Some of the new features of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands were criticized early on – partly even in beta. The biggest of the new features are the Covenants that dominate the Shadowlands. For these, a welcome improvement is now coming.
What is this feature? In Shadowlands, it all revolves around the 4 Covenants, the new core feature of WoW. Both in the lore and in gameplay, Venthyr, Night Fae, Kyrian, and Necrolords are omnipresent:
- the entire story of Shadowlands revolves around the fight of the Covenants against the Jailer
- you will receive your new powers and new abilities from one of the Covenants
- the choice of Covenant is more or less binding – switching costs an enormous amount of time
- the new Legendaries from Patch 9.1 further enhance the abilities
For many classes, their strength only comes through synergy with the Covenant abilities and the important conduits. Especially the conduits are a key point here. Conduits enhance your “soulbind” with one of the Covenant’s characters and grant you powerful buffs for your class abilities.
What is the problem with it? Conduits need to be collected first. Some can be found in the new raid Sanctum of Domination, others in dungeons or from PvP and world activities.
The conduits have item levels like many items do, but drop only in the highest tier in the mythic raid – and here, you don’t always get the best conduit for your specialization.
To reach the highest level, you often need to upgrade the conduits through various items (“Soulwind Scythe” and “Deathbound Shard”). The problem with that is that these items upgrade a random conduit from those with the lowest level.
So far, it can happen that you upgrade conduits through the upgrades that you cannot use at all.
Conduits for the specialization instead of for the class
This is the change: Blizzard now intends to limit the upgrades to the selected specialization instead of making a selection from all possible conduits. This increases the probability that you will upgrade a useful conduit.
If you have a conduit of another specialization at level 200, but a more important one already at 226, then the upgrade item will upgrade the already higher item. This will save you a lot of grind.
Especially Druids will be pleased, who previously needed even more luck with their four specializations.
Additionally, the team is increasing the drop chance of Deathbound Shards in the Adamant Vault in Torghast, so you can get the good upgrades even faster.
When will the change come? With the reset on Wednesday, August 18, the changes are expected to go live.
The community is already responding positively to the change, although some critical voices note that it comes too late. Nevertheless, fans are pleased that they can finally obtain their powerful conduits more easily. Possibly, this is even a first step towards the latest demands:
WoW players demand from Blizzard: ‘Finally pull the ripcord!’
