Kyrian
- Class Ability: Scouring Tithe
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: Summon Steward
While this lil homie doesn't really do much on his own, he does provide you with 3 Phial of Serenity 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: Soul Tithe
Increases your Malefic Rapture damage by 10% for 10 seconds if a target dies while affected by Scouring Tithe. This has some pretty interesting situations in AoE scenarios - remember, when a target dies with Scouring Tithe applied, you instantly gain 5 Soul Shards. This allows massive burst damage.
Necrolord
- Class Ability: Decimating Bolt
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: Fleshcraft
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 Fleshcraft next to. - Ultimate Form (Marileth) provides crowd control immunity while you're channeling Fleshcraft.
- Lead by Example (Emeni) increases your main stat whenever you channel Fleshcraft.
- Emeni's Ambulatory Flesh (Emeni) allows you to move while channeling Fleshcraft, probably the most powerful of any of these buffs.
Covenant Conduit:
Fatal DecimationYou probably will never play this conduit.
Decimating Bolt's strength is in in the buff it provides to your
Drain Soul, not the actual damage it does.
Night Fae
- Class Ability: Soul Rot
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 Drain Life portion of it's toolkit, unless we're in the unlikely scenario that Inevitable Demise 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 Scouring Tithe. - Covenant Ability: Soulshape
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: Soul Eater
While this is a decent damage increase and quality of life buff to Soul Rot, 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: Impending Catastrophe
This ability really only feels like a flavor option. It does decent damage, and has the ability to randomly apply either Curse of Tongues or Curse of Weakness, but outside of that it is what I'd say the weakest of the 4 covenant abilities. - Covenant Ability: Door of Shadows
I feel like there would be a lot to unpack here if Soulshape 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 Soulshape. - Covenant Conduit: Catastrophic Origin
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.