Throughout the majority of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth‘s lifespan, Corruption has been one of the most prominent mechanics. They’ve become a core part of being geared for endgame, to the point where they’re dominantly unavoidable.
The right corruption can exponentially increase your performance, with some classes having their own unique corruption while each role has some that they’ll need to focus on. However, the corruption mechanic comes with a trade-off.
Higher tiers of corruption are significantly more powerful, but they’ll also increase your corruption score by a higher amount than weaker tiers will. Not having enough corruption resistance can end up with you in a situation where you’re running to avoid drastically negative effects.
If you hit absurdly high amounts, corruption will just flat out kill you. Reaching 200 corruption – an extremely unnecessary number to have – causes you to have your health drained while in combat at extremely high amounts until death.
Because of this pro-con relationship between the two, players have spent a massive amount of time mapping out their corruption scores and what will bring them an appropriate amount of consequence for an appropriate amount of reward.
All of that time mapping and planning, however, is now confirmed to soon be thrown away. Blizzard recently confirmed that corruption as a mechanic will be removed with the World of Warcraft: Shadowlands pre-launch patch.
At this moment, we don’t know exactly when that patch will come along, as we don’t know the exact date of Shadowlands‘ launch. However, Blizzard has confirmed the release date to be in the Fall of 2020, which is only a scant few months away.
Game director Ion Hazzikostas confirmed in an interview with PandaTV that corruption would be removed during the 9.0 prepatch. Despite this removal, features such as Essences and Azerite Powers will only stop working once players reach Shadowlands content.
Presumably, this means that players will still be able to obtain and utilize Azerite gear and the powers within. It’s currently unknown if players will still be able to do the questlines to acquire and upgrade the legendary cloak Ashjra’kamas, which was key to utilizing corruption.
It’s far from surprising to see corruption removed, though it does make some players upset to see something that they’ve put so much work into simply removed away. It would’ve been nice to see the abilities utilized in the early days of Shadowlands to give players that had managed to obtain their most powerful corruptions a perk, but Blizzard seems to have other plans in place.
