Everything you need to know about Corrupted gear coming in patch 8.3

If you haven’t had enough of gear being overly complicated in BFA, I have some great news for you — in patch 8.3, we’re moving away from the simple Titanforging system, where sometimes a piece of gear can drop that’s just a little bit better than normal. Instead, we’re going to be getting Corrupted gear. What we’re seeing here looks pretty interesting in some ways, but it also strikes me as really complicated for the sake of being new and different.

So what are corrupted items, exactly?

The Touch of the Old Gods

Corrupted items are similar to Benthic items from patch 8.2, in that equipping a piece of Corrupted gear will grant you a specific bonus. Over on Wowhead, they have a list of known bonuses — these can and probably will change as we get closer to the patch dropping on live.

• Your Avoidance is increased by an amount equal to X% of your Haste.
• Increases the amount of Haste you gain from all sources by X%.
• Increases the amount of Mastery you gain from all sources by X%.
• Increases the amount of Critical Strike you gain from all sources by X%.
• Increases the amount of Versatility you gain from all sources by X%.
• X% of total Health Regeneration now continues during Combat.
• Increases your healing received from all sources by X%.
• Increases your Leech by X%.
• Your spells and abilities have a chance to grant you a Flash of Clarity, reducing the cooldown of your next 3 spells cast by 2 sec.
• Increases the damage you deal with Critical Strikes by X%.
• Reduces your damage taken from periodic effects by X%.

Now, some of these bonuses are really nice and if that was all that Corrupted gear did, it would be a no-brainer to always decide to wear Corrupted gear over regular items. Why wouldn’t you want more of various damage stats, or more healing, or cooldown reduction? I mean, some of these bonuses may be better than others, but if a piece of Corrupted gear drops with bonus Mastery, it’s still better than an equivalent piece without it, right?

Ah, well, that’s where things get interesting. Because in order to balance out these bonuses from Corrupted items, each piece comes with a Corruption stat. The amount of Corruption each piece adds will stack, meaning that if you have three Corrupted pieces with 22 Corruption on each, you’ll have 66 corruption wearing all three.

The Corrupted is you

The higher your Corruption stat climbs, the more negative effects your ascending Corruption will impose on you. These range from cosmetic — you’ll start looking the part with a black shadowy aura around your character — to more directly negative, such as Grasping Tendrils imposing a debuff on your movement speed, Corrupted Zone giving you a chance to spawn a shadow damage area around you that does damage to you every two seconds, Grand Delusion popping a Thing from Beyond that wants to kill you onto the battlefield to chase you around, and Creeping Death which will simultaneously make you take more damage and less healing, meaning you’ll be even closer to dying. Considering that some raid fights are so movement heavy that Grasping Tendrils by itself could be the death of you, the idea of getting any of these procs during an already high damage fight seems like a high price to pay for those aforementioned buffs.

You will be able to mitigate some Corruption with your legendary cloak from Wrathion and some new Essences. If the power is just too overwhelming for you, you can cleanse them with new Corrupted Mementos from Horrific Visions, but cleansing them also removes the positive effects Corruption gives so choose wisely.

Still, if you’re willing to pay the price for power, it is a pretty interesting twist, and a way to go about adding in more powerful gear while also enhancing the lore and RP aspects of the game. I do still worry that there’s a touch too much granularity to this system — I find it annoying when I get an upgrade but can’t use it because I’ll end up dying thanks to the weird debuff on it.