Complaint about Plaguefall & Icy Propulsion conduit

Dear Blizzard,

I am unhappy with my current Shadowlands experience, and my recent ordeal of trying to get my newly levelled Frost mage (currently ilvl 186) geared up has been a nightmare to say the least.

The situation is so bad that I have questioned whether I want to continue playing World of Warcraft. Most of my friends who convinced me to return for SL already have quit due to similar issues with gear progression, but I digress.

To summarise my current grievance:

My DPS is heavily reliant on a conduit that has a 0.5% chance of dropping from Doctor Ickus - the second boss of Plaguefall.

Now, the problem with this three-fold

Firstly, this boss is incredibly difficult to farm on all four modes.

  • Normal - Players only care about clearing the dungeon as quickly as possible for their random dungeon XP bonus. This means players will always skip the first two bosses.
  • Heroic - Players seldom clear the first two bosses, either because they only care about their daily heroic completion bonus, or because they want to farm a memory that drops from the third boss.
  • Mythic - Weekly lockout. I really don’t understand why it’s on a 7 day lockout, because the gear it drops is frankly tripe, and M+ isn’t subject to such a lockout.
  • Mythic Keystone - This creates its own problems. I’ll elaborate on that in a moment.

I have spent two straight days trying to farm heroic Plaguefall specifically for this conduit. I have probably done a dozen runs at this point. There is nothing fun about trying to convince your group to actually fight Doctor Ickus. There is also nothing fun about being kicked from groups because you don’t want to skip. I’ve genuinely had toxic experiences because of this.

Heck, one of my toxic experiences has been with a player who is a in a top 20 progression raid guild who genuinely insulted me for playing frost and told me to uninstall after he got me kicked. I will not name the guild or player but you’d think that when you’re at the cutting-edge of Nathria progression, you’d care more about trying to be a good Samaritan in pug contet.

I know that this conduit can also drop from tributes and world quests, but that in itself seems to be an incredibly rare occurrence that happens once in a blue moon. It seems to only be two World Quests in Maldraxxus, and the Maldraxxus and Bastion daily callings. So if you don’t have those, you’re outta luck.

Sludgefist also apparently drops this, but it’s a 0.25% drop chance, and is also on a weekly lockout. I’m also locked out for that particular boss on LFR and I can’t even get into a Normal raid group due to my ilvl and lack of Curve achievement.

Anything past that is definitely off-limits. I have a guild but they’ve shelved Normal raids and there’s no way I’d get into a heroic raid with them.

Secondly… this inability to get my conduit, as well as playing an off-meta build (people only want a tiny selection of classes in their groups) and not having 210+ ilvl gear or 1.5k rio means I cannot get into any Mythic Keystone dungeons.

Remember how I stated that this conduit drops from M+ dungeons where you have to clear all the bosses and where there’s no loot lockout? That’s not even a damn option thanks in large part to the community.

I have never seen such an elitist, toxic and exclusionary community as WoW’s. My Premade Group Finder list is just full of “Declined” from the sheer amount of elitists who expect a free boost rejecting me for runs that even I borderline outgear. And if I wanted to play a less expensive rejection simulator I’d just grab my phone and download Tinder, Zoosk, Hinge, Facebook Dating or any other online dating app. They’d probably be a better experience for me than WoW too…

Before you tell me to “just do your own key”, I have been doing that. The issue there is a flaw with the game’s keystone progression system. The key quickly outpaces you. I currently have a +10 Necrotic Wake key which I would have no hope of clearing at ilvl 186 without basically paying for a boost.

Thirdly, it’s the fact that this game is about as fair and balanced as Fox News.

When designing player progression systems like gear, conduits, talents, etc, you should not add items which contribute well over 50% of a player’s overall power. You should also not be making them an incredibly rare drop.

Icy Propulsion is exactly that. It’s a conduit that makes critical hits during Icy Veins reduce its cooldown. This kind of meta-defining CDR should be reserved only for talents and baseline abilities, because none of the other conduits that mages or any other class have access to can pump up a class’s DPS numbers by this much.

Fire mages get a talent that reduce Combustion’s cooldown when they score a crit. Why not Frost?

I get your frustration but I can’t help but wonder where are you getting those drop chance percentages from? I doubt those are accurate.

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Wowhead. That’s the only source I can find on it. They’re probably quite inaccurate but Blizz haven’t released official drop tables with percentages to my knowledge.

Yeah the wowhead drop rates are not accurate. Afaik their drop rates are calculated based on people looting the item, but obviously as it can only drop for mages it will artificially lower the % chance shown on wowhead. As no other class can loot it so it shows as much lower than it really is. Doesn’t solve your problem but might give you a little hope :stuck_out_tongue:

There is an item you can get from Ven’ari that gives you a random conduit that you don’t have yet, but going that route will probably be more effort. I suggest to just keep at it and maybe don’t focus on it too hard as there’s plenty of other upgrades you can get at that ilvl. :slight_smile:

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Completely forgot about Ve’nari. But I’ve heard that method of getting conduits is incredibly inefficient, grindy and takes far more effort than is actually worth. Also doubt it prioritises your current spec.

I actively avoid the Maw and Torghast unless I actually need something. Nothing about the Maw is fun. In terms of creating a hostile environment where you don’t want to be, Blizzard did a fantastic job with this zone. But in terms of creating endgame progression that isn’t torturous to play, they’ve failed.

Dont try to grind dungeons for them. Just do the daily callings, they have a high chance of dropping conduits.

And the Maw is improved in 9.1. You can use all mounts. You can defeat the Eye of the Jailer. You can go immediately to Perdition Hold and the Beast Warrens. Plus a whole new city gets added down there with a different biome.

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I have been doing my daily callings. Half the time I don’t even get anything other than around 2k worth of vendor trash. Which I’m not really complaining about in of itself - 2k of cold hard coinage is pretty good.

I also addressed the drop rate of this specific conduit from callings in my post. It seems to only be dropping from two specific callings, which rarely appear as a daily calling.

Also, why should I care about what a patch which will most likely come in August 2021 offers? By then I’m sure much of the remaining player base will have quit.

Ive steadilly been getting 200 ilvl conduits from my boxes. Got one more today. Having 5 184 left to upgrade.

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