Apparently some developer who came up with this idea at Blizz somehow slipped on a banana peel and hit their head off of something if that’s actually what they intended, lol.
They give us what is essentially a Talent System (don’t lie, Conduits are basically another row on the Talent Tree that you have to grind for), and after years of letting us change talents increasingly easier, they’ve somehow slipped on a banana peel and go “OH WAIT I KNOW GAIS LET’S ADD TALENTS YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO CHANGE! YEAH, THAT’S IT!”
Dude, seriously, wtf…
That makes no sense whatsoever. Are they really that far gone that they thought that was a good idea!?
But hey if you can tweak the soulbinds in such a way that classes lacking self-healing get decent self-healing and keep the crafting materials, and rebalance the mobs, I don’t really care, that’s really the only things the soulbind system does that I actually care about.
I actually like the idea, but as they exist now, they’re too basic, and too linked to the Trinity and to spreadsheet gaming to be really fun.
We’re dealing with an expansion that leans heavily on memories and the past. With that in mind, at least half of the conduits should be spells from the old days that were pruned: Mana Burn, Totems, Seals, etc. Let me play with what I want to play with. Like, where’s my Blessing of Kings? Give me that in a conduit.
I do like that they target spells we don’t often use (like Turn Evil on my Paladin, or Transference on my Monk). That said, they should tweak those lesser used spells with abilities and passives that we haven’t seen before, not just faster cast times.
For example, my Turn Evil finesse conduit should make Turn Evil an on hit ability that procs every so often. It’s not like it’s in a Paladin’s standard rotation, and in it’s current form, I’m never going to socket that conduit…but I do look at it, often. Some of these conduits just need a little more ‘oomph’ to them, and we’d be heading in the right direction.
WoW Classic did well. BC Classic is poised to perform well. Blizzard sees that people want to go back to the RPG roots of the franchise. It’s only natural Blizzard would see this as a scenario where people want “Choices that matter” to return while minimizing the “fidgety”-ness of the game (something that was less prevalent in Classic).
Classic is going to run out of runway eventually. Blizzard wants to somehow shepherd these players back into Retail, and bringing back the RPG elements of WoW and introducing them into Retail is one approach to do so.
And you’re likely more than willing to continue to deal with it. So it sounds like the winning play from Blizzard is to just push forward.
I think it’s just simply inept devs making terrible decisions and throwing noodles at the wall to see what sticks, what they’ve been doing ever since WoD.
There’s no consistency whatsoever in the game, and every new expansion feels like an entirely new dev team that can’t make their minds up on what the game should actually be at any given time and they somehow think that stacking systems ontop of systems is somehow fun, despite a good number of players saying they hate it and that such system should either be scrapped entirely or gutted.
I mean, you know it gets pretty bad when the Lead Developer says “If this doesn’t work we can just pull the ripcord.” I mean that alone says they have no farking clue what they’re doing or how to design a good game anymore.
Maybe Classic’s doing so well isn’t so much about “Choices that matter” and more about “less systems and junk”? If you gave the ability to respec on the fly in Classic, I doubt many people would complain.
They don’t want to deal with 10 different and simultaneous systems that have to do with your character’s power simultaneously.
Wasn’t it Asmon or Bellular or someone who coined the phrase “Systemslands”?
I think that’s pretty telling. We don’t want special UIs for 10+ different aspects of our characters. We just want a spellbook and a talent tree and that’s it. Let us do those, and then go out and kill junk.
I’m pretty sure they’ve outright said the success of Classic has made them reconsider some of their decisions, so I’m pretty sure this is at least a good chunk of the reason.
They’ve said they’re reconsidering borrowed power, going back to tier sets, etc. I would say this is probably a not-insignificant reason for it. They’ve literally said straight up they want to go back to a space where players make hard choices about what/who their character is. Covenants represent this ideology as a success, Conduits less-so, but regardless, it is clear that they’re making actionable steps in that direction.
It’s not a success. A LOT of people hate Covenants being a “hard choice”.
Now, the Set Piece Bonuses and other stuff, ya, I could get behind.
Ideally, if we could turn the game back into Wrath or MoP style, that would be awesome. Well, perhaps maybe minus the Glyphs. Wasn’t a huge fan of those.
Vocal minority of whiners. In a community of 7.1+ million players, the whining of a small collection of forum-goers is hardly significant.
The fact that Blizzard can afford to defy the Ripcorders is itself proof that the whining is a minority. Almost any other time Blizzard has received actual majority-level push-back, they have relented (see: Pathfinder).
I’m actually not arguing with you about this. Covenants were/are a success. You can refuse to acknowledge that fact and disadvantage yourself in the future by arguing from a position of ignorance, or you can accept that reality.
My take on conduits is they need to be “bigger” if they are supposed to be important to players. They are all such trivial boosts to things that I don’t even notice having them.
Make them like some of the anima powers, flashy “big” things.
Soulbinds have unique saved sets per spec. Bam done. The fact that soulbinds can only be used basically for one spec each or specializing one spec with 3 different soulbind is bad. It’s nice when you can switch between the 3 for one spec. This discourages multi speccing. And is horrible for druids who have 4 specs.
Since they aren’t going away until the expansion is over then remove the charges . They already have some kind of restriction that prevents you from doing it anywhere , with it needing to be done in ones covenant.
On another note , you know how a lot of people go the devs don’t actually play the game and of late a lot of the defenders of SL systems have been low level ,low cheevo and low post count toons. THat seem to know more about wow then what their data indicates they should . I’m not saying anything ,I’m just saying.
Allow us to freely shift between conduits, and give us a profile page system to save conduit load outs to ease transitions.
Fixes the entire system.
The system isn’t meaningful enough to warrant a character level decision. There’s no point in preventing those who want to be optimal from being optimal with this sort of system. Heck, the classic talent system is less restrictive than conduits… and that’s saying something.
I like being able to click my covenant symbol and changing individual conduit paths or soulbinds at rest places, that works out pretty well for me. The individual boosts to abilities isn’t enough to warrant constant swapping of the actual conduits for me, but more power to you if like doing that.
Also, the old classic talent system cost incremental gold amounts in order to do the swapping. By way of WoW inflation, we’d be paying out like 20k minimum for conduits swaps. I’m good with the little time crystals and the conduit path changing at rest stops
