Artifact weapons in Legion, how important is the initial choice?

Question

I apologize because this question is based on a quote that I read somewhere which I am now unable to find.

The quote basically said something along the lines of "you cannot expect your offspec artifact weapon(s) to be as good as your mainspec artifact weapon".

Now, there's several ways I can see this be true so let me first state my question and then pose several possible ways this can be answered.

The question is this: Is this depending on the initial choice of weapon, when you first get to choose on level 100, or not?

Note: I know I will get all the weapons through quests that unlock on level 102. This is not a question of whether I will only have one weapon.

The way I see it, there could be several ways this quote is true:

1. Your initial choice means you have now chosen your mainspec weapon. There's some kind of limit in effect on what the offspec weapons can become in terms of power.

2. Your initial choice means nothing other than which weapon you will have available for level 100-102 until you complete the quests on 102.

   Instead your choice of weapon to put artifact weapon into will be the one determining which weapon is the most powerful at that time. Over time all your artifact weapons can become the maximum they can be.

   I think this is the right answer but I want to know for sure.

3. Putting artifact power into one weapon will make it more costly for all the weapons, meaning that the weapons you didn't put power into are now more expensive to "level up", meaning again that this is implied by your choice of which weapon to put artifact power into more than the initial choice.

The reason I ask is that since I read the above mentioned quote, I took no chances and picked Holy as the weapon when I was given the choice since my mainspec will be healing. This means that for level 100-102 I can either quest as holy, with the weapon, or as shadow/discipline, with my Draenor crafted staff.

However, if it is more a "over time" thing then if I for instance keep questing and leveling as Shadow, and put artifact power into the Shadow weapon, then I can later on start working on the holy weapon.

Basically my question is: Did the initial choice lock anything in stone?

Answer 1

What they're talking about is Artifact power and trait unlocking.

Essentially, each of your 2/3/4 artifacts has a trait list. To unlock a trait, you need a certain amount of Artifact power. How much depends on how many traits you have unlocked in that artifact. It starts slow, but quickly ramps up to tens of thousands or even millions of power. At level 110, you also start getting special work orders to speed up how much artifact power you get. You get artifact power as a token that gives power to your currently equipped weapon.

Artifact power spent in one artifact does not affect how much the other artifact costs to power up. If you start out as a Fire mage and go "I don't like fire, I want to go Frost" 3 weeks into the expansion, you equip your Frost artifact and go do some world quests for Artifact power. Assuming you have kept up on your power work orders (Artifact Knowledge Research in the game), those tokens will give a lot of artifact power, just about enough to level your Frost artifact up to about 80% of your Fire artifact. if you then continue investing into your Frost artifact, it will surpass your Fire artifact.

The choice of weapon you make at first doesn't really affect the power, beyond "my weapon has gained a few traits during leveling". Suppose you as a Shadow priest have put in some Artifact power into your Shadow artifact, and you feel like leveling your Shadow artifact has become too costly. You can then say "I'm going to work a bit on my Holy artifact". Your holy artifact will be much cheaper to level up.

There is no artificial limitation on how strong your other artifacts may become, and artifacts have no effect on each other. so answer 2 is correct.