In the upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion, players have dozens of ways to make themselves stronger. The choice won’t always been an easy one, and sometimes, the choice the players make will be a hard one to take back in the future.
Such is the case with the Covenant system, where players pick one of four Covenants – Night Fae, Kyrian, Necrolords, and Venthyr – to pledge their loyalty to. Doing so grants them unique powers and abilities, but also makes it so they can’t acquire powers from the other three Covenants.
One Covenant has been a bit more popular than others in the lead up to the full release of Shadowlands, with a high number of classes and specializations receiving a sizeable buff from the powers and perks provided.
The Kyrian Covenant, holy and virtuous inhabitants of the land of Bastion, has been impressing players with the powerful perks being given. Out of Wowheads 83 suggestions for the best possible Spec/Covenant combinations, 43 of them landed in the Kyrian Covenant.
While Wowhead feels that there’s a rather good state of balance in the overall power of the Covenants, the Kyrian Covenant gives a slightly stronger set of buffs than the other Covenants do. It’s not always a massive difference, but for players that want to min-max, it’s a big enough one for sure.
The main reason for this is simple – the Pelagos soulbinding within the Kyrian Covenant provides a bonus that most others don’t, letting players have more than other Covenants provide.
Most Soulbinding trees have two options for their paths: Two Potency slots and one Throughput trait, or one Potency slots and two Throughput traits. Pelagos doesn’t make players pick between these options.
By using the two Throughput traits Combat Meditation and Let Go of the Past, players still have room to grab two Potency conduits. Pelagos is the only Soulbinding in any Covenant in the Shadowlands to provide this bonus, Wowhead states.
So, simply put, the Kyrian Covenant is the most desired because it provides players with more conduits than others do. It’s a difficult competition for others to catch up in – while other Soulbinding trees provide three of these traits, Pelagos offers four, so it’s weighted a bit unevenly.
This also means that Blizzard could easily throw the entire meta out of whack simply by making this unobtainable. If the developers were to alter this path to bring it equal with the others, it would make other Covenants much more competitive, likely changing the tally of which specializations are best served by the Kyrians drastically.
