Corruption gear - Pros and Cons

[Kaver]

As a whole I think the corruption gear is really bad for the game. It's a horrible system. But the idea of changing gear based on content is fine.

Pros:

I like the overall idea of changing gear based on the content you're doing. Using the same gear for all situations is not really fun. Historically trinkets have been the gear you changed based on different scenarios but this can beneficially also apply to other gear.

With the corruption system, it is however only applicable to some specs right now. For a BM hunter for example the best corruption is just pure stat increase in (almost) all situations. This kinda neglects the purpose. But the idea is fine.


Cons:

RANDOMNESS. Both in acquisition and in combat. This just doesn't feel good. It's not fun or satisfying. The acquisition method of corruption gear is completely horrible. Hopefully Blizzard knows this and will make it better in Shadowlands based the weekly chest with multiple choices etc. Even worse is the complete randomness in combat. You have no control of your dps and things like Twilight Devastation can even randomly pull mobs in dungeons. For example on Vol'kaal ("second" boss in Atal'Dazar) where TD can pull the mobs outside the boss arena even when the gate is closed. Randomness like this is not satisfying in any level.


TL;DR: The idea of changing gear based on content is fine but the specific execution of the corruption gear is horrible mainly based on all the heavy RNG in both acquisition and combat.

[iinverse]

Pros:
- Not mere flat stats (well... at least not all of it )

Cons:
- Several layers of randomness:
- Gear of certain ilvl must proc
- Certain corruption must proc
- Certain rank of corruption must proc
- Corruption balancing: there are zero tools to compare corruptions ingame, especially if you have say 10 corrupted pieces of gear and you can equip just 2-3 of it. Of course there are some third party tools (like simcraft, raidbots, bloodmallet or herodamage) exists to help chose right corruptions, but its not the ordinary player wants. Another side of it - different corruption procs in different slots and you need to store a sh*tload of gear in your bags just to maintain all needs for gearing to specific content (like in raid you will equip weapon and boots, in m+ - chest and belt, for pvp - ring, pants and bracers, etc, and of course you need to rebelence your gear sets with every corruption you got). Eccences system is far better here.
- Ppm system. All corruptions just procs from your activity, its another boring random. On-use essences are far better here too.
- Aesthetic effect of corruption. Its mostly horrible and ruin most transmogs. On-use essences effects are far better and do not ruin character look.

[Holdodlig]

I agree with you. And I might also say the efficiency of corrupted gear is a problem. When a single beam can increase your damages by up to 20% because you've been lucky it does not feel good. There's way too much random proc in the game right now because we accumulate class design (who needs proc to actually feel different), trinkets, random item effects (like KR 2h sword), azerite traits, essences and now corruptions. Just to tell you how this is ridiculous, I was once killed by a player I stunned because for reasons his infinite star had a proc and I lost 100k because he also had a proc from breath of the dying passive and purification protocol.

I think the best corruptions in term of design is Wrathion's blade because it's the only one you can actually predict and maybe adapt your damages around (but by itself I find her weak as you'll have the time to proc 2 beams doing way more damages) and I think that's where Blizzard should go. I like the idea of this kind of affix. But when it comes to farm they are more frustrating than titanforge.

So here are the two obvious answer to this mess :
>Make most proc be "every X abilities used" instead of "Roll the dices if you do 5 or less reroll". Being able to calculate when you'll have your procs would actually put the skill cap higher. And you'd have choices to make like "Will I want to align my CDs with this this proc coming in 5 seconds or will these 5 second will cost me another burst phase ?"
>Allow players to grind a currency in major in-game activities such as emissary, invasion, dungeon, raid, arena and battleground to "enchant" an item with a specific corruption.

[sam86]

Pros:
- Not mere flat stats (well... at least not all of it )

that's because they removed all interesting stats to 'not complicate' game
yeah corruption is far easier to calculate than ArP ...
I prefer flat stats over whatever we have now (also corruption is still miles ahead of titanforging)

[Tradu]

Pros:
Potential for impacting gameplay via effects like Ineffable Truth, Glimpse of Clarity, Void Ritual and Racing Pulse.
Usain from Beyond and the Eye are decently well designed, even if some classes/specs deal with them much more easily than others.

Cons:
Most effects have no gameplay impact and just randomly make you do stupid damage.
Adds even more sources of damage that are not tied to playing properly.
Power level of corruption is too high overall.
Tuning is awful.
Acquisition is entirely random.
The downsides being random procs with no ICD is stupid.
The slow has no counterplay and just randomly gets you killed.

[czarek]

Idea of corruption is good but implemetation goes wrong soo wrong.

[Tradu]

I agree with you. And I might also say the efficiency of corrupted gear is a problem. When a single beam can increase your damages by up to 20% because you've been lucky it does not feel good. There's way too much random proc in the game right now because we accumulate class design (who needs proc to actually feel different), trinkets, random item effects (like KR 2h sword), azerite traits, essences and now corruptions. Just to tell you how this is ridiculous, I was once killed by a player I stunned because for reasons his infinite star had a proc and I lost 100k because he also had a proc from breath of the dying passive and purification protocol.

I think the best corruptions in term of design is Wrathion's blade because it's the only one you can actually predict and maybe adapt your damages around (but by itself I find her weak as you'll have the time to proc 2 beams doing way more damages) and I think that's where Blizzard should go. I like the idea of this kind of affix. But when it comes to farm they are more frustrating than titanforge.

So here are the two obvious answer to this mess :
>Make most proc be "every X abilities used" instead of "Roll the dices if you do 5 or less reroll". Being able to calculate when you'll have your procs would actually put the skill cap higher. And you'd have choices to make like "Will I want to align my CDs with this this proc coming in 5 seconds or will these 5 second will cost me another burst phase ?"
>Allow players to grind a currency in major in-game activities such as emissary, invasion, dungeon, raid, arena and battleground to "enchant" an item with a specific corruption.

Problem with that is of course that lining most corruptions up with CDs does nothing because CDs only affect class/spec abilities in BfA. I do agree with the premise, though, the procs being completely random is pretty dumb. That's why I think Void Ritual is actually one of the best designed ones, because by ramping up over time, it lets you prepare for high stacks and play around it(at least a little bit, most specs don't really allow for playing around procs much anymore)

[owbu]

I don't mind items having extra procs on them that are usefull in different situations.
I only hate how you get the items and how limited you are in what you can do with them . You either purge them completely or keep them as they are. Give us gradual purges. Give us a way to increase corruption. Give us an affix reroller. That would give us something to work towards.

[Skildar]

the issue here are not the effects of the corrupted gear but as always how you can manage to obtain them.

I like how they managed to limit the amount of corrupted items we can equip. The thing is this mechanic doesn't enable people to join in later in the patch or to gear alts easily... so a standard and fixed corrupted gear limit would have been way better

[erifwodahs]

It looks cool
Idea is nice, I like plying the game of swapping items based on how difficult content is what do I do
Some are more than just a random dmg proc.

Some are just a random dmg proc. I am in favour of gear which rewards player skill.
No way to target corruptions and it's levels.
Wearing low ilvl with good corruption than a good ilvl with bad/no feels just wrong.

[Dundebuns]

I'm not a fan of double edged swords. A boon should be just that, only a boon.

[Kaver]

Usain from Beyond and the Eye are decently well designed

I agree. I actually like the idea of the tradeoff between power and the negative effects. You gain something and you lose something. There definitely are some good ideas in the corruption system, it's just too bad that the implementation and execution of the system have gone straight to hell.

[oland138]

I have used maybe 4 pieces total. I looooooove getting damage bonuses as a healer.

Sorry Blizzard, if you want to make gearing interesting again, do something other than:

STAMINA
PRIMARY
SECONDARY
SECONDARY

Also, they may as well just remove primary stats and stamina and just have abilities and health scale directly from item level. I'm not being serious, but that's how meaningless those stats are on gear.

[Doffen]

The idea I like, but the balancing is just awful. Not to mention the randomness some of them have in fights. One fight I got one mind flay proc. Later on another boss is was my top damage. And they did some weird tuning. Echoing void(2% version) was actually perfect. It was not as random and it was a steady 10-12% of the damage instead of stuff like twilight devastation that can suddenly do 20% or 3% depending on rng. Not to mention the damage the tanks get from it. It was a weird thing to do. Nerfing EV to being completetly useless to TD doing 600-800k crits for tanks? Just silly.

The good part is that it got some cool negative effects, which makes you do some choices in fight you wouldn't do normally. And the visuals are nice... :P

[united]

I truly hope everything who complained about titan forging is happy... you can get a piece of gear 30+ ilvls higher and it still wouldn't be an upgrade because of corruption. bye

[Tojara]

Still prefer it to titanforging.

Pros:

Swapping around gear and budgeting your corruption verses the risk involved is actually super cool. You can absolutely risk going higher depending on raid encounter, M+ dungeon (and it's affixes) and how comfortable you might be with dealing with the negative effects. This is all pretty amazing, screams RPG and your gear selection actually matters quite a bit.

Cons:

The only real negative actually ties into the positive as a whole. In an ideal world you get to pick and choose from a plethora of effects, but considering how rare these effects are, you don't really get to play the game like I detailed above. The M+ invitational players get to cherry pick exactly what they want to pick which sounds AMAZING, but it's also disturbing because they're playing a completely different game than the rest of us. Not jealous, just wish there was giant increase in abundance in regards to actual corrupted gear.

Balance is the only other big concern. Should they be universally balanced? No, and you would be retarded to suggest otherwise. Some effects, even right now are super stupid for some classes, and useless for others. My only real problem with the balance of these is mostly tied to the damage ones, which would be rectified a bit more if they scaled more with iLvL. Blue rings with T3 TD shouldn't be doing 18% of your health in damage for example. Should you need max mythic gear to get the full effect? Probably not, but allocating budget based on absurd effects and actually considering blue items is equally absurd.

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Like I mentioned this is a better system than TF/WF on paper, the implementation however just missed the mark slightly. In a world where most items dropped and were corrupted and the balancing was slightly better, this system as a whole might have been universally loved by most. As it stands it will just be polarizing depending on who you talk to. There are people who HATE negative effects entirely so you would never win this group over and there are others who like the game to be as simple as possible, and TF/WF is just an easier system for them to understand. Some like it because swapping gear around is fun (like me), and others might absolutely love it because they get to swap gear around like crazy and have loads of options (these are the people who have a plethora of really good corrupted gear and actually change their load outs for every single circumstance). Most people will EVENTUALLY arrive at that last point, but it will probably be too close to Shadowlands for people to actually care.

[Tradu]

I truly hope everything who complained about titan forging is happy... you can get a piece of gear 30+ ilvls higher and it still wouldn't be an upgrade because of corruption. bye

So nothing really changed? The only difference is the item has purple spooky text on it instead of displaying a higher ilevel. What difference does it make if the random WQ item says "Twilight Devastation" or "480 ilevel"? In both cases it's a WQ item that's stronger than mythic raid items.

[crewskater]

The azerite system would have been fine if it gave you the option to pick and choose your traits. Blizzard is way too focused on RNG and lack of choice for some reason. Letting players choose what they want is somehow a bad thing. People still pick the same specs regardless of choice, they always go for what sims best.

[Kaver]

I truly hope everything who complained about titan forging is happy... you can get a piece of gear 30+ ilvls higher and it still wouldn't be an upgrade because of corruption. bye

I complained about titanforging and I'm happy that it's gone. But I never asked for corruption so don't blame that system on me.

[LordVargK]

I liked swapping Legendaries in Legion. But I did not really like, that their effects were tied to gear, so that I had to have my ~20 legendaries in my bag all the time. A glyph-like system effectively does the same and does not clutter you bag.

I disliked having to have different Azerite gear for different situations (that's why I did not bother at all). Because it was unnecessary complicated that Blizz made the respec cost for them exponentially high. And then you had to have different gear for your different specs to play optimal. So you had to maintain different gearsets for one spec and different ones for your other specs, leaving your bags full of gear, which does not seem like a good design to me.
Same goes for corruption, but that is a slightly better system than Azerite. But corruption does not seem like a system that's designed to be switched on demand.

I never complained about having to have different tier sets for each spec back in the days (until MoP iirc). Similar to that with offspec gear. But I would probably never go back to that now that adaptive gear was introduced.

So overall my point is:
I like having to have adaption possibilites based on the content I'm facing. Talents SHOULD exactly do that, but they more often than not don't deliver on their promise. Gear is not the right place to put such effects. A Glyph system with really impactful glyphs would be optimal, because they don't clutter your bags and don't make gear management a hassle.

Corruption gear has really nothing to do with the survey tbh.