Covenant
Table of Contents
TL;DR Recommendations
First things first. All covenants are relatively well balanced. The difference is usually within the single digit percentages and you should pick your covenant depending on what you actually like to play.
Recommending “best” covenant is a pretty impossible tasks. The strength of the covenants breaks down to the strength of the covenant signature ability, the strength of the covenant class ability and the strength of the soulbinds. The strength of the soulbind will change every week you gain renown.
So for the TLDR PvE recommendations:
When assuming full renown:
| Raiding | Necrolord/Night Fae |
| Mythic+ | Necrolord/Night Fae/Kyrian |
If you want to multispec the recommendation changes:
| Restoration and Elemental | Necrolord |
| Enhancement and Elemental | Kyrian |
| All Specs | Kyrian |
We will be discussing the value of specific soulbinds here.
Actual covenants:
Necrolords
By pledging your allegiance to the Necrolords you will gain two new abilites:
Fleshcraft is a channeled ability that gives you a 20% HP shield for 2 minutes. This can be amplified to 50% of your HP if it gets cast while in the vicinity of a corpse.
This can be cast before entering combat. It can be useful as another defensive in our toolkit, but 20% is usually not impactful enough to cast it during combat outside of downtime.
Primordial Wave is an ability on a 45 second cooldown that puts a Flame Shock onto a target and duplicates the next Lava Burst on all targets with an active Flame Shock. It accelerates the speed in which we get out and provides good damage on single target, spread cleave and low target AoE.
It gets affected by the conduit Tumbling Waves which grants a chance to refresh the cooldown on use.
Kyrian
By pledging your allegiance to the Kyrian you will gain two new abilites:
Summon Steward does what it says on the tin. It summons a smol, cute, fluffy swolkin, who most importantly, gives you a which can be used to remove Curses, Disease, Poisons and Bleeds. After the changes to the raid, the usefulness of this is vastly more limited. It is still very useful for m+ where a lot of effects can be dispelled even if your group composition doesn’t contain the appropriate counter.
Vesper Totem summons a totem that will do AoE damage around itself on the next 3 damage casts you do and heal up to 6 friendlies on the next 3 healing casts. The totem can also be re-placed by recasting the ability which is not on the GCD. It is a very nice “set it and forget it” ability which is only slightly dependent on the the tank not moving the targets out of the totem. The ability is mostly limited by targets needing to be stacked up.
Elysian Dirge is a conduit that increases the damage done by Vesper Totem to the closest target, increasing it’s value in single target.
Night Fae
By pledging your allegiance to the Night Fae you will gain two new abilites:
Soulshape is arguably the strongest of the covenant signature abilities. It turns you into an animal form, teleports you 15 yards forwards and increases your movespeed by 50% for 12 seconds or in rest areas until cancelled. This teleports ports you directly to the ground, meaning it can be used to cancel fall damage. Even though we have a very similar ability in already, the added teleport enables us to dodge abilities on a short notice.
Fae Transfusion is a 4 second channeled ability that deals a set amount of damage either to a singular target or split between multiple targets in AoE. It is Nature damage and can thus be buffed with Master of the Elements. Because of the need to stand still while channeling it, it can sometimes be hard to get the full worth out of the ability, but you can use to handle that more easily.
Essential Extraction is a conduit that decreases the cooldown of Fae Transfusion}}
Venthyr
By pledging your allegiance to the Venthyr you will gain two new abilites:
Door Of Shadows is a short 35 yard teleport with a 1.5 second channel. It can sometimes be used to skip hard packs in mythic+ and skip over gaps that you couldn’t get over normally. This is usually not as useful as we are ranged anyway and can reach most targets anyway.
Chain Harvest is basically a special Chain Lightning. After a 1.5 second channel it deals damage to 5 targets and heals 5 friendlies. Its cooldown gets reduced by 5 seconds for every critical hit, including damage and heal. Lavish Harvest increases the critical hit chance of Chain Harvest by 10%.