I’m with you on that. The problem comes when a very existent, not-insubstantial portion of the playerbase demand you switch to meta for every fight, or they become driveling animals who swear you killed their cat.
It’s a mindset that completely invalidates the entirety of talents and builds and character customization. This mindset and style of gameplay doesn’t have an inherent right to exist. It exists because Blizzard allowed it to, and now Blizzard is moving to disallow it.
See, I’m not calling YOU out specifically. Not my goal. I’m calling out everyone who demands Blizzard cater to this mindset. Sorry if it came out as me targeting you specifically.
Now, if your mindset is caught in my wide line of fire, I won’t apologize for that.
Inherently? A meta is neither good nor bad. The problem is that these players then use gameplay performance as a metric for mistreating players. Players who aren’t hellbent on fielding the very best build, because they found a playstyle that they enjoy, are ostracized because they aren’t sacrificing fun for performance. They couldn’t build a better community with the easily accessible meta. Because of it, Blizzard has deemed that they don’t deserve easy access to the meta from here on out.
Here’s the thing the average CE level player frankly does not care in the slightest what casuals do. I don’t care if pet battling gives normal level gear as long as I’m not forced to do it for prog. If staying committed to a covenant gave you a damage boost overtime out in the world or even in m0/normal content we wouldn’t care. So long as they didn’t apply to mythic or decent level M+. We would still be able to swap as wanted and people who didn’t want to swap would be rewarded for loyalty.
I just want to mess around and figure out what’s best like I always do instead I will be stuck waiting for sims to tell me because if I make a bad choice it won’t be easy to change and then go back if needed. I just want to use all the new abilities of my class I don’t understand why that’s a bad thing.
You can also just run to the mirror on your ship in Divinity OS2. 
Man I miss save scumming KoTOR
The summary of all of these pro-locked covenant arguments can pretty much be boiled down to “HAHA RAIDER MAN BAD”
Pretty much I just don’t get it. How is it fun to only have access to one spell out of 4 new ones.
It isn’t.
And only having one of the abilities isn’t also going to magically infer some sort of “WOW IM SO GLAD I MAKE MEANINGFUL CHOICES NOW” mindset.
You’re gonna kind of enjoy it when you can use it, and then when you can’t you’re just gonna be frustrated that you can’t use the others. The lustre will wear off fast.
‘I’m sorry, are you saying no or mo?’
Oh we’re saying no and blizzard is going mo.
Hellen Keller could hear better then them
And it’s even worse than that. It’s “you only have access to one spell out of 4 on your main spec, and that also makes the decision for your offspecs at the same time”. If one spell is decent for MS in most situations but it locks you to something useless or worse in OS… too bad. Sounds like fun, right?
(I can already hear the objection: “but none of the abilities will be outright useless.” Congrats if you play one of those classes/specs!)
I really really reeeeeallly wish both sides of this debate would stop using words like everyone, everybody, no one and so on.
It doesn’t do your sides any favours to be disingenuous, trying to back your position with a voiceless ‘everybody’ and hyperboles doesn’t make your arguments stronger it makes them much weaker.
It isn’t black and white, all or nothing. Lots of in between~
I’m not using everybody I am speaking for a specific group which has pretty much universally shared this opinion. I also think more than just ce level raiders are going to become incredibly frustrated when their new talent row is an incredible annoyance to change around.
That wasn’t directed at your post, although I’d still say you could find some CE raiders who’d disagree, it was a generalized statement after reading thru your thread and seeing those words thrown around a bunch by folks.
Not even in just this thread tbh, all over GD and across many many different subjects.
There’s only one specific person I’ve seen using those terms tbh and largely as everyone except those dreaded toxic elitists.
It’s a classic bait and switch! Those stinkers.
Two key words here, “had” and “classic”. Its been 15 years.
I am scared that covenants will be legion and bfa power borrowed grind systems to the 10x. If you don’t pick the right one and if that one is every nerfed, you are screwed. It will be out of your control and you are now stuck and behind everyone else.
I don’t trust this new system at all. They are only talent trees in the end, with a cost to change if you can even do it and catch up.
The solution is get rid of the switching cost and power grind for all of them at the same time. If you put class power at all behind them, you are really going to get hurt when 9.1 happens and your covenant gets nerfed. You are done unless you re-roll. Why blizzard does not see this as a major issue is beyond me.
That’s my primary worry as well.