Corruption - The worst system ever added to the game?

[Ange]

Exactly this. Acquisition is thousand times more important. Even with moderate farming I got my boots after a fucking 8 months of grinding that consisted of 800 raid bosses, 240 emissaries and god knows how much M+ and other shit activities.

While in BfA in first week I got like 5 corrupted items and simply got one guaranteed from raid.

This really isn't debatable. People who complain about corruption either
1. Never played legion
2. Got their bis legiondaries early and "I don't see a problem because I was lucky"

Lets be honest here, with MMO-C main audience beein casual players from the current expansion, at best most negative posters here played the end of legion and got their targeted legendarys from doing 1 week of worldquest and not the world-tour-raids for 70 weeks while spaming 1000's of M+ to get all legendarys with the normal drop chance.

Because people claim all day long without any proof that they actually played, here some legion lego progression:
You find DK discord timestamps to every one of this images.

28.11.2017
26+5 legendarys


15.01.2018
43 legendarys


09.03.2018
57 legendarys


People have no idea how massive amount of grind it needed to just get all your class legendarys in the first place, since your BiS or lets call the usable or not DPS-negative legendarys dropped RNG.

[BetrayedOf52]

Not sure if it's the worst, but it's the only system to make me take a break from raiding, the first months... oh man.

I went from top 5 DPS in my guild to the bottom, because people were replacing their epic weapons with blue world quest weapons that had infinite stars and echoing void ( when it was good ) on them and tripling my damage. I thought well whatever ill just get one myself... after tons of farming I never saw one.

Now that it's the end of the expac and the vendor is in it's easier to get but they still ruin the game whether it's warlocks in arena or killing mythic Jaina before she transitions because our power jump was that of an entire expansion, we now treat her like last expansions mog boss.

[Raelbo]

love the need to get a vendor after just 4 months because blizzard gave in and saw the tuning for corruption had gone haywire.

I would tend to disagree with your use of the term "gave in" because it implies a change of heart that I don't think is supported.

Just because they unlocked the vendor 4 months into the final tier of the expansion doesn't in any way whatsoever indicate any kind of admission on their part that it is something they should have done sooner. The state of players and the game changes a lot in the first 4 months of a raid tier. In particular, most of the groups that care about raiding are pretty much done with progression. Opening the proverbial flood gates on corruptions when they did was about meeting a different objective.

At the start of the tier, the amount of power anyone could obtain via corruption was very much a function of total effort committed to chasing them. So the decision not to have a vendor was very much about keeping corruption in check during progression and ensure the people putting in the most effort/dedication were those reaping the biggest rewards. Yes, there were people who were "frustrated" at not having the exact corruptions that they wanted, but there isn't really a compelling need to cater to a simple case of impatience.

Once progression was done and dusted though, it stopped mattering that corruption power creep be kept in check. Secondly, with 4 months having gone by, complaints about "frustrations" actually had validity.

[skorgg]

Devs do as they're told. And what they're told is to keep the player retention high... or be replaced in their work. So Ion goes to the meeting of directors with another idea to do that, because he wants to keep his job.

Glad you're finally able to shed light on what goes down in these meetings!!

[Dommie530]

With the vendor yeah, that's possible if you got your correct one in this week's rotation, maybe 2 resets? Great stuff though, love the need to get a vendor after just 4 months because blizzard gave in and saw the tuning for corruption had gone haywire.

Yeah, it's tough when the one your argue with present the evidence for you, and call you out on things you have no clue about. Half a year=less than 3 months. Time flies. Bending the truth to my will, or giving you the truth that goes with my will, you are of course free to choose one that suits your need.

Unsure what u claim your evidence is, is all i hear is a sheep taking a shit and claiming its gold.

[Huzzaa]

Glad you're finally able to shed light on what goes down in these meetings!!

Ah you're welcome mate .

[Onikaroshi]

Ion has flat out said it's broken the game, soooooo that's definitely something.

[majinzeni]

That's not a problem with corruption though. It's a problem with trying to implement PvP in an RPG.

As an RPG, WoW has always been about a combination of skill and effort. Now I am not going to tell you that you're wrong to want to have a PvP system that is 100% about skill. But by the same token, there are also people who want to be able to get an advantage through work and effort, and they are not wrong either. Unfortunately there is just no way to reconcile these two viewpoints and the best you can hope for is a compromise that both can live with.

I agree, and I think the expansion that dealt with this in the best way was Wrath of the Lich King. Stats like armor, resilience, armor penetration, and spell penetration allowed players who were succeeding in their relative areas to have strengths and weaknesses in a very enjoyable way IMO. PvE players had advantages when it came to raw number output, but disadvantages defensively due to not having as much resilience. Plate classes had extra defensive protection from other melee classes by having high armor, but classes such as warriors, rogues, ferals, and even hunters could use armor penetration to deal with high armor targets. Casters had spell penetration to deal with the base spell resistance a lot of classes had due to gear/talent trees choices.

WotLK did all of this while keeping the MMO integrity of the game. It made sense that being at the cutting edge of raiding gave you the best gear for your specialty (tanking/DPSing/healing) but wasn't optimal for fighting other players. It also made sense that people who spent a lot of time in battlegrounds/arenas could pick up gear that was best for fighting other players but not necessarily best for pure damage output, healing output, or damage mitigation for PvE encounters. Future expansions tried to solve the same problem of PvE and PvP existing together by implementing things like gear scaling in different ways. WoD magically changed the iLvl of your gear when you went into instanced PvP and Legion/BfA apply stat templates to your character in the same content. While they're trying to do the same thing, in my opinion they're ruining the immersion/"RPG-ness" of the game. This is why I think having a dedicated PvP stat (such as resilience) is necessary to let PvE and PvP co-exist in the best possible way.

[ydraw]

Nah, the worst ever system was raid attunements, which kept a massively growing playerbase from even seeing 90% of the game's content for almost 2 years.

[ro9ue]

I agree with you that LFD greatly reduced the gameplay Quality of Dungeons. However I like especially on Leveling my Char the easy to just Hop into a dungeon without the need to stop what I´m doing.

And LFD is only around for trivial Content.

LFR however, I try to avoid that as much as Possible, I dont really see/get what it adds to the game, but surely it has its Crowd, so doesnt really affect me. Most "LFR players" dont step into Normal or Heroic raids anyway.

Same here. I use LFD a lot, however LFR I just can't bring myself to do. But there was another thing that LFD dragged along, and that was the Blizzard developer philosophy of "if we're going to group you with random people, there should be an expectation that you'll win" and I think that drove the strategy and tactics required in dungeons down to nothing.

There was a critical moment at the end of Wrath. All of the LFD dungeons were fairly easy except for the new ICC 5 mans. The reason they were easy was because people just were so familiar with them by that point and had massive gear level inflation. Then at the end of the expansion, people got into Halls of Reflection and the like. And most people left group, gave up, etc... because it was designed around the new gear level and people had to actually figure stuff out. People were already used to AOEing everything down in LFD.

So Cataclysm releases and Blizzard has 2 options: appeal to the ez mode LFD random expectation of AOEing shit down, or try to stay course on what dungeons were supposed to be. They chose the latter. Ghostcrawler put out the "dungeons are hard" blog post. People complained and cried. Eventually they changed their philosophy to just let dungeons be easier and nerfed the hell out of everything. That has been the philosophy ever since. Doesn't mean people can't wipe, but it means you barely see multiple attempts at a single boss in a dungeon, you don't see any coordination between players, you don't see any strategy in terms of CC or mob priority... it's all just nuke it down.

So while queueing up for a dungeon might not be bad by itself, it's all of the supporting elements that come along with that system that make it have a bad effect on the game.

I actually like how its done right now, where you get flying later, however I´d like to have it in the first Season.

I agree. I think pathfinder is pretty excellent solution. I did have some smaller gripes with the BFA version where it required you to do quite a bit in the 8.2 zones to unlock it... and then I would never return there again making it useless on my main. However, still worthwhile for all my alts, maybe that's by design?

As a Casual player Titanforging has been Awesome. I dont really mind "Not getting the BEst Possible", made clearing Lower Level stuff like Normal still have the chance to grand an Upgrade. Though I can see the Issue Min/Max players have.

I have mixed feelings but I do agree being a casual player and seeing a big ilevel item TF drop is nice. But what are the larger effects on the game as a whole? Adds to more ilevel bloat, makes progressing into higher difficulties less impactful because you can realistically get 3-4 items of higher tier content just doing WQ and casual stuff. Also the feeling of never being -done-. Just having a static item you can go after, and when you get it you can cross it off your list is extremely satisfying.

I'd rather them do other bonus stuff for casual content, like chances to get cosmetics instead or something.

I see what you mean, but lets be Honest, for one the LevelBoost is damn Expensive, and only comes around MidExpansion, so the people who use it are that few. And at leas the last two Expansions you dont learn your class beforehand. in Legion the Legendarys/Sets dictated how you played, and in BFA the Azerit Traits/Essences and now Corruptions Dictate how it works.

Leveling is since at least Cataclysm just a Chore.

Leveling is a chore, no question. But to me that doesn't mean solve it by charging players to bypass your own broken system. I'd rather the leveling process be revamped so it's more enjoyable (like getting talent points and abilities every level).

There is still a ton of stuff that leveling up through the game teaches you. How to interrupt mobs casting heals. How to dispell. How to interact with other players. How to not run past the tank as a dps and let them lead the dungeon. As time has gone on, less and less players seem to really understand how the game works fundamentally. And giving people a free top end character is a huge problem. For example, do you know how many times in the Underrot dungeon I've seen MAX LEVEL players not interrupt that Withering Curse AOE when it was a dangerous mechanic early on? I interrupt if I can, but there are two mobs. It's... baffling.

I would rank these from worst to best solutions:

A) Kill the boost, and just revamp the leveling process completely to be more fulfilling and interesting (they might accomplish this with the squish but it will still need a lot of work).

B) Only allow people who already have a max level character to purchase the boost. If you've done it once you should have a pretty good grasp of what the game is all about the 2nd time around.

C) Kill the boost, but add a heirloom elixir of unlimited use where every max level character you have increases your XP gain by a large margin, potentially up to a cap. So say you have 1 max level character. You can use your XP potion buff and level your next class at 2x speed. If you have a bunch of max level characters you can get like a 5x speed. Because as you have an increasing level of familiarity with the game the leveling process becomes less and less important to you, but there ARE people who do enjoy it or maybe want to take their time so they can just skip the potion. And if there's a level range they just want to get out of... pop potion and blaze through.

[Zogarth]

Dunno, legion legendaries made me unsub two hours into Emerald Nightmare the day it released.

[Spiffers]

Naw Corruption is fine. You just have to ya know "play the game and farm your BiS" items like you always did.

[Doffen]

People have no idea how massive amount of grind it needed to just get all your class legendarys in the first place, since your BiS or lets call the usable or not DPS-negative legendarys dropped RNG.

People who played in Legion of course know the amount they needed to get their legendaries. This is the worst I see, someone who claims that people forgot or don't know, just to validate their own opinion. It's kinda hard to validate when you got all leggos, if you didn't screenshot it. 1st of march I had all leggos except the gloves which were added in 7.1.5. I can't see when I got those, but that was the last one I needed. Then again I had changed main in November when I dinged my hunter, and already had 3-4 alts that I got several leggos on.

Because,your example is just that. It just does not prove more than what one certain player did. Some people also got their best legendaries before the very last one, and they might have stopped farming the rest as well. There are so many variables that one certain example does not make everything be the same.

All this can be applied to corruption too. I am not sure why you don't talk about that? That's the discussion here.

- - - Updated - - -

Unsure what u claim your evidence is, is all i hear is a sheep taking a shit and claiming its gold.

Mhm, deflecting is a way to go as well. Don't bother quote me again then if you don't want to hear it. You don't have to answer me you know. At least properly.

It wasnt evidence for me, but something you said blizzard said that they didn't really say, and you took it almost 4 months further in time when the actual change and post happened not 3 months after launch. Simply put, you are a liar.

[Averrix]

Everything is the worst system in the game until the next new system is put in

[LanToaster]

I have mixed feelings but I do agree being a casual player and seeing a big ilevel item TF drop is nice. But what are the larger effects on the game as a whole? Adds to more ilevel bloat, makes progressing into higher difficulties less impactful because you can realistically get 3-4 items of higher tier content just doing WQ and casual stuff. Also the feeling of never being -done-. Just having a static item you can go after, and when you get it you can cross it off your list is extremely satisfying.

I'd rather them do other bonus stuff for casual content, like chances to get cosmetics instead or something.

Well, we had now the Visions of Nzoth patch to compare, and I must say, even without TitanForging I didnt really wear stuff from the Raid.

Even without Titanforging i´m decked out max Ilvl gear. The Problem is not really Titanforging, because only very very very Lucky people were actually decked out in TitanForged Low Content Gear. The Problem is more the amount of Loot you get, (which they Address in Shadowlands.

Leveling is a chore, no question. But to me that doesn't mean solve it by charging players to bypass your own broken system. I'd rather the leveling process be revamped so it's more enjoyable (like getting talent points and abilities every level).

Which they do with Shadowlands,

There is still a ton of stuff that leveling up through the game teaches you. How to interrupt mobs casting heals. How to dispell. How to interact with other players. How to not run past the tank as a dps and let them lead the dungeon. As time has gone on, less and less players seem to really understand how the game works fundamentally. And giving people a free top end character is a huge problem. For example, do you know how many times in the Underrot dungeon I've seen MAX LEVEL players not interrupt that Withering Curse AOE when it was a dangerous mechanic early on? I interrupt if I can, but there are two mobs. It's... baffling.[/QUOTE]#
Sadly you are wron there. You never need to dispell Mobs, or actually Interrupt them. Unless you go against a 5man Elite Mob with heals you dont need to mind Healing abilities from mobs.

The game also never tells you this stuff, so most people will just punch a mob for 10 minutes before realizing that you can Interupt a cast.
A player who at Max Level wont flip through his Spellbook and see what he can do and cant do, will not do that while leveling. Thats the sad truth.

And Interaction with other players is also zero while Leveling. I used Party Sync to level with my Guildmates, and with random players there is zero Interaction. You Queue up, Kill Mobs, and leave the Group.

Your Underrot example is the best example:
You never needed interrupts in the first place. Normal/Heroic dungeons at the start of the Expansion, the only Indication that an Ability is "Supposed" to Hurt is when DBM tells it to you. I´ve only started "learning" the actual Abilities from mobs in Mythic +5 and above.

The Problem with that is that OpenWorld content and Normal/Heroic/Mythic0 content is damn Trivial. You can Ignore anything the mobs do, and just punch them till they die. You wont learn anything there.

I would rank these from worst to best solutions:

A) Kill the boost, and just revamp the leveling process completely to be more fulfilling and interesting (they might accomplish this with the squish but it will still need a lot of work).

B) Only allow people who already have a max level character to purchase the boost. If you've done it once you should have a pretty good grasp of what the game is all about the 2nd time around.

C) Kill the boost, but add a heirloom elixir of unlimited use where every max level character you have increases your XP gain by a large margin, potentially up to a cap. So say you have 1 max level character. You can use your XP potion buff and level your next class at 2x speed. If you have a bunch of max level characters you can get like a 5x speed. Because as you have an increasing level of familiarity with the game the leveling process becomes less and less important to you, but there ARE people who do enjoy it or maybe want to take their time so they can just skip the potion. And if there's a level range they just want to get out of... pop potion and blaze through.

The Leveling will be a Breeze, new Characters start in BFA, which are nice zones.
For B, I dont think a "New" player will use the paid MaxLevel Boost service. So, that would change nothing.

As for C, you dont really need to "Level Faster" coming Shadowlands. You can get your Character from start to 50 in one go in BFA, and you can complete BFA fairly Quick. You can do each zone easily in a day. If you rush probably even faster.

[ro9ue]

Sadly you are wron there. You never need to dispell Mobs, or actually Interrupt them. Unless you go against a 5man Elite Mob with heals you dont need to mind Healing abilities from mobs.

The game also never tells you this stuff, so most people will just punch a mob for 10 minutes before realizing that you can Interupt a cast.
A player who at Max Level wont flip through his Spellbook and see what he can do and cant do, will not do that while leveling. Thats the sad truth.

And Interaction with other players is also zero while Leveling. I used Party Sync to level with my Guildmates, and with random players there is zero Interaction. You Queue up, Kill Mobs, and leave the Group.

Your Underrot example is the best example:
You never needed interrupts in the first place. Normal/Heroic dungeons at the start of the Expansion, the only Indication that an Ability is "Supposed" to Hurt is when DBM tells it to you. I´ve only started "learning" the actual Abilities from mobs in Mythic +5 and above.

The Problem with that is that OpenWorld content and Normal/Heroic/Mythic0 content is damn Trivial. You can Ignore anything the mobs do, and just punch them till they die. You wont learn anything there.

You don't view that as a problem?

[Doffen]

I would tend to disagree with your use of the term "gave in" because it implies a change of heart that I don't think is supported.

Just because they unlocked the vendor 4 months into the final tier of the expansion doesn't in any way whatsoever indicate any kind of admission on their part that it is something they should have done sooner. The state of players and the game changes a lot in the first 4 months of a raid tier. In particular, most of the groups that care about raiding are pretty much done with progression. Opening the proverbial flood gates on corruptions when they did was about meeting a different objective.

At the start of the tier, the amount of power anyone could obtain via corruption was very much a function of total effort committed to chasing them. So the decision not to have a vendor was very much about keeping corruption in check during progression and ensure the people putting in the most effort/dedication were those reaping the biggest rewards. Yes, there were people who were "frustrated" at not having the exact corruptions that they wanted, but there isn't really a compelling need to cater to a simple case of impatience.

Once progression was done and dusted though, it stopped mattering that corruption power creep be kept in check. Secondly, with 4 months having gone by, complaints about "frustrations" actually had validity.

I am a living proof of what you said about impatient is not right, and I am far from the only one so disagree completely there. Is that a way of implying that the four layers of rng was nothing to fuss about or? There was no form for actually getting the corruption I wanted except hoping for it to proc on item, correct corruption, correct rank, correct item level. Because getting lets say Infinite Stars on a 445 item if you got 470 item with other corruption, that wouldn't do in most cases. I generally agree about the commitment with most things in WoW, but with no BLP in place like legendaries which is the closest thing to compare it with, there was zero guarantees for you to get the corruption you wanted. I am not sure how you can bypass that in your argument? Not to mention it took them 2 months to actually make it so you would always get corruption gear from Horrific Vision, well if you didn't get Azerite Armor for the 110th time.

And the thing about gave in is that they definitely had some actual technical issues that shouldn't have been there if they were actually planning this, like taking off corruption would make that item ineligible for adding corruption to it. Was it fixed anyway? I have only bought 3 Gushing Wounds for none-corruption pieces so I have no idea if they did. They also said it was because people gave feedback about it.

Was it planned? Maybe further down the line in was planned, but from the start when they made it? Doubt it, and the way blizzard handled it and what they said about it, I would disagree with what I said is not supported. I agree with the reasons for why though like you suggest, even though I disagree with blizzards way of dealing with this system as a whole. But when a system is like that, I guess the vendor is the only choice they got. Progression was over by then anyway, and I quit raiding(did some arena until recently, gushing wound ftw) when the vendor came because there is no need for it anymore.

[LanToaster]

You don't view that as a problem?

Well, I dont really see it as Fixable.

If blizzard makes the WorldContent harder it mostly hurts the non DPS roles, and people who dont have any interest in getting better will just QQ around.
If blizzard makes dungeons in Normal and Heroic harder, they just become annoying.

Looking back to Warlords of Draenor where loot was not as abundand like nowadays, and the dungeons actually Requiring a tiny bit of Skill. I was glad that they had the Unsurmountable Brickwall of Proving Grounds in place to keep them out of Heroic Dungeons.

Having more challenging content doesnt make better players sadly. I might contradict myself here, but sadly thats the (for me) perceived way how it works:
Having trivial Content doesnt offer the ability to learn, and making content offer challenge doesnt make the average player better.

However, I´m all in for making the proving grounds Mandatory again.

[Thetruth1400]

A lot of systems, but basically it boils down to one thing that went wrong; Gearing.

So many systems have been implemented that have essentially taken gearing from a simple "Hey, you're looking for these 8 main pieces and then you have room to play with the rest of the slots" to "Hey, you better go break out a spreadsheet, learn how every little thing can interact, go through the same content 500 times with mild difficulty sliders adjusted and hope you also get a random proc chance at items you're looking for to be the best."

[kaminaris]

People have no idea how massive amount of grind it needed to just get all your class legendarys in the first place, since your BiS or lets call the usable or not DPS-negative legendarys dropped RNG.

Yep, I was at brink of quitting doing braindead content for 8 months. Meanwhile couple of players got lucky in first month. That sucked so hard.