Over the years, Conduits have gone to some truly zany places. Spam Aegis, spam Doom Bolt, nova Phantasmal Blades, Chaos “rain from the sky” TSS. However, looking over them, there are still some affixes that feel like they don’t fit what Conduits are trying to do, or, simply feel a bit too vanilla, if you will. These could be split into two groups: Channelling spells and RR modifiers
1. Channelling Spells
Flames of Ignaffar
20% Weapon Damage
18% Chance of Impaired Aim to target for 2 Seconds
Drain Essence
24% Weapon Damage
15% Slower Enemy Attack for 2 Seconds
Albrecht’s Aether Ray
16% Weapon Damage
20% Slower target Movement for 1 Second
All three of these basically do the same thing: add some % WD and a secondary debuff effect. Doesn’t feel very fitting for what Conduits are designed to do, that being: supporting niche damage conversions or skill uses. This is especially the case for the FoI Conduit, as from these three skills, FoI is the only one that already has inherent % weapon damage. The extent of the “zany” for that conduit is adding Impaired Aim to a skill that already has Fumble. That’s not very experimental.
2. RR modifiers
War Cry
1650 Bleeding Damage over 3 Seconds
22 Reduced target’s Resistances for 3 Seconds
Curse of Frailty
-15% Elemental Resistance
There are many more of these “added RR” modifiers across the Conduits, such as those tied to Storm Box or Devouring Swarm, but those not only add RR the skill doesn’t natively have, most of them also convert the skill they’re tied to. The two above, however, seem strangely timid. Both of them are free of major conversions and add something the skill already does. War Cry with the Terrify modifier already has generic flat RR, which is only 1 RR point weaker. So all the Conduit does is save 3 skill points (removing the terrify chance in the process) and add bleeding, a damage type Soldier already supports. In the case of CoF, Elemental RR is already part of the skill, Conduit just amplifies it. Going Elemental as Occultist is not all that crazy of an idea, certainly not enough to warrant a Conduit slot.
I feel like these 5 Conduits could either use some spicing up or could be a good spot for a full redesign. If we were to try to stick to the original design of the latter two Conduits, the CoF Conduit could add flat Elemental damage to CoF, perhaps promoting a playstyle similar to Word of Pain, except the player will have to find their own sources of flat damage for CoF. The War Cry Conduit could perhaps be adding flat Pierce or flat Vitality to War Cry, or perhaps include % Weapon damage and some War Cry damage conversion to promote a shouter build.
The first three Conduits seem like a good place for some new, wacky designs. DE, AAR and FoI don’t really seem like the skills that give much room for that. The FoI Conduit could be replaced with a Cold Aura of Censure Conduit with lifesteal to perhaps promote an aura build. The AAR Conduit could be replaced with a Chaos Devastation Conduit that removes the spell’s cooldown but also drops the duration and projectile count so that the spell only drops one meteor. The DE Conduit could be replaced with an Acid Reap Spirit Conduit that either has an AoE explosion around the target, or chains between enemies.
A third group worth mentioning are the Conduits for the two core CC abilities:
Blade Trap
100% Piercing Damage converted to Vitality Damage
-15% Vitality Resistance
Olexra’s Flash Freeze
-20% Physical Resistance
-20% Aether Resistance
These would be technically zany…if they worked. Both conflict with the skill’s dedicated set (Rimetongue and Mageslayer respectively), thus removing the ability to further increase the skills’ Trap/Freeze resistance reduction. A BT or OFF at ultimate levels with Conduit equipped and the absolute maximum number of duration increasing items lasts a grand total of around 1 second on all nemeses. And that’s with the maximum item support, which isn’t always good for the build (e.g. dual-wielding Spectral Blugeons). This means that most often the Conduit’s effect ends up being mostly useless.
For these, I think the Conduit itself is fine, it’s the base ability that’s simply not useful enough/not fulfilling its role. The addition of reduced Trap/Freeze reduction to the base skill was a step in the right direction in increasing the general usability of the skills without a set, but it feels like it’s still not enough. If the worry is that reducing Nemesis Trap/Freeze res even further (either through these skills, or just across the board dropping their res) is that they could be perma-cc’d, a common approach is to give enemies a resistance to cc after the initial cc expires. I’m sure something like that could be baked into BT and OFF. If the maximum duration of the CC on a nemesis were to be increased to, say, 2 s, so that players get to capitalise on the debuffs that come bundled with these skills, the enemy could afterwards be given a 6-8 s buff that increases their Freeze/Trap resist. It would allow these crazy builds like Physical Arcanist using the Conduit to possibly actually exist, without making OFF and BT broken across the board.
, not really a similar incentive as the other zaney examples
