Ion Hazzikostas says destructible Conduit system won’t go live, leaving us with more questions

For some folks, the upcoming design of Conduits as part of World of Warcraft’s next expansion Shadowlands has been a concern, and there’s been some debate about if it makes sense if they could be permanently destroyed when removed, the way gems have worked in gear over the years. It feels like those folks will be relieved to discover that according to Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, the system will not be going into the live game as it is. In an interview with Preach, he discussed this topic and a lot more besides, and there’s a liveblog up at Wowhead if you prefer the text version.

While there's no solution to announce for this yet, @WatcherDev said they are not going to go live with the destructible conduit system as it is now. A change will be coming. #Shadowlands #Warcrafthttps://t.co/dae68jav5b

— Wowhead💙 (@Wowhead) July 17, 2020

Of course, that still leaves a lot of questions. What will they be doing with Conduits? Saying it won’t go live as it is now doesn’t mean we won’t get destructible Conduits at all — it just means they won’t be the same as they currently are. So how are they going to change? In the discussion Ion mentions that Blizzard knows that putting in grinds to overcome situations like the Conduits being destroyed when removed frustrates players, and there’s an overall sense that they’re looking at issues like the Azerite Armor reforge system to try and improve, which I think is a smart play. Conduits are going to end up being the main way players can customize within a spec/Soulbind, I think, and so I hope they’ve realized that forcing players to carry around three whole sets of Azerite gear — or more, in some circumstances — didn’t end up feeling great.

Making players feel like they have to farm up a bunch of Conduits so they can adjust for specific raid encounters or to swap between running Mythic dungeons and soloing isn’t ideal, and Ion mentions knowing that players will do the optimal path to getting enough Conduits to get around the loss of one when it is removed. However, what we don’t know yet is what, exactly, they’re going to do about it. How will Conduits behave? How will they not lead to the same pitfalls as previous systems? Hopefully the Shadowlands beta drops an altered system for us to playtest soon so we can get an idea of how this will all shake out.

For the complete interview you can head to Wowhead and check out their liveblog.