They’re doing this all wrong. The reason corruptions were one of the best systems they’ve ever made is for a specific reason that they’ve failed to include:
There was a downside to the corruptions.
That made it an interesting and fun decision-making process. Do I go for more corruption and risk the thing-from-beyond killing me in a key? It made it feel good to time a key with an insane amount of corruption.
Corruption is genuinely the only system in the history of the game that truly didn’t have a correct/optimized answer. There wasn’t some guide you looked up for the exact corruptions to play in every scenario. That made it feel fun and is likely the last time most players attempted to theory-craft their own builds. Now you just look up the best setup on wowhead. Corruptions were awesome.
I’d love for them to bring corruption back, but they need to do it right.
I’d love to theory-craft my own build, but unfortunately, when I did that, I got 300k less hps because I chose options that seemed good but didn’t interact with the other 10 passives in the right ways.
There was a correct answer to corruptions. It was fit as many twilight devastation as you could get and wear without dieing every pull. Tanks? Twilight Dev. Stack 3-5 of them and you were doing more DPS than your entire raid team was if they had zero.
DPS Stack as many as you can and Git Gud at dodging mechanics.
Healers? Well if the boss dies in 3 minutes instead of 5, thats 2 minutes of mana you dont have to budget for, so you can just rip big fat heals instead of trying to triage. Better stack twilight dev.
Tldr of it, twilight dev was overtuned. All the other corruptions were corner case in group play, and they didnt really have a downside once you fully upgraded your cloak, you just ran as many you could bring and not die.
Corruption was fun. As long as they added the vendor and put currency on every activity you did (including PVP), then it’d be fine. Player power is fun.
If you weren’t running Infinite Stars or Twilight Devastation (or maybe Gushing Wounds), then you were doing it wrong. Unfortunately, until the Corruption vendor showed up much later after loads of player complaints and unsubs, acquiring the gear with the Corruption you needed was an insulting process of RNG on top of RNG.
They know exactly what they are doing and why my friend.
Yes corruption had that kiss/curse effect. For stacking it. That was interesting, and sometimes annoying. I will say with all the mechanics that current content have, adding the corruption mechanics would be too much.
It did. Certain class/specs did better with certain corruptions. Stacking Haste corruptions worked great for some. Stacking the bleed one was amazing for others. Stacking Twilight on a high HP tank like a DK was pretty great.
But, yes. Corruptions did have a min/max. And when you werent lucky enough to get your good ones to drop, it felt bad. Then they put the vendor in and it felt less bad. But, you had to farm currency to stack em. The other issue, was certain ones scaled utterly out of control for some specs. It was a balance nightmare.
many people at the highest level didn’t even play twilight devastation.
There were many specs/classes that at the highest end stacked
Expedient 3’s, Masterful 3’s, Gushing Wound, , Ineffable Truth, even Versatile 3’s for tanks. The patch was even evolving as it ended-- we started to see people experimenting with Surging Vitality 3’s for tanks-- it was a very, very large vers proc.
Extra stats are fun, and the way these corruptions allowed very big scaling was also fun. This variety was the fun.
Only the people that cared about parsing heroic raid and hard capping at +15’s (475 ilvl vault) cared about Twilight Dev 3’s.
and you still had the opportunity to play with some corruption with ZERO side effects.
All told, corruptions were good. and the kiss-curse and stat scaling is what made them fun.
It was a very fun system: Stacking or not? There was also the imbalance provided by said corruptions, which did 80% of the fun of this system.
The planned return is underwhelming as they are just weapon enchants: No stacking, probably not as imbalanced as in BfA so less fun.
We’ll see how they’ll hold their ground against current enchants
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