Kyrian
- Class Ability:
Currently, Kyrian is the strongest covenant due to the versatility of the spell and the power of the individual soulbinds within the covenant. Scouring Tithe itself isn't necessarily the strongest spell for Affliction warlocks, but it has the best usability compared to the other 3 covenants. - Covenant Ability:
While this lil homie doesn't really do much on his own, he does provide you with 3 every time you summon him - these are essentially an extra health potion with their own seperate Cooldown, that also remove a large number of debuffs. - Covenant Conduit:
Increases your damage by 10% for 10 seconds if a target dies while affected by . This has some pretty interesting situations in AoE scenarios - remember, when a target dies with applied, you instantly gain 5 Soul Shards. This allows massive burst damage.
Necrolord
- Class Ability:
As mentioned above, this spell was massively nerfed. While its strong suit will still be execute, it's tough to say whether or not it will have any real use case for the duration of the expansion in its current balance state. - Covenant Ability:
An extra shield for a small amount on its own, which must be channeled in order to use. Each tick of the channel increases the shield gained. In addition to this, if you channel this ability near defeated enemies, the size of the shield vastly increases. While this is a pretty versatile ability for defensive purposes, the real time use cases for it are pretty limited. It's a long channel time of 4 seconds that you'll likely not want to cast in the middle of a long fight unless you absolutely have to. It's worth noting that there are useful soulbind traits that modify the way this ability buffs you.
Volatile Solvent (Marileth) gives you various buffs based on type of monster you channel next to. - Ultimate Form (Marileth) provides crowd control immunity while you're channeling .
- Lead by Example (Emeni) increases your main stat whenever you channel .
- Emeni's Ambulatory Flesh (Emeni) allows you to move while channeling , probably the most powerful of any of these buffs.
Covenant Conduit:
You probably will never play this conduit.
's strength is in in the buff it provides to your
, not the actual damage it does.
Night Fae
- Class Ability:
This ability was made less painful to use by removing the life cost associated with it. However, it's still capped to 4 targets, and it's even still less likely that you'll ever end up using the portion of it's toolkit, unless we're in the unlikely scenario that get's buffed by an unprecedented amount. That being said, the damage of the ability really isn't that bad, and might even be able to compete with the kyrian . - Covenant Ability:
In my opinion, probably the strongest of all of the covenant secondary abilities. Throughout the years, warlock's Achilles heel has almost always been their sluggish movement. This provides an instant blink as well as a 50% movement speed increase on a single button press. In addition to this, there are also various buffs to the ability scattered throughout the soulbind trees, making it even more attractive. - Covenant Conduit:
While this is a decent damage increase and quality of life buff to , it's unlikely you'll ever want to socket this conduit as affliction. The general damage potency conduit options are already strong enough.
Venthyr
- Class Ability:
This ability really only feels like a flavor option. It does decent damage, and has the ability to randomly apply either or , but outside of that it is what I'd say the weakest of the 4 covenant abilities. - Covenant Ability:
I feel like there would be a lot to unpack here if didn't exist, but in almost every scenario it just feels worse than that. Similar to Night Fae, there are a decent number of options in the soulbind tree to buff its effectiveness, but in my eyes none of them make it compare to . - Covenant Conduit:
For an ability that was already underwhelming, this conduit doesn't really do much to make it more exciting. Add in the fact that affliction already has several conduits worth taking, this would need a number of buffs to make it worth considering.