A lot of players won’t be “winning one for their chosen covenant” in the first place because they didn’t choose that covenant out of personal desire/connection/meaning. They will have chosen it because of numbers.
They chose it to win personally rather than to have any kind of pride to their choice.
If the powers were detached, players would be able to 100% choose out of personal desire/connection and their choices would have meaning. TONS of players would stay in their covenant freely without even having to implement restrictions.
They’re not meant to. Grymes is a troll who thinks that being pro-covenant will let him enact revenge on the nasty min-maxers for taking away Titanforging.
Yeah, it’s just objective fact. He’s admitted it several times and if I could be bothered digging through his post history to find it, I’d just requote him.
Just thank him for bumping the thread and move on.
Meaningful choices require personal investment. Choices that are predetermined by Blizzard’s balance team have none. Some specs on some classes MIGHT have 2 options that make sense, if they happen to play a couple of different specs.
Your attributing the player power as the “teeth” of the decision, but it’s beyond that. While player power exists as a part of the decision, there functionally is no decision. The decision is entirely gone. It doesn’t matter what covenant you like or what covenant you want to join. The abilities determine the choice, not the player. The choice becomes “choose to be weaker than you should be or choose to join a covenant you have no link to”.
A grand total of zero systems have survived their lifetimes intact since the start of legion, 5 or 6 years ago. The system of covenants and covenant abilities is a near certainty to change; pulltheripcord was just about trying to get it changed before it impacts on the live game. One day, Blizzard will release a functional, enjoyable system that doesn’t need months of live testing to get right.
There is no evidence to support the idea that the system won’t change after release given the track record of recent WoW, since Ion was at the helm. Every other system has.