WoW Shadowlands Covenant Armor: Is it Purely Cosmetic?

WoW Shadowlands Covenant armor was revealed during BlizzCon 2019, showing players the next set of armor to earn. Players will be able to earn the cosmetic sets through their Covenant campaigns, earning one piece of gear a week until it's finished. Each covenant has different ways to earn slight color tints and changes to the same set of gear.

At BlizzCon 2019 it was mentioned that the sets would have set bonuses leading people to believe they would actually use the gear as armor, but that was quickly proved false as the gear was too low.

WoW Shadowlands Covenant Armor: Is It Purely Cosmetic?

Players can upgrade the pieces of armor depending on the highest set of gear they've unlocked, but it still doesn't compare to the gear in the raid and Mythic+. Maybe if players were allowed to unlock the gear quicker, it could be used as filler pieces, but it's been time-locked until now, as the last week of the campaign has been played out.

Blizzard continues to do similar things, time-gating certain gear to a point that when it's finally unlocked, people have moved on to bigger and better things. Blizzard has mentioned the return of raid tier sets, even as early as this expansion, so we could see the next raid or the one after that bring a new raid tier set that could actually be used more than just a cosmetic.