Tettles
Best Balance Druid Double Legendaries for Sepulcher of the First Ones
The popular 9.1 Covenant of Venthyr for Balance Druid is back again, but this time less potent with nerfs coming into 9.2. Venthyr in Sepulcher is strong on specific encounters in which you value the potent 3 minute cooldown and can get high effective value out of it. Venthyr also is quite strong prior to getting double legendaries and can definitely see some play at the beginning of the patch again. You need to be way more diligent about your dump at the end of your
Ravenous Frenzy window as the nerf to
Sinful Indulgence forces you to dump earlier and the 4-set
Umbral Infusion allows you to dump more Astral Power at the end of your Ravenous window.
Primordial Arcanic Pulsar is the second legendary of choice because it synergizes perfectly with our 2 piece. With the
Umbral Embrace 2-set you just generate so much astral power that you are able to proc pulsar and cycle eclipse states at an insanely fast rate. The 4-set
Umbral Infusion also grants you gains for pulsar similarly to you using these abilities at full cost which is an incredibly cool interaction.
Night Fae is potentially back on the menu with all of the changes. The covenant still has a bit of a lower ceiling than Venthyr, but can be used in raid assuming a couple of conditions are met. For one you need the fight to not just grossly favor venthyr and be on 3 minute intervals timing wise when you would like to cooldown (like sanctum was). The other big condition is related to adds and AOE. Since Night Fae is almost strictly a Single Target covenant bosses that have low priority adds up whenever you need to be convoking is a potential issue.
The strengths come in the fact that you can proc a
Primordial Arcanic Pulsar every time you want to press
Convoke the Spirits which is a pretty nice interaction. Night Fae in raid can be pretty decent, but the decision on whether you play Venthyr or Fae for a fight is going to be determined with a lot more studying.
Best Balance Druid Double Legendaries for Mythic+
Venthyr is a lot more flexible as a whole than other options due to the lack of real AOE from other options typically. At the same time, Venthyr in dungeons is going to be the same old. This means Venthyr can still be quite strong, but it still suffers from similar issues in 9.1 of knowledge of cooldown timings and just general player use. If the things do line up well for Venthyr it can be one of the most potent abilities in the game for Balance Druid, but if used incorrectly then you will be out a lot of damage.
It is still pretty good,
Primordial Arcanic Pulsar is turbo strong with the 2 and 4 set, and you are never upset to play Venthyr.
Guiltyas
With the addition of double legendaries in 9.2 it's time to think about combinations of legendaries. Before we get into that I want to point out a huge issue with the way the way double legendaries functions, you'll be able to equip both a normal legendary and a covenant legendary. The issue here is that not all covenant legendaries are created equally, they range from
Celestial Spirits which is universally useful in every situation and is a significant increase to
Unbridled Swarm which is almost completely irrelevant on a decent chunk of content, Blizzard should heavily consider doing an additional tuning pass on the covenant legendaries.
Best Feral Druid Double Legendaries for Sepulcher of the First Ones
This will probably be your most common legendary combination once you've gotten your tier, on most fight lengths this will be the highest throughput legendary. It has decent synergy with the 2 and 4pc from the tier set, with the 2pc meaning more damage from the damage effect of the
Frenzyband and additional damage from the 4pc due to the CDR from frenzyband. There's no incredible synergies or interactions but it remains likely the best option being between -1% and 5% better than the next best option.
Prior to tier this will likely be your best option on single target, and even post tier it may be best on certain fight lengths. There's no interactions at all between these two legendaries and is simply a case of combining the two best throughput legendaries. On certain fight lengths this is the best combo by around 1%.
Best Feral Druid Double Legendaries for Mythic+
Again this will probably be a fairly common legendary combination once you've gotten your tier. It has decent synergy with the 2 and 4pc from the tier set, with the 2pc meaning more damage from the damage effect of the
Frenzyband and additional damage from the 4pc due to the CDR from frenzyband. If using this in M+ it will likely be simply to maximise aoe damage from the 4pc, it's hard to evaluate how valuable that will be on the live game however as currently the set for feral is HORRENDOUSLY bugged (snapshotting mastery, tripple dipping with
Tiger's Fury), but it's likely this will be a solid option.
This might be more of an option for higher keys, particularly once you've gotten tier.
Apex Predator's Craving when combined with
Primal Wrath and the Tier set gives you a decent amount of funnel. In high keys funnel can become extremely valuable allowing you to take out challenging mobs in a big pull fast enough to keep your group alive, a niche that is currently primarily filled by rogues. Once you have Tier this also avoids sacrificing too much AOE potential due to the CDR from the
Apex Predator's Craving procs and the 4pc bonus.
The Necrolord legendary currently only functions on AOE, with the 4pc applying a fairly hefty damage over time effect (if, as mentioned, hilariously bugged), this legendary combination on Necrolord can amp up the 4pc damage even further. This legendary combination does have some issues if you're not chain pulling fast enough as you can drop swarm stacks, but if you manage to maintain the stacks this may even be the highest overall throughput legendary combination.
Jaydaa
Best Restoration Druid Double Legendaries for Sepulcher of the First Ones
If you've been playing Restoration Druid for all of Shadowlands, then you're probably intimately familiar with our legendary progression thus far. For Sepulcher of the First Ones, our double legendary selection feels like the culmination of the previous two raids where we'll take the best of what we've played before and mash them together. With no nerfs to either legendary in 9.2, it's almost destiny that we'd eventually arrive at this selection for raiding. 1+1=2 and that feels right and we even get an assist from our new tier set bonuses to tie everything together.
For Castle Nathria, we primarily played with
Vision of Unending Growth largely due to it's ability to create a larger blanket of
Rejuvenations. While it wasn't particularly exciting or gameplay-changing, it did offer significant healing on it's own but also provided additional
Mastery: Harmony and
Abundance support. We could scale the additional
Rejuvenations up simply by putting out more
Rejuvenations to ramp for a large damage event. We'd let this foundational healing cover us as we utilize our burst cooldowns (
Convoke the Spirits,
Flourish, and
Tranquility) to do the remaining heavy lifting. As long as the healing wasn't relegated to a few targets,
Vision of Unending Growth was generally the go-to option.
The introduction of covenant-specific legendaries was initially a rocky start, but we eventually landed on the current incarnation of
Celestial Spirits that has taken top honors for us in Sanctum of Domination. It turns our 2-minute
Convoke the Spirits into a 1-minute giving us greater access to a burst healing tool. While it does reduce the number of spell casts due to lower channel duration, we do still acquire full stacks and duration of our soulbind buffs
Grove Invigoration and
Field of Blossoms in addition to slightly less than a 1-in-2 chance of casting a
Flourish. Greater access to burst healing means we can better cover more damaging events.
Once we unlock double legendaries in 9.2, we'll be able to have our cake and eat it too with both of these outstanding legendaries. We get all the benefits of both, but get an extra bit of synergy from our 2-pc set bonus where we gain an additional HoT
Renewing Bloom via our
Rejuvenation healing. Both legendaries provide additional
Rejuvenations which give an additional boost though nothing too crazy. Unfortunately, the additional
Swiftmends from
Convoke the Spirits don't feed into our 4-pc, so we can't win them all; however, we should have more targets to
Swiftmend without consuming more valuable HoTs thanks to both of the legendaries.
With flat healing and damage buffs, a killer double legendary combination, and a raid that plays into a lot of our healing strengths, expect a strong showing from Restoration Druids in Sepulcher of the First Ones.
Best Restoration Druid Double Legendaries for Mythic+
With the advent of 9.1.5 and the ability to freely swap covenants, we received a significant shakeup in our options for Mythic+, notably we're able to drop the all-purpose Night Fae for the more niche and specialized Kyrian and Necrolord covenants. Kyrian in particular has found considerable success in the current meta being able to provide additional damage to a DPS via
Kindred Affinity.
Healing Focused
When your focus is healing a small subset of players, it's hard to beat Necrolord and
Adaptive Swarm. The additional HoT healing in addition to the healing of
Adaptive Swarm itself allows us to play an almost
Germination playstyle while still allowing us to keep the burst potential of
Flourish. With
Unbridled Swarm, our
Adaptive Swarms split often enough that with some careful overlapping we can have enough to heal our entire party or deal damage to a large pack of enemies all gaining the addition HoT/DoT effect. Combine this with the single target burst combination of
Verdant Infusion and
Cenarion Ward and your tank will be covered for almost any situation. Many consider that sheer amount of healing unnecessary, and many will opt for the more damage-oriented playstyles.
Damage Focused
With a nearly flat 10% buff to our damage, things have generally been looking up for us in Mythic+. However, with the recent nerfs to
Kindred Affinity, excitement has deflated a bit now that Kyrian and Necrolord are tighter than ever when it comes to damage.
Necrolord has all the same benefits as above, but can deal a solid amount of damage while buffing our DoT damage across the board. Combine this with the strong single-target damage legendary,
Draught of Deep Focus, and we can provide a fairly significant amount of damage, especially when trying to push bosses as quickly as possible.
While the numbers are still okay for Kyrian, your mileage may vary for those that aren't utilizing it to the fullest extent. It'll take better planning both at the macro level for how your group is planning on pulling the dungeon as well as at the micro with your bonded partner. Expect Kyrian to still excel at the very top end, but more casual players will likely default to Necrolord.
Is either enough to dethrone the stagnant Holy Paladin Mythic+ meta? It's unlikely, but don't sleep on Restoration Druid in Mythic+ either.