Necrolord Buffs

So with the Necrolord buffs could Necrolord finally see significant play? Night Fae is hard to pass up for numerous reasons, especially since it allows a huge burst window in both PvP and PvE, but the buffs to Necrolord seem pretty significant especially for Resto, Feral, and Guardian. Anybody else planning on switching? Think Necrolord could possibly even be the “best” covenant for some specs?

best is always relative to the player. just going a specific covenant may be convenient if it’s super strong (or niche for an arranged team) - but the player determines how effective it is most times.

that being said, there are def going to be more Necrolord druids soon. It’s nice to see variety. I’m not sure if it’s going to be better, but it will be competitive for sure. Maybe even for Restoration Druids…we will see :slight_smile:

I’m personally going to stay Night Fae - i think the soulbinds are pretty interesting, and I’m only now getting to explore all of them fully…so hopefully nobody jumps the gun without careful consideration :nerd_face:

I mean I feel like for Tanks the choice is going to be obvious, 40% HP shield that can be used as a defensive is going to be pretty massive, plus the buff to Adaptive Swarm is going to help Frenzied a ton, as well as allowing us to do one of the things we lack a lot; single target DPS. I also think it’ll be pretty good for Resto as well especially since they buffed the Swiftmend Lego. And since it was already technically best for Feral it’ll just further cement Necrolord as their best covenant. I do think Boomkins will still mostly be Night Fae which is why they felt the need to buff it to 35% for Boomkins to make it more competitive.

I do agree that variety is nice and seeing statistics say things like 85% of all Druids are Night Fae really sucks. Night Fae definitely fits the Druid aesthetic the best but I know most players ignore aesthetics and go for what’s “best”. I just hope that if the numbers still don’t balance out we get even more buffs for Necrolord and Venthyr. Undispellable Adaptive Swarm would be nice and removing the stun from the Venthyr ability would be nice since I hardly ever see any Druids Venthyr.

I honestly want to play venthyr druid but I also enjoy pvp a lot and there’s no way I’m using raging frenzy or whatever it’s called when it still has the downside.

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I will say after learning how easy it is to swap covenants back and forth I went ahead and pulled the trigger on Necrolord. Overall Adaptive Swarm just feels clunky as it’s not crazy impactful and you need to burn a GCD to use it. Maybe it’ll be more worth it once the buffs go live? As it stands right now I already started (and finished) my quest to go back to NF and just need to do the one on Tuesday to go back.

Overall the biggest thing Convoke has going for it is the fact that it can have all its power dumped in a small window which can be good for both PvP and PvE. Plus the fact that you can change how it functions based on which form you’re in and when you use it. Adaptive Swarm just gives you very little control over what it does outside of the initial 12 seconds and at this point I’m not even sure the buffs will be enough to make Necrolord viable.

“easy” is not how I would describe the covenant swapping, more like an unnecessary time sink.

Either way, it would be nice to see some more intuitive play when it comes to adaptive swarm, like perhaps for Guardian it goes between you and whatever your current target is, ensuring it always returns to you for additional healing.

For DPS it only hops to enemies with your Dot’s and IDK what to do for resto, only allies with your Hot’s? I know the swapping between enemy and ally is the main function but it feels kind of moot when your only doing one or the other. perhaps if it was affected by what other players do it would be more effective and/or valued.

Well yeah, time consuming for sure but all it takes is two dungeon runs and a world quest to fill the bar for the quest. Do the quest twice and you’re done. Really you’re only locked to your old covenant for one week or if you do it right one day. I dunno, I didn’t think it was that bad personally.

But yeah Adaptive Swarm needs to do far more single target healing and/or damage because of it’s severe lack of AoE. Either that or make it do a small amount of AoE damage/healing while it ticks. Another good solution might be to give it two charges because it would allow us to bank up charges and then use them up quickly to do two things at once.

Personally, I picked NF for the aesthetic, and at this point I’ve sunk enough time into it that they could nerf it into the dirt and I’d stay NF.

Also, if I ever get another kitty up and running it’s going to be a vampire kitty because that just sounds BA.

2 charges would be nice.

Sucks that they aren’t giving the bigger buff to every spec instead of just balance, but as a necrolord druid no it isn’t worth it unless you’re resto, necrolords needs a soulbind rework to make it more appealing as there’s only one good soulbind

Oh I agree completely. I was shocked how horrible Necrolord Soulbinds were. The only benefit to the first soulbind is not having any finesse conduits required. I’m beginning to feel like Shadowlands is an unfinished mess. Shame the delay didn’t do much to help.

Just silly how in one soulbind you can get a auto proc shield when you hit 50% HP for 15% of your hp and in another soulbind in the same tier you can get something that increases your HP by 5% for 30 seconds but only after you cast fleshcraft, like what? They didn’t even try to balance stuff, I think they tried too hard for diversity between the four covenants and it feels like necrolord was the last one to be design and ended up with the messy soulbinds

I assume Blizz will address this some in 9.1 since they are adding soulbinds and conduits. Necrolord should definitely become more viable.

As a resto druid, I definitely agree with the assessment that necro soulbinds feel lacking. I currently use dreamweaver and it would definitely feel weaker to switch to necro.

I am Venthyr, but I am rooting for necro to become the best one day. I think they could modify the single target thing a little to model after something like Dauntless Duelist, which could make your bleeds tick harder on your first target attacked, but then you can AOE like everyone else in the game.