Upcoming Diablo 4 patch improves one overlooked feature, but fans don't think it's enough

Diablo 4 is slated to see a patch drop on March 5, and it improves quite a few features in the game — unfortunately, while one of them is a good idea, some fans in the community aren’t really seeing what they were hoping for. Some are taking it for what it is — a positive step forward for one of the weaker shrines in the game — while others were honestly looking for a step backward, which could fix the problem completely.

While I’m glad to see the Conduit Shrine improve in Diablo 4’s next patch, I do agree that the way it functions still temporarily makes even the best builds inaccessible. There is a potential fix, but it’s unknown if the developers are looking at it.

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The March 5 Diablo 4 patch improves Conduit Shrines, but fans are looking for something more

According to the Diablo 4 patch notes, there is a major change coming to Conduit Shrines and how they deal damage. For those who don’t know, the Conduit Shrine temporarily turns players into a mote of lightning, and all the buttons on your hotbar now make you dash to the nearest enemy and erupt into damage. However, if there are no enemies nearby, it feels remarkably useless.

They did it! They finally freaking did it!! Conduit shrines "shouldn't" be hot garbage anymore!! byu/Talzyon indiablo4

These patch notes state that the “damage of Conduit Shrines have been adjusted to aggressively scale with player level and Paragon level.” The example given is that the average increase is approximately 37x in Torment III, which is admittedly some pretty serious firepower. But that doesn’t really solve the main problem with Conduit Shrines.

At first, the idea of transforming into ball lightning was really cool, until you factored in that it took away all of your abilities for as long as it’s active. You can’t press any of your normal spells while this is triggered, and it’s upset some members of the community. I certainly understand, to be honest.

It’s unclear to me why we didn’t just keep the Diablo 3 Conduit Shrine. It just gave the player an aura of lightning that devastated anything you got near. It was incredible damage, but was also limited in how many targets it could hit at once. While I don’t think we should completely copy the previous Conduit Shrine one-to-one in a future Diablo 4 patch, I do think it should be changed in some capacity.

Comment byu/Talzyon from discussion indiablo4

I’m glad at least something is being done though — the damage at higher difficulty tiers for Conduit Shrine were miserable, and if you saw one, the odds of just skipping it and moving on were pretty high. Even if you’re playing an overpowered build, it’s not worth it if you’re just going to become mediocre ball lightning.

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