Death-Bound Shard - the item used to upgrade random conduits to 252 - should be redesigned to allow you to target a specific conduit to upgrade. I’ve been fully decked out for a long time but have absolutely zero motivation to grind any other character to a competitive state for high rating PvP.
The argument of ‘it keeps you playing for longer’ doesn’t make sense to me when it frankly does the opposite. If I have nothing to do on my main, I do not log on.
Please, let us choose what conduits to upgrade, make the grind a lot more bearable and less mind-numbing.
I don’t really care if it stays random but there one major issue which will be even worse in 9.2 : There’s no bottom line to the upgrades. If you have a 180ilvl conduit then you’ll need to grind a ton of upgrades to get it to the 270~280ilvl cap in 9.2. Then rinse and repeat for each conduit.
The main change we need if for the upgrade to have a baseline ilvl such as “+13 ilvl OR to 252ilvl if you’re still below that range”
In all fairness it worked (How many shards did you earn on your main ? How many times did you do a torghast run just for your conduit upgrade ?) but it just feels terrible imo.
It’s not just the grind which is driving players away. It’s the all the overly complicated and pointless systems which are confusing the player base.
Having 3 or 4 different talent trees (and that’s exactly what they are) locked behind different content and grinds is just too much.
It might be something which top end players like to use to finely tune their specs. But the rest of us just looking on IcyVeins or Wowhead for the BiS spec and leave it like that until next content patch, getting fed up with the pointless grinds at the end of it all. All it does is reduce the amount of time we spend doing what we enjoy doing.
But, yes your suggestion is a good one. A better one though would be to remove the entire conduit system and just balance the classes better around what would usually be the BiS spec.
Dunno, but I had decent rng with my upgrades and only have a few 200 ilvl miscellaneous conduits left which I don’t need to worry about upgrading. Got my sockets and conduits before rift farming became the method for farming, so my grinding came via dailies and weekly activities, then using the currency from the weekly vault to buy more research.
The thought of grinding all of that on an alt though just to get to a competitive level makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out.
This is obviously my preferred way as well, but the conduit system is clearly staying for the remainder of the expansion, so this is the way to improve it.