Recently, Blizzard has made a sizeable number of alterations to their corruption mechanics in World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. Removing some of the RNG from the mechanic, the developers allowed corruptions to be purchasable from M.O.T.H.E.R.
This has been met with a mixed set of reviews, as there’s still a considerable amount of RNG to the system. Not all corruptions are available, for example, with only a few available per week, leaving a bit of randomness to which will be available.
Overall, though, it’s been an excellent way for players to be able to grab their preferred or best-in-slot corruptions and help round out their builds. Plenty of players have been able to get what they need from the system, even if it still has a slice of randomness to it.
However, there are still issues with the corruption system overall in some cases, and that can lead to drastically improved performances that throw the balance out of whack. Recently, Blizzard decided to fix one of the issues that was causing a balancing problem.
Ineffable Truth, a mechanic that helps to decrease cooldowns and allow players to use abilities faster, is one of the more effective corruptions for several classes. However, due to an issue with the corruption, it was stacking to incredible results with other cooldown-reducing abilities.
Game Director @watcherdev has replied to some concerns on Twitter about the Ineffable Truth nerf, stating that Blizzard's focus is on the interaction between Ineffable Truth and Fist of Justice, and they don't want to break playstyles for other specs:https://t.co/uP4U2scBQD pic.twitter.com/EuYKYwi6PS
— Wowhead💙 (@Wowhead) May 28, 2020
The main ability that Blizzard discussed was Fist of Justice, a Paladin talent that reduces the cooldown on Hammer of Justice for every Holy Power spent. Combined with Ineffable Truth, Paladins were having their cooldowns reduced to a worryingly high rate.
This is far from the only example, however, as there are plenty of abilities across classes that do the same thing. Blizzard intends to employ the fix to the bug in the next few days.
“The specific interaction we’re focused on involves Ineffable Truth, which has some unique quirks, but we’re going to take time to thoroughly investigate any potential collateral ‘damage’ first,” director Ion Hazzikostas said on Twitter, responding to players that were concerned the bug fix would serve as a heavy nerf. “We have no desire to break the way Fire (or other specs) have played for months.”
Much of the player base is concerned that there could be impact to their class off of fixing this bug, as Ineffable Truth is crucial to many builds across multiple classes. This has led to some backlash to the bug fix, as the discussion Hazzikostas responded to shows.
Hazzikostas, however, seems to insist that they’ll be doing what they can to avoid “collateral damage,” as he words it. Rather than removing the bug and letting it affect what it may, it seems that they only wish to handle the one issue of incorrectly-compounding cooldown reduction as a result of Ineffable Truth.
