Kyrian:Spiriti Affini - When originally seen it was hoped that Kindred Spirits was going to be Symbiosisesq in design. Unfortunately for DPS, Kindred Spirits, is not going to be the most useful thing. There may be niche cases where Kindred Spirits is used to help your DPS players parse or if you are a Resto M+ player, but as it currently stands it is not very engaging for Balance Druid.
Evocazione: Factotum - Pretty cool honestly. You are able to get potions that are independent of Healthstone and Health Potion. They do 15% healing, meaning they scale pretty well. In addition to that it removes all curse, poison, disease, and bleed effects. It could be super useful for multi-class tank or healer player, but i still don't see the full viability for Balance.
Venthyr:Frenesia Vorace - This is probably the most interesting Covenant ability for Balance Druid. With 3 minute cooldowns as a baseline, Ravenous Frenzy lines up perfectly, amplifying your damage via a haste steroid. The only real drawback is if for some reason you would go idle over the duration, it could put you in a position to die, but you should be able to cast
Fuoco Lunare and
Fuoco Solare while on the move. It also works with Shapeshifting / Melee attacks as to not count as idle, so that is something you can do as well.
Porta delle Ombre - BY FAR one of the best abilities coming out of the covenants. With the removal of
Bestia Distorcente coming into Battle for Azeroth, the lack of a blink felt pretty bad at some points into the expansion. The ability to be able to take this blink is going to be really nice. I hope that all fights are designed with this ability in mind. Making sure that Door of Shadows does not break any fights would be imperative.
Necrolord:Sciame Adattivo - is actually a dope ability, especially if you want to have multi-role utility. I suspect that this will be fairly strong for both Guardian and Restoration while doing okay damage as Balance. The Adaptive Swarm may also be fairly strong on Single Target when talented into
Bengala Stellare making it an all around decent option. On AOE, this will be slightly lackluster as it can only apply to a few targets unfortunately. One thing I noticed as Balance is the fact that it only jumps 25 yards as opposed to Balance's native 45 is kinda awkward, especially since ranged can be positioned very far away from targets to not take benefit of that bounce. Decent option nevertheless.
Forgiatura della Carne - This is a 4 second channel for a shield equivalent to 20% of your HP. I doubt it will break any fights, but can you imagine swapping bear then channeling this for a mechanic. I really would not mind Necrolord in M+ solely due to this shield. While the channel can be awkward, just the addition to the Balance Druid toolkit feels pretty sick.
Night Fae:Convocazione degli Spiriti - Perhaps the MOST LACKLUSTER covenant I've played with. So you read it, you'll be channeling for 4 seconds to erupt in a flurry of 16 druid spells favoring your current specialization. This is so misleading it is insane. Even though it favors your specialization, it will cast a mix of other spec abilities as well. Sigma addressed some changes coming to
Convoke the Spirits here, but unfortunately this does not address the core problem of the ability just not feeling like it comes from your spec and instead it just feels the same regardless of what spec you are playing.
I genuinely believe
Convocazione degli Spiriti should favor what form you are in, not what specialization you are. So say I want the
Falciataes and
Vello di Ferros for whatever reason, I go
Forma d'Orso, channel Convoke, and I get the Thrashes and Ironfurs. Say I wanted to use it as a healing cooldown, I could swap into Human form and use it there and get
Rinvigorimento and
Ricrescitas. It just makes way more sense that way. Then I can use it as a major offensive cooldown in Moonkin Form as well getting
Fuoco Lunare and
Ira Silvana.
Animorfosi - This feels like a watered down version of
Slancio with a 10 yard blink involved. You lose a lot of damage being in the wolf form, and I don't really suspect it has a ton of niche uses. I think it is something nice to have flavor wise and I would rather have it than not... but meh it's pretty bad.
Overall ThoughtsSo right now the only covenant that really impresses me is the Venthyr one for Balance Druid due to it lining up with our cooldowns as well as it does. I think Night Fae has a lot of potential if it got major changes though. Necrolord is probably the most balanced if you are looking to multi-role as a Tank / Healer and DPS on the side. I'm not like jumping up and down over the thought of any of these covenants though. They all feel pretty meh and are on a
VERY long cooldown for the effects that they grant. They do not add anything rotational and a lot of the on use stuff is on a 2 or 3 minute cooldown. I hope Blizzard takes a look at these. Maybe covenants will be a bit of a minor influence, but from what we have to work with right now these are the problems / cool things I have noticed.