Conduits are being made easier to acquire, swap, and upgrade

Among the many new systems that are coming with the next World of Warcraft expansion, Shadowlands, is the Conduit system. Conduits are like a mixture of Essences from Battle for Azeroth, with gems that you can acquire for extra customization. Basically, they are items that you add to your Soulbind — think of it like a Covenant-specific talent tree — in order to fine-tune your abilities with new powers. It’s like if you had an extra talent tree, but could “collect talents” to add to certain specific slots of that tree.

Originally, Blizzard intended for Conduits to be inventory-based. That is, they would be items that you would add to your bags and consume in order to add their effects to your Soulbind, kind of like glyphs. Of course, this system was met with criticism by the playerbase — it would force you to reacquire Conduits all the time, as well as worsen your inventory management minigame. Well, we have good news: Blizzard took this feedback to heart, and decided to change the whole thing!

In a forum post, Community Manager Kaivax explained that, while Conduits will remain as items that you collect from endgame activities — such as PvP, raids, dungeons, World Quests, and reputation rewards — you will now take that item to your Covenant Sanctum (your “base”), where it will be added to your collection — much like adding Essences to the Heart Forge in BFA. From then on, whenever you want to swap Conduits — at the moment, this will be limited to once per week — you will simply access your collection, with no need to obtain those items again.

Furthermore, Kaivax also explained that once you obtain a more powerful version of a certain Conduit that you had already collected, it will simply upgrade the version from your collection. And even better news: most Conduits will be acquirable from multiple sources — which should greatly diminish player complaints about feeling “forced” to do content you don’t enjoy in order to find your upgrade. Hooray!

These are all good changes, that have been met with overwhelming warmth by the community. Unlike in previous alpha/beta cycles, Blizzard is clearly paying attention to community feedback, evaluating that feedback, and making changes when necessary. The Conduit system certainly sounds much better after these changes.