How would you change the conduit system to make it better?

If you have time to do all that in the same week then your problem goes beyond a videogame mechanic.

Lol, it’s an example dude. Which happens to also be exactly how the game is set up. That’s not my issue, that’s just how it is :laughing:

Blizz just likes to throw pasta at the wall to see what sticks, and/or they feel the need to reinvent the wheel.

Remember way back when, during TBC, Wrath, Cata and MoP, where we just had our characters, their abilities, and talent points without all of these special little systems tacked on?

I remember those days. I remember having more simple design, less things to balance out, and the focus was on simply playing the game and getting gear rather than doing spreadsheets to figure out which of doohickeys you’re supposed to pick from are actually good and which aren’t.

I just don’t get why we need all of these systems, other than “it’s one more thing to grind for”.

Classic Wrath just can’t come soon enough, I suppose.

He’s just a troll, ignore him. He’s only here to argue for the sake of arguing about something that wouldn’t impact him in any way whatsoever.

And that’s exactly my point, most players don’t have time to do more than one or two of those activities a week. It’s not a huge deal to use a suboptimal soulbind if it comes to that, you’re still getting benefits out of it.

There are already posts about how it hurts people if it is removed. It adds extra annoyance to the game while providing nothing of value. If Conduit energy goes, just chunk the whole system. The point of Conduits is SPECIFICALLY that you aren’t supposed to be changing them frequently. Letting you change them does literally the exact opposite of what they are supposed to provide for the game - a simple, “fixed” amount of texture to player character, and instead changes them to yet another fiddly annoyance. How are you not getting that?

Holding up entire raids so people can min-max 0.5-1% DPS is obnoxious as heck. If we don’t like Conduits, they should just be thrown out - letting people swap them is literally the worst possible solution to the situation.

Weird, in another thread where I was talking about how many players actually do Raids and M+, I was told that it was like 40%+ of players had achievements from heroic raids and +10s, and now you’re saying that the number is far lower.

lol.

Gotta love how people twist the truth around to fit their own narrative. Either lots of people do this stuff or they don’t.

What’s your point? If someone wants to play 24/7 let them. Putting in a restriction like this is arbitrary and a “fix” for a non/community type issue.

Blizzard limited conduits because they were worried players would feel “pressured” to change conduits on a per encounter basis. They wanted to put energy in and have you return to your sanctum every time as a barrier to this kind of gameplay. Lots of people still do it, but if you do M+ or PvP then you’re using more energy, throw in people who play multiple specs, and that’s even more energy you’ll burn through.

So it comes down to what’s worse, is it worse for the player that likes to play the game 24/7 who is going to min/max to be punished for playing or would it be worse for the casual who just wants to ignore the systems in the first place who is now getting flamed for playing his character “wrong” because he doesn’t want to change conduits every fight?

If the casual is getting flamed it’s obvious he’s playing with the wrong people (community issue). If he was playing with other similar minded casual players he could continue to ignore conduits and just play the game, while the hardcore player is free to min/max to their hearts desire.

The community issues, the toxicity in plugging, the flaming for playing your character “wrong” are things Blizzard would rather just not touch or just have no idea how to even address in the first place.

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You’re the one taking things out of context: The only people that need BiS conduits are pushing 24’s. We can time any 15 with the worst or even no conduits at all.

If it’s that annoying then guilds need to put their foot down and say no to it. You do it, you get benched. Not hard.

I don’t want to get rid of the entire covenant system because there ARE things that I like, especially the conduits that give self-healing to some classes lacking it, and also the crafting material thing that used to be expensive shoulder enchants in past expansions, etc etc.

Though I suppose we could cut out some of the more useless conduits that barely do anything and just make them static upgrades without choosing anything or something. Shrug I dunno. But still.

The casual player comes first because he makes up a larger portion of the community, and high-end players can “deal with it” when it comes to Conduits. Shadowlands is doing well, Asmon is still subbing, Preach is still subbing, Bellular is still subbing. It’s all a lot of whining but nothing to show for it.

That said, if we’re talking about making changes, this is a false dilemma. We can make a different change than simply only removing Conduit energy. We don’t need to punish casual players in the pursuit of appeasing compulsive players.

You don’t tell me “how it has to be” when you’re making a suggestion Blizzard absolutely disagrees with and I disagree with. No - if it is annoying, then I will support Blizzard’s Conduit Energy approach so that it is not an issue. You can suck it up.

I’m not saying delete Covenants. Just the Conduit stuff. Conduits are literally designed to be the opposite of what you want them to be, and the only compromise to you getting what you want is agreeing that the whole system needs to go. Conduits are literally designed to be the opposite of what you want them to be, I guess I need to say this twice because you’re not getting this - the design of them is not to be changed but to be not changed. How is this confusing for you?

Conduits are a system meant to not be changed. If you don’t like that, advocate for their removal. Suggesting they become the opposite of what their design goal is just seems misguided.

The design goal is misguided. You can’t have a meaningful character building choice that get’s tossed out the window or re-iterated on every 4-6 months. My main has switched Covenants 4 times so far this expansion as Class abilities and conduits have been changed since launch. I’ve had to just “deal with it” doing the renown grind 3 times (left Kyrian pretty quickly), while the casual player just ignores this stuff anyways.

They should just “deal with” their toxic pugs flaming them and find a guild. Stop feeding me a bowl of :poop: as dessert with every meal Blizzard.

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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 doubt this is the reason, really.

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.

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This thread would like a word with you.

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.

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Make the conduits craftable up to rare. Put epics in WQ’s and keep legendaries as drops in Raids/PvP/Mythic +/Vault.

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.