The main criticisms I see about covenants is that you are packaging player power with cosmetics, visuals and a general style and theme,
that some covenants are not good for every situation, and that the covenant system is unbalanceable.
A player that likes Venthir could be forced to play Nightfae because it is better for raiding, but Nightfae could be bad for pvp, so what ever he choses he will not be perfect at everything.
The problem is that the entire game is fundamentally like that.
Some classes are not the best for raiding, some specs are not the best for dungeons, some specs do not interact well with their race traits, while the other class spec does, one faction is better than the other in raids, some professions interact better with some specs more then the other ones, and this goes on and on.
You canât have an MMO after removing classes, specs, professions, factions and races. Packages of player power and cosmetics will happen and they will be the most important decisions you make in this game. If you remove player power from all of them, they will all be as meaningful as your transmog.
And yes, some covenant and spec combinations are not ideal for every scenario, just like some classes and specs, and that is ok. What is not ok is when the combination is too far behind the others, making the player have to play with one hand tied behind their back.
The solution to this is not to remove classes or covenants, nor remove the power associated with them. The solution is to balance them closer to each other.
Of course balance is subjective and never perfect, but you canât have an MMO without having things to balance. Even if you think Blizzard devs are incompetent at balancing, there is no other way around it, there will always be things to balance in an MMO, and the perception of imbalance will always exist even on a perfectly balanced game.
And no, covenants are not harder to balance then classes and specs. It is way easier to balance a single skill then an entire spec. If a skill is good for one spec and not the others, add an effect only for the bad one and tune the numbers. If a skill is bad for pvp, add a pvp effect to it.
And yes, just like classes, specs, professions, races and factions, covenants become more annoying the higher you go on the competitive latter. The MMO genre is not designed for world firsts, world championships and people pusning +30 keys.
The genre completely breaks down, forcing players to do hundreds of hours of chores, force them to put vasts amounts of gold and money into the game, force them to have a dozen alts in peak performance to adapt to every scenario. And that is the reason why there are no rewards associated with these activities.
If you play MMOs at this level you know the consequences, you know the game is not designed to be played like this, and yet you do it anyway.
If you are not playing like this, covenants will probably be balanced enough for the content you are doing. If it is not, then we can talk about fixing the specific issue or situation that is causing it, most of the time simple number tuning are enough.
Most players also have a very distorted perception of how balanced things are. It is very common to find players complaining about balance issues while playing one of the top rated spec for that task. Most players overvalue dps and undervalue mechanics, most players completely undervalues the importance of social skills, most players donât even consider forming a stable group, they want the game to be balanced around pug perception.
To summarize it: Stop using these arguments to ask for ripcord pulling, they make no sense whatsoever in an MMO. If some covenant and spec combination is too bad for a specific scenario lets talk about fixing that instead.
