Originally Posted by
Wavebossa
I'll try to to cover all bases, but I think this makes sense.
As it stands now, Conduit Energy is a punitive mechanic stacked on top of an already restrictive mechanic to ensure that players don't minmax and shift conduits for every encounter. This is by design.
Current System
1. You must change conduits at Forge of Bonds
2. You consume conduit energy so you can only do this a limited amount of times per (insert time frame)
As someone who plays multiple specs and uses the same Soulbind for 2 of those specs, I actually have run out of conduit energy multiple times. Especially when healing Kael in CN. It may not impact you, but it does for some of us. However I think my solution would make it useful for everyone.
My Idea
1. Changing conduits at Forge of Bonds cost 0 conduit energy.
Reasoning - You already ported to your Covenant location. That is already restrictive and punitive enough. No need for it to cost anything else. The cost is the time and summoning resources it took for you to get there and change.
2. You have to ability to change conduits like you do talents, but it costs conduit energy
Reasoning - You still have to use a Tome, or go to a rested location. But you are not forced to go to your Forge. This way there is still a restriction, and blizzard still gets to artificially limit min-maxing. But the players themselves have the option of using something already in the game (tomes) to make an on the fly change.
Blizzard obviously wants us to change conduits less often than we change talents, so that is where the conduit energy would come into play. We use it when we swap conduits away from our Forge, but its free at our Forge. So if we run out of conduit energy for minmaxing, we always have an option to do it, we just need to port back to our forge and utilize a lock to summon us back (important). So there is your punitive restriction, but in order to get there, we need to exhaust all the conduit energy first, and we would need tomes for every change.
What do you guys think? My guild agrees, but that's a small sample size and i'm an officer so they might just be biased.