And that’s the key: make everything the same.
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Personally, I prefer to max-min my meta.
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“This is an RPG, we want people to be able to play the way they want”
- Playerbase finds the way they want to play
“We don’t like the way you are playing”
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and then hear whining about homogenization…
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“To combat this limiting of choices, we will create so many systems and so much depth that it will be incredibly difficult to create, much less enforce, the perfect meta choice, especially for each individual situation.”
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It’s semantics but for as much as the term is being thrown around, min/maxing isn’t the entirety of what’s going on here.
Min/maxing happens in D&D where there are no respecs for any part of your character. Min/maxing is just optimizing your character for a specific task, which isn’t going away.
In a game governed by numbers, you can’t get rid of min/maxing. It’s literally impossible.
What Blizzard specifically seems to want to break is that in WoW it no longer is “optimizing your character for a specific task” but rather “optimizing your character for every task” because we can so easily change most aspects of our builds.
I don’t think covenants are a good way of doing that, but I do think that the way it’s become isn’t healthy for the game as a whole.
If Blizzard were serious about it though, they’d need to overhaul classes again. The current talent system is just fundamentally designed around constantly switching for the very specific thing you’re currently doing.
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No worries, they’ll open it up sooner or later.
The whiners saying others are ‘spiting’ them will get their wish.
A) Choose the covenant.
B) Then choose the skill out of the four that goes with that covenant for your spec.
(Give each covenant the same skills but with a nice fancy names that suits their theme.)
C) Now you have made 2 meaningful choices and ended this whole conflict.
D) Go enjoy a frozen beverage on the beach.
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That would mean that all classes and specs can fulfill the same roles, not necessarily that they play exactly the same. Longwriter would say that Healadins should be able to do at least some AoE healing like other specs can, and not be just a single target or two-target healer.
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Thing is, there’s no evidence that there’s a level of balance good enough to effectively mitigate the problem they’re claiming to be trying to solve. This is especially true for the cargo-culting masses who don’t even do anything for performance reasons, and are actually just lemmings following the lead of MDI entrants, leading edge guilds, streamers, etc. Even if balance were near-perfect (~0.5-1% margins) and good enough that only mythic raiders and people pushing +20 had to care, you’d still have low and midrange players mindlessly copying their top-end peers.
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Why can’t they just balance the talents…feels BFA man.
I’m all for player choice. Just balance the talents blizz.
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Yup.
They are going to give player agency by limiting player agency. Welcome to the world that makes no sense anymore. 
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How long until Ralph shows up and says something buck wild, do you think.
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Here’s the thing that gets me: the reason the devs did away from the old talent trees and gave us our current talent system was to create new talents with choices that were stylistic choices above anything else; I guess you could call it a “meaningful” choice.
And here we are with two straight expansions with under-performing talents and no balance passes so everybody was basically shoehorned into the same build for every class. Instead of just fixing talents and basic class functionality, they decided to create convoluted systems that just magnified the problems they were trying to fix.
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“Wait. That’s illegal.”
You don’t need to balance talents with old talent trees. Talents didn’t fight with each other. Nowadays you have a lot of dead talents that they are not fixing for 4-5 years already?
So from cookie cutter builds we came to… cookie cutter builds minus normal class mechanics?
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Lol. Min maxers will still be there in shadowlands and if you play a class with a covenant that is not meta for your spec and try to pug the chances are you will be laughed out of the group for trolling. There will still be warcraft logs and the same way we saw Arcane Mage at the bottom we will see a Night Fae Ref Paladin at the bottom and just ignore them or auto decline. (Not that this is the indication just using examples)
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A lot of talents on most trees should be baseline and something exciting should replace them. This is a game and is ment to be fun. Idk why blizz has a hard time understanding that.
Adding a gcd to things and dead talents aren’t fun at all…
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They make those “not fun” changes because of the MDI and some times rated pvp. They have to keep the 4 people watching both those events entertained by not seeing the exact same comp of classes every time. And it just hurts the rest of us.
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I tried to make a game a while back called sticks and stones.
There are two groups.
Group A can only look under sticks, and group B can only look under stones.
Unfortunately the stick people constantly complained that the stone people were getting more drops, so then I would slightly boost the drop rate for stick people.
But then the stone people would get mad, so I tried to compensate by slightly increasing how fast stone people could look under stones.
The stick people got pissed because their gameplay was slow, so I added a little fireworks sparkle explosion to make looking under sticks more fun.
Now the stone people were pissed because quickly looking under more stones was less fun than having a fireworks sparkle animation.
In the end I just burned the whole thing down.
Sadly, I couldn’t balance sticks and stones. 
- T
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