Title sums it up. I get the whole “let’s make our choices meaningful” argument, but you would think that between covenants that take time to recover from swapping between, and crafting legendaries that take resources that are capped each week and require 4+ weeks to fully upgrade each, that we would have enough of that.
With several soulbinds offering distinct choices for different environments, for instance Plague Deviser Marileth being strong for pvp due to Ooz’s Frictionless Coating, vs Emeni’s Lead By Example giving a good pve boost, it makes it difficult to justify using one soulbind per spec to cover using spec-specific conduits.
It hurts nothing to make soulbinds spec-specific, especially with the completely unnecessary Conduit Energy system (who decided to go ahead with THAT by the way?). Covenants already make spec swapping awkward if the ability is different for two specs, like Elemental vs Enhancement, let’s NOT have the conduit system further disincentivize players from having off specs.
Make the Soulbinds spec-specific, and remove Conduit Energy.
Let it be known that you’re unable to freely change specs in the field without losing huge dps increases with potency conduits.
This is honestly astounding and only serves as evidence that blizzard does not play their own game and is completely out of touch with the vast majority of their playerbase does.
Let it also be known that the lead developer of the WoW team, Ion Hazzikostas, has only played ONE character and ONE spec since VANILLA. Suddenly things become much more clear.
Somebody didn’t read the first paragraph of my post. I get that they “wanted to make choices matter”, but between covenants and legendaries, they should have that covered.
It’s one of my big pet hates this expac: Change specs, then you have to go BACK to the sanctum and manually change soulbinds/conduits to suit. So annoying when you want a change in the fly, and have the gear set up ready for it.
It’ll most likely be added later in the expac to draw people back in after more get fed up with the constant back and forth
Not… exactly true. Sure, if you want to use the exact same soulbind you have to go back to your covenant to change conduits, but you can set different conduits for different specs. I have my Demo conduits on Emeni, and my Destro conduits on Marileth. I’m Demo most of the time, but when I go Destro, like for the Maw for example, the moment I change spec, Marileth becomes my active soulbind, regardless of where I am, and vice versa for Demo and Emeni.
Since I don’t touch Aff, my plan is to have Marileth for Destro, and Emeni and Heirmr for Demo, one for raid and questing, the other for dungeons.
Just do that. Pick your soulbind for each spec. The only real issue is for Druids, and anyone who uses all 3 specs as well as a second build for a spec, but like 90% of the playerbase won’t go that far. It’s certainly not a perfect system, far from it, and there’s a bunch of flaws I’d like to see addressed. But it’s far from impossible to change specs in the field without losing a lot of dps from wrong conduits
I’m not. Because I despise the one I have to use for Resto.
“Let me save you by putting you in a pod! But oh wait… everyone else around you gets to die, because you can’t do anything while you sit here for a while!”
By this point in the expansion, it seems like a serious QoL improvement that should be made so that when you change specs (Destro to Demo or Affliction), your conduits would also change to match that spec with the spec-specific conduits you set up. Silly you can be mid-raid and want to change to a better spec for the content in front of you, but to actually do so you have to fully leave the raid to change your conduits even though you can spec swap and gear swap without any need to leave.
Another flaw with the soul bind system is that I dont like that When I play my resto druid I use Plague Deviser, and then for feral it is also Plague deviser and I cant have it set up to where when I switch specs it automatically changes my conduits back. Its really frustrating that were this far in WoW where they cant set up a conduit bind set up to spec. Makes me want to wait until Dragonflight.