Blizzard recently was forced into the difficult decision to delay the upcoming and highly-anticipated World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion. After the COVID-19 pandemic caused a considerable hit to their productivity, the expansion simply had too much work left.
Rather than release the expansion unfinished and broken, they’ve delayed until later the year to release it as a finished product. Whether or not it’s still broken, though, remains to be in the air.
Thankfully, Blizzard is doing everything they can to balance the many systems present in the game. One of the many systems being discussed is the Conduit mechanic prevalent as a result of Soulbinding and Covenants.
In a recent update posted to their blog forums, the developers discussed the fan concerns that the system will be limiting multi-spec play and experimentation with a variety of builds. While they feel that this limitation won’t be dominant, they agree that some level of limitation exists.
“While the existing weekly cooldown may provide sufficient flexibility once players have all three soulbinds fully unlocked, we agree that it is initially too limiting,” Blizzard confirms.
“A single weekly reset also fails to draw any distinction between someone who only wants to adjust a single conduit, and someone who wants to clear and rebuild their entire soulbind tree.” Rather than simply leaving it as is, they feel that they could certainly make improvements.
To that end, they’ve changed the weekly cooldown to be more flexible. Now, when first unlocked, the Forge of Bonds will have charges that allow players to place a conduit into a socket.
The Forge of Bonds will have ten conduit energy when first unlocked, each socket taking up a charge. Conduit Energy will recharge at a rate of one per day, with a cap of 10. This allows players to make changes daily, rather than having to wait an entire week for a simple change.
Blizzard’s goal with this change is to make sure that players are free to try out new upgrades and adjust their soulbinds to support multiple specializations or activities. This way, players aren’t stuck having to use all of their resources on their PvP play, or specifically tanking.
Players will also retrieve a free Conduit Energy (cap of 10 notwithstanding) each time they add a new conduit to their collection. With at least seven conduit changes per week available under this new system, changing and trying out new conduits is a significantly easier and more flexible system than the previous weekly reset.
