave me a lot of choices. I chose based on which ability would be more fun. Meaning, I didn’t choose the boring stat boosting ones. I chose the ones that were class specific and added some flare.
I would prefer the current talent system replaced. Most of those abilities should be baseline with a few put back in a talent tree that more resembles the original ones. I do not mean give us wand passives etc but just add crit to certain spells or magic types, bring back spell hit and melee hit, add spirit again for regen. I am open to suggestions. I just would like for there to be more options that come with some sacrifices in other areas.
I would like the talent system replaced as well. But not back to the classic style, because that REALLY gave you no choice. The cost of changing was so high that if you ever wanted to maybe try something different you just couldn’t.
Could this not be said about unlocking covenants as well?
I felt that dual spec took care of that nicely… though I am ok with how we can change now. I just want a tree to feel like a tree rather than pick 1 of 3 seven different times.
I would not mind dual spec covenants.