Is corruption the ungodly imposition on healers that it looks like from a distance?

[Omedon]

So, I've been taking a bit of a palette cleansing sabbatical for the past 3 months from WoW, letting 8.3 simmer and cook a bit, and now that I'm finally making my return, I have to ask something that's been on my mind since I first read about corruption:

Does WoW hate healers or something?

Maybe I'm old school, maybe it's that I'm an old school tank, but the healer can arguably be said to have the most potentially stressful job in a trinity style game, and a lot of the social mores I learned back in the day all boiled down to "don't make the healer's life harder than it already is, you're lucky to have someone healing you."

Fast forward to today, and it appears that very concept is well and truly dead because hooolycrap corruption seems designed to complicate a healer's life!

1) Healers, how are you handling this?

2) Non-healers, is your healer's stress level anywhere in your personal moral compass when deciding how to engage with this masochistic rental power system?

3) Fellow tanks, as the ideally primary target of heals... we kinda have to just purge all of it, right?

I for one am cleansing everything I get, but that's because I'm a control freak. Seriously though, in a game where so much is all about avoiding any variable that can get in the way of the kind of failure that devalues your or your friends' time... who the hell thinks letting people just decide to make their own lives harder is a good idea?

[kranur]

Not really, though I can see why it may feel that way. It's up to each individual to take up only so much corruption that they can deal with without screwing up. Should they fail, yes, it may take it's toll on the healer, but then so are 99% of the game's mechanics.

[Great Destiny Man]

The point that makes things pretty dicey is when people are going over 40 corruption but not correctly dealing with their grand delusion mob. On its own I can heal that back up no problem, combine that with a heavy hitting AoE effect coming in immediately after then either you need to be using defensives and/or heal pot or risk eating floor.

Overall, I wouldn't say the stress levels are that much higher. If people die to their grand delusions most are pretty accepting and don't really bitch about it (which surprises me with the amount of PuG M+ I do). Tanks dying to it royally screws up momentum though, that's the point where that's a frantic battle res going out and everyone doing their best not to get instagibbed by trash/bosses.

[Echeyakee]

It's not that bad. It annoying that corruptions are designed with DPS in mind, and healers don't get the overpowered feeling that you have from rank 3 infinite stars, but rest is meh. I'm running with 53 corruption right now, just for the fun of it, and the damage part might of killed me once? But the ~60% slow is what gets you ^_^

In terms of healing others, it's barely noticeable. In raid people can safely stay in their eyes and ignore them, simply popping the cloak if you get double stack. The illusions are the a bit worse, cause if you have 40+, staying in the eye will almost certainly spawn an illusion. They do hurt, but rarely lethal.

But there are some bad cases. Like tanks with corruption are either annoying, cause they keep running around, or tend to randomly die. Also corruption is an ungodly imposition on healers in a specific case... In pvp. Fuck me, healing the 2v2s against a team with a bunch of infinite starts or tentacle bros is the absolute cancer.

[Elodeon]

Encounters aren't built around damage dealers not taking damage. Unavoidable raid damage that's lethal without healers is an essential part of most encounters. It's what guarantees healers their raid spots. We're not "lucky to get heals", we absolutely need them and groups where this is not understood would not be able to progress in difficult content.

What corruptions are doing is simply to transfer, in this current raid tier, some of the RNG and raid damage mechanics that would otherwise be part of the boss encounters, to the individual choice of each player. Players who prefer less complex gameplay at cost of doing less damage can run less corruption. Players who choose the more complex gameplay do not necessarily incur damage, unless they get eaten by a Thing From Beyond because they lagged out or something.

Corruptions are a way to customize gameplay to each player's preference, allowing a player to remove complexity from an encounter as their power increases. In this regard, I think corruptions are a pretty ingenious idea, and they seem like a promising approach for future tiers of content.

As an Elemental Shaman that has to stand still to cast, I prefer lower complexity encounters, so I run 18 corruption and do very similar damage to friend Rogue with Rank 2 Infinite Stars who runs 43 corruption currently. We both do less damage than friend Windwalker Monk with Rank 3 Infinite Stars who runs 68 corruption (after resistance). But then again, friend Windwalker Monk was always ahead of everyone in past raid tiers, too.

[Great Destiny Man]

In pvp. Fuck me, healing the 2v2s against a team with a bunch of infinite starts or tentacle bros is the absolute cancer.

Yep, the amount of burst that can be achieved via passive corruption damage is nuts. All completely random too so some points you might be dealing with few procs here and there, next minute they're all triggering one after the other. It's absolute chaos.

[swatsonqt]

Healer simply noped out of healing in order to do dps.

I havent had a healer "heal" in a long time now. Most of the time they provide healing cds and don'T give a damn about the group.

"you take care of yourself or die. i cant do anything about it" seems to be the new healing modell so... yeah go go corruption i guess

[khazmodan]

Basically, everybody is an old school warlock now and i hated healing warlocks back in the day when they would life tap for more dps. Still, my personal experience with healing has only been easier than back in vanilla and maybe Cataclysm when i couldn't bang the buttons fast enough and fast heals was everything.

[Powerogue]

1) Not doing any content above heroics and LFR for the loot satchels. :P

2) I don't do DPS when I'm dead, and my monk doesn't have that good self-heal or defensive capability compared to my rogue, so I have to play it safer. Though that's hardly relevant atm because I CAN'T. GET. CORRUPTED. GEAR. TO. DROP. I'm at -20 or so corruption right now and it's driving me nuts.

3) I have some corruption on for the leech but it's hard to tell how much that's counteracted by the laser eyeballs. Some of these traits look to be pretty good for survival but obviously you need to play it safer than the dps.

[burek]

1) Healers, how are you handling this?

At what level of play are you experiencing anything additional that you need to handle? If you are doing +15s or lower, people usually run with just one r3 twilight devastation, which doesn't put any strain on the healer.

Are you raiding with a bunch of people trying to parse but are unable to deal with the thing from beyond?

[Rustedsaint]

I kinda wanna see how a disc priest does with stars, the beam and the others for healing/dpsing

[Pandragon]

Good dps will get out of it, like everything else, bad dps will die to it, like everything else.

[Sevyvia]

Healing is quite easy and boring.

I think my m+ team healer

Alright, so you actually have no clue, you're just going "This other role has it so easy."

[Elbob]

So, I've been taking a bit of a palette cleansing sabbatical for the past 3 months from WoW, letting 8.3 simmer and cook a bit, and now that I'm finally making my return, I have to ask something that's been on my mind since I first read about corruption:

Does WoW hate healers or something?

3) Fellow tanks, as the ideally primary target of heals... we kinda have to just purge all of it, right?

I for one am cleansing everything I get, but that's because I'm a control freak. Seriously though, in a game where so much is all about avoiding any variable that can get in the way of the kind of failure that devalues your or your friends' time... who the hell thinks letting people just decide to make their own lives harder is a good idea?

As a tank certainly not, our damage contribution is super important in pushing keys and even in raid it matters. Eyes of corruption are completely negated by passive healing on us unless you get multiple in a row. If I'm tanking a boss that moving out of my EoC is not an option I will cloak reset or use a cd at 10-12 stacks of the eye (keeping my hp in mind, if im stable I may not).

Grand delusions can be annoying as a tank since we are constantly taking dmg which means we get more of these procs than a dps would. I almost always avoid going over 40 Corruption in M+ or raid encounters where boss dmg is actually threatening.

Cascading is usually no more of a risk than just having grand delusions for me. Mind you I play a Brm so I have numerous tools to keep the add from hitting me and causing the proc. I also have tiger's lust to clear the snare if I need to. I have done mythic shad and xanesh at 73 corruption. I stopped on shad because unfortunate timing when cds were down got me killed once and I don't like wasting people's time on farm but still run 73 on xanesh.

Inevitable doom is a hell no going to avoid this one as a tank assuming im not just parsing faceroll farm content that will never kill me.

[Steelangel]

I kinda wanna see how a disc priest does with stars, the beam and the others for healing/dpsing

I'll let you know when anything with that drops for me, because I have gotten nothing at all outside of the guarantees from raid drops.

[JoshuaNLG]

(the eye damage is designed to be healed, so just stand in it)

If it was designed to be healed through, it wouldn't have a radius you can just walk out of.

[KrotosTheTank]

I for one am cleansing everything I get, but that's because I'm a control freak. Seriously though, in a game where so much is all about avoiding any variable that can get in the way of the kind of failure that devalues your or your friends' time... who the hell thinks letting people just decide to make their own lives harder is a good idea?

Please don't cleanse everything you're getting... Corruption is very easy to manage and will only get easier as you keep up with your cloak upgrades. These items are massive buffs to your output as a DPS, Tank and even Healer.

As a tank i rarely go over 40 corruption in M+ because i don't feel like dealing with it, that said, it's definitely manageable in raids. It's about finding that personal balance.

These small downsides are often vastly outweighed by what they bring to the table, again, particularly as you progress your cloak. Your statement about devaluing your or your friends' time is more accurate when describing someone who isn't utilizing the tools presented to them (corruption in this case) as well as they should be.

One more footnote, people who consider themselves "old school" tanks tend to tank poorly. Staying alive is very binary. If you're able to survive a fight, which often comes with experience, without completely forcing healers to bomb you, then you should be focused on maximizing your damage output. It makes runs faster, mobs die faster (less dmg) and increases your threat (when/if that ever matters).

[StillMcfuu]

Unless you are raiding mythic or pushing high + keys, healing is probably the easiest job in WoW, if not tied with tanking.
If healing gets slightly harder for people who are cruising by as it is, so be it.
It's not effecting higher levels because the dps/tanks who can't handle the corruption are being benched or removing it.

[Wondercrab]

Honestly, in most content where the extra dangers of corruption really matter most players will be decent enough that they'll either know how to play around them, or will cleanse/swap gear out accordingly. The only times I've seen people repeatedly standing in their eyes and taking multiple thing from beyond hits have been in LFR and low level mythics, where it hasn't been much of a problem to just heal them up (or recover after their kill themselves). Of course you'll still run into the odd problem in higher level content when people mess up or want to be carried in pugs, but I haven't noticed that much of an appreciable difference in my stress levels as a healer overall (speaking from a PvE perspective -- I can't comment on PvP).

Stuff like bursting and explosive in Mythic+ are still far more terrifying when people don't play around them than the effects of corruption are.

[Justank]

Don't mind it at all when I'm healing. Since the debuffs are visible, I can see when a Thing From Beyond spawns on someone and how many stacks they have from the Eye, so I know when they're going to take significant damage and can plan around it. Corruptions provide a significant damage boost in most cases, I'd much rather people are using them. Even tanks should be. However, if they're over 60 I expect them to have the awareness to avoid TFB if there's other unavoidable damage going out, and I wouldn't take someone over 80.