Ok Here We Go! (corruption rant/fix)

The Corruption system is quite possibly one of the worst things ever added into the game, expecting no less after an expansion of underwhelming content but this is just ridiculous.

Blizzard has been on this loop for like 3 xpacs, they introduce a bad rng based system into ptr/beta/alpha, the playerbase expresses their concerns and are ignored and the systems go live, then they come out 6 months later and say yeah it didn’t pan out how we thought it would and they talk about how they intend to steer away from rng systems in the future, this same empty speech is becoming as clockwork as raid show legends ads on youtube, They did it with legion legendaries and spent an entire expansion fumbling over a way to correct it, they did it with azerite gear and now they’ve done it again with corruption, at what point does the stupid lab mouse stop going for the cheese?

This time though they have taken it to a new level of horrible, not only does corruption gear have the potential to be the single biggest player power level increase in a single item ever in the game, The disparity between good and bad corruption is enormous, the acquisition is completely rng based but they have also made corruption an entirely pay to win system, never before could you just go buy the single best items in the game off the ah, this sad ploy to increase wow token sales is not only pathetic but completely takes away from the integrity of the game.

Let’s overlook all these issues though and assume you’ve gotten a good piece of corruption for your class, do they impact your gameplay at all? Do they even feel good to use? No, you just get passive rng based dmg on top of what you’ve already been doing. simply put your actual performance matters far less than it ever has, who cares if you suck at your rotation, or if you executed it perfectly at the end oof the day the only question that matters is who has more corruption and who got it to proc more often.

I’m simply at a loss with this system, every single aspect of it is terrible, the acquisition feels bad, the impact of it on the game feels bad, the actual gameplay with it isn’t rewarding in the slightest.

Now I’ve laid out all my issues with the system, and I don’t believe there to be a perfect fix because it’s just too far gone, but the only improvement I can see is to just allow for the actual targeting of corruption, the best system i can think of is already partially in place, allow the cleansing of the corruption of our items to return us with some form of resource that can be repurposed to create corruption on our desired gear, the amount a particular corruption gives or costs obviously corresponding to the amount of corruption the piece has. This seems to be a pretty widely accepted concept amongst the players I’ve talked to and seems like a fairly obvious improvement since it has been proposed many times.

4 Likes

I am genuinely curious how we go from “we hear your feedback on WF/TF” so here is CF.

This is the reason why I’m not very optimistic about SL.

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To be fair, they did say no more random upgrades on gear. I think. Right?

Cool rant but it’s going to be gone once Shadowlands launches.

I’d argue it was still better systemwise than TF/WF.

Biggest problem with corruption is simply the number of ranks and the balancing.
It provides too much of a dps increase whilst also having too much variance.

As to the actual system behind it I believe it was better. The kiss/curse mechanic, the ability to do certain content for guaranteed drops, and the guaranteed effects on certain raid items, the ability to cleanse (manage corruption levels), the thematic value, the variance between effectiveness dependant on content (TD for AoE, IS for ST etc) all make the system better than a flat item level upgrade with no drawbacks or consequences.

In my opinion people get caught up on the balance, and rightly so, but that isn’t the actual system itself.
If there was better clarity and balance between corruption effects I highly doubt there would have been as much upset throughout the community.

Definitely agree that having the ability to cleanse and then further corrupt (or rank up) determined gear would have been a dramatic improvement to the system though. Especially if you unlocked those corruptions (accountwide) through acquiring them or something.

So CF doesn’t count as an upgrade? Maybe not in ilvl…but that’s some serious hair splitting.

TL:DR what has been repeated over 9000 already.

The biggest issue with Corruption is that it is such a large portion of your dps. It makes you feel like a walking proc machine instead of the class you play.

2 Likes

The issue is they clearly haven’t learned and just repeat the same mistakes in a more extreme fashion each time, I am simply unconvinced until I see it first hand that shadowlands won’t continue on this same path. The amount of times they have said one thing and done the complete opposite I’m done taking their word for it.

Would be doing away with all the gear gimmicks imo.

I would have to profoundly disagree, even a max level TF on a bis piece was never as impactful as even the mid tier corruptions are now, corruption is overtuned to a degree that item level has next to no impact at all, a WF or TF still required you to use the item properly to get functionality out of it and relied on your gameplay to maximize the value.

Passive rng based dmg is in no way better, doing more dmg purely for existing with a piece of corruption suited for the type of content is not engaging, doesn’t feel good, and requires absolutely nothing from you. How can you find that better than a system that required actual effort? Both systems were terrible I still find every aspect of this one to be severely worse though. This system takes their entire reasoning for removing TF/WF to begin with and just amplifies it 10x As someone who has raided at a fairly high level for a reasonable amount of time I promise you TF had a minimal impact in comparison, Player skill was still the biggest factor.

1 Like

Which is exactly my point, the issue with corruption is predominantly the impact and how imbalanced they are.

Having a kiss/curse system that has places of guaranteed acquisition with more variance on what the effect is good at based on content type is better than a blanket inflation system that has no drawbacks and no ability to interact with it.

Corruptions issues 90% come down to how strong they are and how it diminishes player input.

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Shadowlands Crafting

I mean, I’m not really pro corruption or anything, but… to be honest I can’t even read that block of text that doesn’t matter cause they won’t do anything massive with corruption. This xpac is already dead. Say some words over it’s corpse and wait for SL for changes.

I personally enjoy many aspects of Corruption because I like it when gear has more variations and customizability.

I do not like the extreme RNG of getting Corruption and that there are so many variations to gear and it’s not really in the player’s control. You can maximize your chances of getting good gear/effects by doing high keys, killing all the raid bosses each week, doing a bunch of masked Vision runs each week, getting a PvP chest each week, and (to some extent) doing all the WQs that provide gear. But there’s no guarantee you’ll get anything good. Some weeks I get three or four viable pieces of gear when top-tier Corruption, other times I go 2-3 weeks getting nada. And that’s with doing roughly the same content and putting in the same effort each week.

The point is moot but I really feel we should have had some way to manipulate or even create Corrupted effects. Things like boosting a Corruption’s rank (Twilight Dev 2 to 3, for instance), extracting Corruption from item A and applying it to item B, buying/trading Corruption with Wrathion for Mementos…anything. Hell it could have been integrated into professions to make them more in-demand. For example players with Inscription and/or Enchanting could make items to extract and reapply Corruption from one piece to another. Crafting profs could make Corrupted gear and/or have unique Corrupted effects. And so on.

Also the negative Corrupted effects affecting classes/specs differently isn’t great. They maybe could have done more with that, though I get it’s hard to balance.

1 Like