What is Meaningful Choice and Why Ion is wrong

[Memphis1021]

So everyone has been talking about covenants and meaningful choices for the last few days and I've noticed a strange theme coming through. Meaningful and enjoyable choice, is where you struggle to make a decision between multiple options because they are all appealing, and there is limited to no ability to backtrack on your decision. Good meaningful choice should mean picking something where you like all of it, not just some of it. What am I getting at? The way covenants work is there is so much loaded into a single choice that that choice is now not enjoyable or even really "meaningful", Ion wants people to carefully consider who they want to swear allegiance to and covenants are a thematically awesome system. Choosing the zone you focus on and improve, the people you work with to do it, the weekly activity, the soul bind and bonus passive effects you get, where you spend most of your time, the story line you pursue at max level, is already a big choice, and is already a meaningful choice as it affects a massive portion of your max level experience and the eyes through which you experience the max level.

You might have noticed that list of covenant choice didn't include abilities, its already a meaningful choice, throwing abilities on top doesn't make it even more meaningful, it makes it paralysing because all of the other stuff is largely cosmetic and flavour and fun, and now you put a throughput ability on top and now you are making a 2 pronged decision:

"Do I do what the devs want and pick the covenant i think is the coolest thematically, or do I pick the ability that is going to give me the best numbers in the content I care most about, OR if possible do i try split the middle of both these options."

I cannot make this clear enough, NO MATTER what decision you make, it will NEVER feel good, why? because you are being forced to pick 2 completely different things at the same time. Its like if every restaurant had a menu where your Starter, Main course and Desert are all linked and you HAVE to pick one group. Maybe the stars align and you find a starter, main, desert clump that works but the chances are pretty slim. You will almost always pick the set where the main course is best, and the starter and desert aren't offensive to you. For most players main course is their DPS. OR better yet you will just pick the restaurant/class where the stars do align for you. I currently have 4 classes I am interested in, as the system stands regardless of which is the MOST enjoyable I will be picking the class that has the ability I want with the covenant I want for that class.

IF blizz still wants the choice to be MORE meaningful than flavour and soulbinds, then meet us halfway keep the covenant signature abilities (the utility ones) tied to the covenant choice and make the class abilities a new row of talents (sorta) like this post below shows: Covenant Abilities - Album on Imgur It also happens to be the case that most classes have 1 ability in the new set that just blows and blizz needs to put serious work into it, this would fix that by just letting them scrap 1 ability from every class, the only thing it would do would be increase the art teams work load, but we all know they can manage that