There just seems to be a huge disparity between them. Kyrian mostly look great. Venthyr Look good, especially the tanking one. Bastion is a mixed bag. Necrolord look extremely weak when compared to the others.
I am really wondering what is going to happen, when SL launches, and there is such a vast player power disparity between covenants? The first 3-6 months of the expansion should be very interesting, if every other week they are massively changing them. I may just be picking for aesthetic, because with the state the soulbinds and covenant abilities are in now, I highly doubt the one you pick at the start will be anything close to what it is after a couple months.
Too many systems with too many layers of borrowed power, but I still want to dive in and play with them.
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i would not worry about it that much
if more players are in a covenants then others one of two thing happen
1 the popular cov lets say venthyr they will get a small nerf to balance it out
2 they bring up or fix the others to match the popular one.
There likely won’t be. At the level of “competition” that most people play at it won’t even affect their performance in the slightest.
AoTC, Keystone Master, Duelist… all of those are 100% achievable regardless of Covenant choice. I’d go as far as to say you could, with some effort, achieve all three of those without even choosing a Covenant at all if you were good enough.
Stop worrying about it.
They should have just made conduits a skill tree attached to each spec, and covenant abilities one of 4 talents to choose at 60, that can be changed in a resting area or with a tome.
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Yep. That would be an elegant solution to the crying. But Blizzard really wants players to commit to a choice, here. Players are wildly upset about it. The difference between me going Kyrian Warlock on Shriekwing and going Venthyr Warlock on Shriekwing looks to be about 6.7k DPS vs. 6.6k DPS. In other words, it doesn’t matter. That’s within the 5% leeway that ALL spells now have in Shadowlands anyway. In other words, it’s not even statistically significant.
And if it was say, 6.7k vs. 6k, a much bigger margin, would that mean I can’t get AoTC or Keystone Master or Duelist next season? Absolutely not. 10% wouldn’t “ruin my character”. That sort of variance only matters at the absolute highest level of competitive play. It’s funny that the bottom 90% of players are whining about something that really only hold true, impactful significance to the top 0.2%.
People like to fear-monger by cherry picking extreme and outdated examples of Covenants having a 15% or even 30% impact on your performance. I can’t name an example of that for any of the specs I play. Not even close.
Edit: Even better is that I can guarantee that the other warlock in my raid will be doing 4k DPS to my 6.7k DPS no matter what Covenant she chooses. And let me tell you, it has nothing to do with what Covenant she chooses.
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Tuning’s finished. Ship it.
LFM +15 checking covenant
Enjoy your weekly conduit lockout guys 
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To emphasize : You can swap between your three Soulbinds at will, while each of those three Soulbinds has a separate week long cooldown on respeccing it’s bonuses/conduits. This means you can setup one Soulbind for tanking, one for DPS, and one for Healing, or setup one for Mythic+, another for Raid, and the third for PvP, or any other combination. The flexibility of having three independent Soulbinds is what allows offspecing without restricting you to a single choice each week.
Edit: Why would I have to swap my soulbinds? I have one soulbind for M+, one for raid and one for PvP. I can swap between the soulbinds in any rested area, just like talents. I can only change my CONDUITS once a week, but that’s not particularly restrictive, especially with THREE FULL SOULBINDS AVAILABLE.
Edit #2: I can make a soulbind for Outlaw Mythic+, an soulbind for Subt arena and a soulbind for Subt Raid progression.
I can make a soulbind for Afflic Arena, a soulbind for Demo Mythic+ and a soulbind for Destro Raid progression if I really wanted to.
It’s a flexible system, man. The spec-specific legendaries requiring over a month to rank up is going to do more to harsh my multi-specc’ing than a conduit lock-out that I’ll probably never have to change. As usual, you’re worried about the wrong things.
Turns out soulbinds mattered way too much. And conduits where 50/50
- Soulbinds should have just been flavor not that important or powerful
- Conduits should have changed the way abilities played… 2handed vs 1handed for frost DK and been closely balanced.
Azerite armor traits where much closer more interesting and better balanced.
It feels like soulbinds/ conduits wherent tested or just neglected after the fact as a dead system on launch which really colored shadow lands.
In dragonflight hopefully talents will not experience this pitfalls and if they do they get quickly adjusted on a weekly basis. And 90% of player power comes from their own talents and ability. Not the gear- sets - or legendaries they get stuck with.
My 2cp.
