Make conduit swapping cost a seal of fate

Community General Discussion
21

Conduits CAN be replaced. Unless they’ve altered that in the past 4 hours.

The issue then that remains is how easy conduits are to acquire and how they’ll handle people who play multiple specs. Having each spec have its own conduit “board” would be a good way to do it.

23

Make conduits act like a mix between gems, enchanting, essences & Legendary Runefored powers…

How it works:

  1. Acquisition (Gems): Make conduits drop from “content” in a “blank slate” state.
    • Each type of conduit will be its own unique blank state for 3 types total and they can stack in your bags.
  2. Acquisition (Enchants): Acquire the “Affix” from varying degree of content like the essences, and maybe make account bound.
    • Essences: Each level or “tier” of an conduit “Affix” will work similar to the essences in that you will get them from x source. Each source will come as needed via content patches and will replace any “previous” tiers as you acquire them.
  3. Runeforged Powers: Take the “Blank slate” conduit to your covenant conduit person and he will “inscribe” the “affix” onto the “blank slate” conduit (basically he is enchanting the affix onto a conduit).

Example of how it plays out:

  1. Going into a 5 man, kill a boss and get a couple “Blank slate” conduits & get a conduit “Affix”.
  2. Take the conduit “Affix” to your covenant conduit person, he “learns the affix” and now he can apply that “Affix” to the correct “blank slate” conduit type.
  3. Take your “affixed” “conduit” and place into your desired slot.
    • You only lost 1 “blank slate” conduit as a net result.

Why goes this route?

  • It makes each “conduit” meaningful in that you have a limited quantity and have to keep playing the game / doing content to get more in order to change things up.
  • It makes “targeting” the “Affix” you want easy as you only need to get 1 of them in each content patch (as tier levels apply). Then to be able to apply that effect to the correct conduit, you just need a supply of that correct “blank slate” conduit type.
24

That’s the exact idea I had a couple days ago. But after watching the Preach/Ion convo, I realised that isn’t the kind of system they’re trying to create with them. Feedback that tells Blizzard “abandon your design goal” just isn’t going to be as useful as “here’s a good way to achieve your design goal”.

Watch Preach & Lore talk. Ion specifically says that the way conduits work right now, which the community is very vocally opposed to, WILL NOT be the way they work at launch. They KNOW that destructible, on-the-fly replaceable conduits will just mean players have to carry MORE conduits in their bags and Ion admitted the system doesn’t achieve their design goal with conduits, which is to be a semi-permanent choice. Not as immutable as your class choice, but more permanent than Azerite powers, which he said was a failure in that, instead of being semi-permanent, were just another “change before the boss” setting that either required you to carry duplicate gear, or port out of the raid, pay for reforging, and then port back in.

Seals of Fate are valuable and have a hard limit, which makes them perfect, imo, for achieving the design goals Ion put forth in his chat.

25

So players that need to change conduits for different specs, pvp vs pve, etc. would need to give up limited reroll tokens? Wow cool idea.

26

  • Seals of fate work. But that’s a A LOT of seals you may have to burn for a couple changes here or there between all your different conduit people and slots (maybe that’s a good thing).

  • Also order resources etc. to “pluck” out a used conduit in order to reuse in a another slot etc. might be a route, but again that means bag space issues as you would still be carrying them around etc.

  • What I suggested though… Yes you would “carry” them around. But only 3 bag slots. 1 reserved for each conduit type. Meaning you can have every single conduit possible in the game and it would only take up 3 bag slots.

    • I think that is fine as you would always be taking up at least 1 slot just holding the conduit before you slot it in. Whats 2 more slots?

Its no more different then having RAW uncut gems in your bags.

  • 3 colors:

    • Red
    • Blue
    • Green

  • Red Gem: (These are in your bag)

    • Cut Affix 1 (These are in your conduit tree)
    • Cut Affix 2 (These are in your conduit tree)
    • Cut Affix 3 (These are in your conduit tree)

  • Blue Gem: (These are in your bag)

    • Cut Affix 1 (These are in your conduit tree)
    • Cut Affix 2 (These are in your conduit tree)
    • Cut Affix 3 (These are in your conduit tree)

  • Green Gem: (These are in your bag)

    • Cut Affix 1 (These are in your conduit tree)
    • Cut Affix 2 (These are in your conduit tree)
    • Cut Affix 3 (These are in your conduit tree)

Also, You can just have a MAX (5) quantity limit for each “Blank conduit” type.
So you will never be able to change more than 5 (or w/e number) conduit type in 1 sitting. After that, you need to go do content to gain more of that “type”.

27

The very basic premise of conduits is that you DON’T change them for every situation. There are a lot of things where you can do that. The devs want some choices that are harder to remake.

If picking a conduit that works in multiple scenarios or filling out multiple Soulbinds & paths (there are 27 combinations of Souldbind paths at launch), plus a potential item upgradet, is a better overall choice, then you’ll set your conduits the best you can and save your seals for rerolls.

It’s meant to be a tough decision with hard consequences. You’re MEANT to not be able to 115% optimize for every single encounter or activity.

Or just one if conduits were fully blank and imprinting on them assigned their type. Yes, blank conduits would take up even less space in your bags, but from what I’ve seen, bag space is a secondary concern after Ion’s stated goal of “semi-permanence”.

As I said, blank essences that you imprint from a library was the best solution I could come up with when I was looking for a solution to “take up as little bag space as possible while giving players full control over their conduits at any time.” I simply think it’s the most elegant way to achieve that goal. But Ion’s goal seems to be “make you carefully consider your options and make it hard/undesirable/rare that you change it afterwards.” For THAT goal (and only for that goal), Seals of Fate are the most elegant solution, imo.

28

which is great in a perfect world where everything is exactly balanced as all things should be. Less so in a murky world where you can never really be sure what you’re getting

29

So how would that work exactly?

You only spend a seal to what? save a conduit you already slotted in so you can place it somewhere else?

30

Like a Tome of Clear Mind. You click the “edit conduits” button, a dialog warns you that this will cost a Seal, you click okay, and then all your conduits get sparkly and can be moved around as you wish. You can put them in your bags, put them in different spots, move them to other soulbind characters, whatever you want. Then you click the “Lock Conduits” button at the bottom, and another dialog warns you that you won’t be able to change them again unless you pay another Seal. You click okay and your conduits are set. If you left empty holes, then can be filled at any time, but any slots currently filled cannot be removed or changed unless you pay another Seal.

You can do this on average twice a week, three times if “the first one’s free”, but you can stack them up to 7 or 8 per week if you have the max 5 seals, use two, and then buy the two you can get for that week.

1 Like
31

Yea alright. 1 seal for changes for all conduits in all conduit trees.
I think this is a good way to handle it.
I approve.

1 Like