The four new covenant-related legendaries for Rogues have been revealed with the latest PTR build. Let me give a class-wide commentary on first impressions. Please note that PTR has not been very stable so I wasn't able to fully test everything myself yet. On top of that, these legendaries are riddled with bugs and quirks that make me think they were just thrown on the PTR without any internal testing. For that reason, these comments are based on some assumptions and a very early preview. Of course, everything is also subject to change.
Pic mortel (Necrolord)
The Necrolord legendary is the kind of legendary that is getting strong with more targets. In single target situations, it is more or less no DPS gain aside from a few combo points. In AoE, it is really strong though, allowing for some very powerful
Pointe d’os dentelées. This is most notably so for Outlaw, where every single initial bone spike hit also translates into
Déluge de lames. For Assassination, it also synergizes well with the additional combo points for crits via
Destin scellé, and the fact that the DoT scales with Mastery (which in turn can also synergize with the new soulbind trait
Œil du sculpteur of Heirmir). It is too early to put it into numbers but it looks like it will be a very strong AoE legendary for Necrolords at the cost of almost no benefit for single target.
Obéissance (Venthyr)
On the PTR, this legendary is fairly bugged. The Versatility does not translate into the
Flagellation buff when it persists after 12s. Also, the cooldown reduction is always active, no matter whether the buff is up. Nevertheless, assuming this legendary will be working as it implies it should, it doesn't sound too bad at all. Up to 30% Versatility alongside the up to 30% Haste buff is very good, and there is the cooldown reduction on top of it. With Venthyr being a good single target covenant, the legendary might be a strong contender for a new top legendary. Whether strong enough to beat Assassination's
Lame-du-destin remains to be seen further down the road.
Clarté résonnante (Kyrian)
At the time of writing, I haven't been able to get any testing data or seen anyone else be able to test this at all. All I can go off is the assumption that it means that
Réprimande retentissante will essentially give you access to 4 empowered finishers. From spell datamining it suggests that it overcharges every combo point from 2 to 5, so you can match each of them once. It is also hard to put any numbers to it. It doesn't sound too amazing but not bad either. I can see it ending in the solid middle of the pack for legendaries, maybe less good for Assassination, where Kyrian is not too amazing of a covenant.
Assaut toxique (Night Fae)
I have to straight away say that this legendary is just completely horrible. Period.
The way it works is that it randomly rolls one of applying
Vendetta debuff,
Poussée d'adrénaline, or
Lames de l’ombre whenever you consume the final stealth-ability buff from
Septicémie. The cooldown is random and not based on your active spec. This comes with a number of quirks of things not always being set up consistently across the entire class. On dummies, the
Vendetta debuff disappears again almost immediately, which might be due to a dummy quirk or even a cross-spec restriction for Vendetta that might screw with this legendary. How
Lames de l’ombre works is also unintuitive as, for example,
Estropier does have the CP generation in a separate base spell, so it does not affect the damage.
There is more. Procs of this legendary actually hard-set the duration of their corresponding buff to 8s. Seriously, it can actually be a damage loss if you are unlucky. If you proc
Lames de l’ombre with more than 8s remaining of the regular spec cooldown, you
lose uptime. This is probably a bug and it is supposed to extend active buffs.
Aside from the randomness in what cooldown you get and the buff overrides, this legendary also comes with the aspect that it does nothing whenever the player runs into the situation of having used
Septicémie on a target that dies.
Finally, it is also just not good numerically. In essence, it would boil down to 8s of a big cooldown every 90s. Even just half of the effect of
Vélocité is better than that.
I would like to see this legendary reworked from scratch.
Overall, it is too early to say much about these legendaries. Personally, I am not a great fan of covenant-specific legendaries. So far, legendaries and covenant tools have been (mostly) separate subsets for tuning. Covenant legendaries will, however, be an additional factor that can play into covenant choice and overall performance. What does this mean? Well, one case is the legendaries are bad and nobody cares. The other is they make the landscape even more confusing or shift meta around by being actually strong. Blizzard are not making balancing things any easier for them in an already inconsistently tuned system. For everyone who chooses the covenant based on which one they like, this can end up a dangerous slap in the face, just adding more reasons to the potential pile that make you feel like you're not living up to your expectations when you chose "wrong" according to some meta.
