First things first: I love the new (old) Shadow. It feels amazing to play, there are some really good new talent choices and overall getting rid of the horrible Voidform mechanic did wonders to the entire spec. Gameplay is great now.
But... Covenants and Legendaries are severely lacking (?). That's at least what most streamers say about Shadow at the moment. I tried to make up my mind which class I am going to main and just checked a lot of Shadow content on YouTube and this was mostly the major complaint.
All Covenant skills range from bad to very bad when it comes to gameplay (and, besides Nightfae, usefulness). Mindgames is horrible for PvE and very undertuned, Unholy Nova with its melee positioning is a major no go in most cases, the Kyrian ability is breaking Shadow gameplay (but numbers make up for it) and Nightfae is just a boring buff. Why are the Covenant abilities so inherently bad? In the case of Mindgames, why would I ever pick Venthyr as Holy or Discipline priest. It was clearly designed to be the Shadow go to but it's just so bad at the moment. Can this be fixed by tuning alone? I don't know. (Edit: I am talking about PvE here, I know that Mindgames can be useful in PvP, but it's still a very odd Covenant ability; and even though Discipline might make the most use of it, why would I go Venthyr instead of Kyrian or Necrolord in that case?).
Legendaries are in a similar, very underwhelming state - at least when it comes to those content creators.
Do you agree? Shadow gameplay is great and for the first time in many years is fun, but much of that enjoyment is taken away or trivialized by the horrible Covenant skills and underwhelming Legendaries?