邦桑迪的契约 - Night Fae
邦桑迪的契约 is the Fae covenant legendary which enhances the power of
法夜守护者 whenever you cast
暗言术:灭. While
法夜守护者 does offer good utility, mana return, defensive values, the buff is fairly low for the amount of uses you get out of
暗言术:灭. You would need to have a much lower Death cooldown to get strong value out of this legendary. Maybe when two legendaries are available,
死神之吻 in conjunction with
邦桑迪的契约 could have some very niche applications.
暗言术:控 - Venthyr
暗言术:控 is the Venthyr covenant legendary granting an additional
控心术 charge but lengthening the cast time of the spell. This legendary is very interesting for Discipline thanks to the spec's heavy reliance on
控心术 for increasing
救赎 output. After testing it on this week's 4 PTR bosses, this legendary looks to have good competition with
坚定意志 depending on the encounter.
Many Sanctum of Domination boss fights have ~40 second raid mechanic timers, so being able to have a
控心术 on hand for a
灵魂护壳 or
全神贯注 then another
控心术 available for a 2x
真言术:耀 ramp with or without
福音 can have some good value. There are also a number of lengthy intermission periods where you can take advantage of the charge system and actually build up those charges for a later period. Some boss fights like Soulrender Dormazain seem to have all of their damage in 1.5-2min timer windows and I'd be interested to see (as this legendary was not available when Soulrender was tested on heroic) if
坚定意志 netting an additional couple
救赎s or double
控心术s in one
灵魂护壳 window would be more powerful. Either way it's a flexible legendary for the spec whether you're holding true with
灵魂护壳 or looking at
全神贯注/
福音 for the new raid.
苍白指令 - Necrolord
While not confirmed in the PTR yet, the Necrolord
苍白指令 looks to grant a champion buff whenever
邪恶新星 is cast. Without being able to use it yet it is difficult to properly evaluate but a key question would be whether this champion's damage converts into
救赎 healing. I would assume that it does not but even if it did, it would have to do a substantial amount of healing to move the Discipline spec away from Venthyr.
天球祥和 - Kyrian
天球祥和 is the datamined covenant Legendary for Priest that still remains unconfirmed. Granting substantial cooldown reduction for
晋升者之赐 is a nice damage increase for the spec especially considering Disc's hunger for efficient
救赎 transfers in a 5man environment. Discipline already looked to the Kyrians for a helpful covenant for 5 mans and that may very well continue depending on the seasonal affix which is yet to be announced. Many have pointed out the synergy between this legendary and
溢流心能加速器 from the Mikanikos soulbind which can contribute to very large cooldown reduction overall. This can be very helpful for 5mans but trail off considerably in raids where your stack generation will be limited if you cannot generate stacks off of adds. Looks to have more M+ potential than raid potential at the moment.
邦桑迪的契约 - Night Fae
邦桑迪的契约 is the Fae covenant legendary which enhances the power of
法夜守护者 whenever you cast
暗言术:灭. While
法夜守护者 does offer good utility, mana return, defensive values, the buff is fairly low for the amount of uses you get out of
暗言术:灭. You also can only use one legendary at a time meaning that you would have to give up
快速专注 and that is a non-starter for the spec right now.
暗言术:控 - Venthyr
暗言术:控 is the Venthyr covenant legendary granting an additional
控心术 charge but lengthening the cast time of the spell. This legendary has more PvP and Discipline applications than Holy as
控心术 is often not a substantial output increase so again, you'd prefer a throughput oriented legendary over a covenant one.
苍白指令 - Necrolord
While not confirmed in the PTR yet, the Necrolord
苍白指令 looks to grant a champion buff whenever
邪恶新星 is cast. This champion would have to do substantial damage or healing to take Holy away from its current legendary choice of
快速专注 and since Holy doesn't have any sort of special interaction with their covenants these covenant legendaries look to be quite disappointing for the spec.
天球祥和 - Kyrian
天球祥和 is the datamined covenant Legendary for Holy that still remains unconfirmed. Granting substantial cooldown reduction for
晋升者之赐 is a nice damage increase for the spec, but since Holy lacks any sort of
救赎 interactions that Discipline has, these covenant legendaries in general don't have much application in a PvE environment beyond just increasing the spec's damage. Since Holy already relies on their legendaries for additional healing these covenant legendaries look to have niche uses at best.
With last week's PTR came the four new Covenant legendaries for the Priest class. Only two of these have been confirmed, but the other two effects are likely to be covenant legendaries also.
- 邦桑迪的契约 - Each time you take damage from 暗言术:灭 whilst 法夜守护者 is active, increase the effectiveness of any active fae by 25%. This effect is reset when 法夜守护者 ends.
- 暗言术:控 - 控心术 gains an additional charge, however its cast time is increased by 50%.
- 苍白指令 Unconfirmed - Casting 邪恶新星 will summon a Maldraxxi Champion which deals damage to enemies and heals allies. Each time 邪恶灌注 heals an ally, the effectiveness of the champion increases.
- 天球祥和 Unconfirmed - 晋升者之赐's cooldown is reduced by 2 seconds for each stack of 晋升者之赐 consumed by 晋升爆发, up to a maximum of 60 seconds.
Before I move on to speak individually about any of the Covenant legendaries, I would like to address a concern I have with the Covenant legendary system as a whole, and really the idea of class wide power systems from a Shadow Priest perspective. This isn't a problem exclusive to Shadow, but as it's the spec I play the most it's the one I see the problem the clearest.
Shadow is, being the only dps spec for the Priest class, very different from Discipline and Holy. It has very different goals and uses the few spells the three specs share in very different ways for the most part. This makes creating fun and engaging power systems that work for the same way for all three specs incredibly difficult. This often means class wide power systems need to either be overly convoluted, have their power split between damage and healing, or simply devoid of meaningful gameplay interaction. Three things we see here with these.
For each legendary I will first give my opinion on its design, before discussing potential uses, as well as its power level and impact on Shadow's Covenant choice in 9.1.
邦桑迪的契约 - Night Fae
My opinion on this legendary is, unsurprisingly, a negative one. When it became clear that Night Fae were likely to be getting a support focused legendary, I was immediately concerned. Shadow already has access to one support focused legendary, and its inclusion has, for the most part, had a negative reception. In my opinion, it did not need another. However, my negative view of this legendary goes deeper than simply saying "Support Bad".
My biggest issue with the design of this legendary is the interaction it has with
暗言术:灭, and the choice to tie the effect to backlash damage, instead of to simply casting the spell.
暗言术:灭 is not a spell Shadow Priests cast outside of execute range, as it is a dps loss over the standard rotation. The one exception to this is when Shadow Priests are using the
暗影烈焰棱镜 legendary, which of course cannot be used in tandem. Not only is this a support geared legendary, that offers little tangible benefit to the Priest, it also requires the user to play a sub optimal rotation to have any value.
The one scenario where Shadow Priests do cast
暗言术:灭 frequently, and therefore might be able to get some meaningful value from this legendary, is Mythic+. However, there are still problems there. Shadow Priest's goal with
暗言术:灭 is to 'snipe' low health targets to deal large execute damage, as well as reset the cooldown with
癫狂陨灭 and avoid taking unnecessary backlash damage (Which can be very dangerous when casting it on multiple low health targets back to back). The legendary requires you to take backlash damage to activate its effect though, meaning that to get any value you have to deliberately take high amounts of damage from execute backlash
暗言术:灭s.
Why the legendary has its effect tied the backlash damage of
暗言术:灭 I have no idea. To me it seems overly convoluted and severely hinders the small amount of potential it might have had in Mythic+.
As for the tuning, in a standard raid environment, casting
暗言术:灭 as often as possible during
法夜守护者, you are looking at roughly 7.5-10 seconds of additional cooldown reduction, as well as a negligible amount of increased insanity generation. As already discussed, the potential to get more cooldown reduction from
癫狂陨灭 resets is severely hampered by the design of the legendary. It is significantly weaker than all of Shadow's viable legendary options, even taking into account potential value of the cooldown reduction on other classes.
I can't see any way to fix this legendary whilst keeping the design as it is, I'm not even sure I want to see it fixed. The least that could be done is make it trigger on Death cast, but even then I can't see myself ever wanting to use this in any capacity.
Whilst Shadow Priests are still likely to play Night Fae in 9.1 for PvE. It will not be because of this legendary, as it is overly convoluted, weak, and has no positive impact on gameplay.
暗言术:控 - Venthyr
Another disappointing one. Venthyr, while not terrible for Shadow, was lagging behind the other three covenants in terms of power level in PvE. This legendary does nothing to solve that issue.
There's no getting around it. Using this legendary is just a dps loss compared to not having the effect at all, let alone compared to a legendary that actually increases your damage. Adding a charge to a spell does three things that can have an impact on a player's overall damage.
- Increases the number of uses across a given fight length by 1, independent of other factors.
- Effectively reduces the cooldown of the ability by the cast time of the spell, as now the first charge's cooldown will continue ticking during the cast time of the second.
- Increases the flexibility of the spell, allowing you to delay uses to better time it with other abilities.
Whilst these factors are often relevant for short cooldown spells, such as
心灵震爆 and
倒刺射击, they only have an impact for longer cooldown spells if that spell is exceptionally powerful. An extra cast of
控心术 has very little impact in a two minute fight, let alone anything longer. On top of this, the cast time increase offsets whatever small gain that extra cast would add. This legendary is also even worse in AoE, as
控心术 is purely Single Target, making it even worse at the thing Venthyr is already weak at.
Despite my focus being PvE, this legendary feels as if it were designed explicitly for PvP, as that's the only place where the added drawback even begins to make sense. Even then, I can't see having the potential to double cast
控心术 offsetting the increased cast time, and increased difficulty to cast an already high kick priority spell.
This legendary has no impact on Shadow Priest's Covenant choices, and whilst Venthyr is by no means unplayable. It's still the worst of the bunch.
苍白指令 - Necrolord
Whilst not as disappointing as Venthyr, this is still just a pet you have no control over, tied to a fire and forget spell you press on cooldown. The fantasy of raising an undead ally to help fight for you is spot on for the Necrolords though.
As this legendary only exists in spell data, we have no information on its duration or power level. It seems unlikely that such an effect can ever be strong enough to eclipse Shadow's current choice of legendaries though. Beyond just the tuning, it's also damage that is tied to Blizzard's often unhelpful pet AI, and doesn't appear from what little we know to scale with targets.
As the power level of this legendary is completely unknown. We cannot say if it will have any impact on Covenant choice. My suspicion at this stage is that it won't though, and if it does I will be thoroughly disappointed to replace
暗影烈焰棱镜 with something so dull from a gameplay perspective.
天球祥和 - Kyrian
Despite my negative opinion of Kyrian and
晋升者之赐, I have to admit this is the most promising and potentially enjoyable Covenant legendary. Reducing the cooldown of
晋升者之赐 helps to realign it with one of Shadow's other major cooldowns,
能量灌注, which is one of the major downsides of playing around its current three minute cooldown.
My concerns with this legendary mostly come from the design of Boon itself. Being a spell that creates a separate and mostly contradictory rotation to Shadow's own, as well as having little to no value on AoE due to the abysmal tuning of
晋升新星, as well as cooldown reduction only actually having value if it nets additional uses of the cooldowns across a fight. Something that depends heavily on the length of a fight, and when is already best to use your cooldowns during it.
The tuning of this one seems fine. It's close in power to Shadow's other options when playing the Kyrian Covenant, though much more sensitive to fight duration than
塔尔巴达的谋略. The cooldown reduction to Boon is also heavily tied to the execution of the previous Boon, which means small mistakes early on have the potential to have a massive knock on effect, costing you cooldown uses later on in the fight.
Whilst it has some potential. I do not see this legendary causing many Shadow Priests to switch to the Kyrian Covenant. It might see some use on raid bosses of specific lengths by those playing it already though.
Closing Thoughts
I am disappointed by the majority of these legendaries, both in their tuning and overall design. I do not see any of them toppling the current top Shadow Priest Legendaries, or having any impact on a player's Covenant choice unless they like one of them for one reason or another. I am especially disappointed, and honestly confused, by the design of the Night Fae and Venthyr legendaries.