You should let people pick and choose racial abilities upon character creation so players aren’t locked into a race that is not visually appeasing to the person playing.
The idea is simple:
You have 4 or 5 racial slots to choose from
1 of those racial slots is for strong abilities like shadowmeld or stoneform - you only get to choose 1 strong racial because obviously stacking 5 “ultimate” racial abilities would be broken.
The other small racial slots are for utilities like vulpera mailbox, undead water breathing etc etc and you can mix and match any of these as they’re not considered particularly game breaking.
These racials much like picking your race at character creation are still locked in place and are not changeable (Though I’m sure you could sell racial talent respecs on the store for a few blizzard fun bucks).
If you would not considered that then you need to seriously rethink some racials shadowmeld/stoneform specifically which are so strong they let you completely negate some mechanics entirely which means for players at the high end being a NE or Dwarf is nearly mandatory.
So please think about something like this as it would make a lot of players very happy I assure you.
You can have something like this and not break role playing immersion (even if a tiny fraction of players care for such things)
Example:
In games like Dragon Age or Baldur’s Gate you create your character of whatever race and then you choose it’s background i.e the preleading story of your character.
e.g Your character grew up in the woods and often traded with forest elves so they’re naturally more nimble and aware so they get +2 dex +2 awareness or something like that.
In other games like elder scrolls the racials partly from your race choice but also from your theology e.g you worship this particular deity so you get a bonus of XYZ
It must be very tiring to be a meta slave, constantly chasing that 1% of dps and optimizing the fun out of the game, turning everything into a bunch of sims and spreadsheets.
So what’s different to now?
Every serious player is already running stoneform/shadowmeld.
At least then people can pick a race they like the look of and still be in the meta.
If all the racials were just a factor of 1% dps it wouldn’t really be an issue that needs fixing.
The problem is some racials are so strong that they give you a way higher chance of surviving a mechanic (e.g you can Shadowmeld targeted abilities in raids/M+ entirely shrugging off something that would be otherwise lethal)
