WoWNov 20, 2019 2:00 pm CT

Blizzard adds a new wrinkle to Corruption resistance and Ashjra’kamas, takes away ‘infinite’ AP trait in 8.3

World of Warcraft loves its grinds, but at least one of them won’t be going live in the upcoming patch.

The saga of the Heart of Azeroth and our constant attempt to feed power back into the thing will have an end in patch 8.3, according to Kaivax on the official forums. There had been a patch 8.3 change that would have allowed you to basically chase Corruption resistance on the Heart as long as you wanted, but that has been removed in the latest PTR build in favor of an option to fortify your legendary cloak with more Corruption resistance instead.

Kaivax spells it all out for us in a post on the forums.

Originally Posted by Kaivax (Official Post)

In the Visions of N’Zoth PTR, we’re removing what we called the “infinite” at Heart Level 85. It was intended to allowing for an open-ended increase to Corruption resistance.

We’ve heard a lot of feedback from players, and we agree, that there’s value in being able to reach a point where you’re essentially done with Artifact Power.

Increasing the Artifact Level of the Heart after unlocking its final Stamina node will continue to increase the Heart of Azeroth’s item level by 2 per step, but otherwise, major progression will end at Artifact Level 80.

To complement this, we’re adding an item in Visions of N’Zoth that players will earn once they’ve upgraded their legendary cloak to its maximum potential via Horrific Visions or from defeating N’Zoth on Normal, Heroic, or Mythic difficulty, or from fully completing a Horrific Vision with at least one Mask active. This item will fortify the cloak, adding additional Corruption Resistance and allowing players to earn the ability to wear more Corrupted armor pieces as time goes by.

We see this as similar to the way that legendary upgrade items were awarded by Archimonde or Argus the Unmaker at the end of the last two expansions – it should provide players who prefer to not do organized raiding with a way to have an engaging option for pursuing this reward.

Allowing us to still slightly benefit for raising the Heart’s level past 80 — but not making it a terribly compelling benefit — seems like a decent way to eventually say sure, Artifact Power isn’t worthless, but you don’t need to go after it any more to me. And the idea of letting you get your Corruption resistance from multiple sources once you’ve fully upgraded the Cloak via a drop that you can get multiple ways — from either raiding, from working on Horrific Visions, or from completing a Horrific Vision with one or more Masks active — means that you’re giving players as many ways to get that cloak up to max and then increase its Corruption resistance yet further while doing the content you want to do.

I mean, I’m aware that players are creatures of contradictions and that some players are going to simultaneously do all of those things at once while complaining that they feel forced to do them, so perhaps Blizzard needs to put a cap on how many of the items you can get or make it a one time item (which it may well be, the text in the post doesn’t really spell that one out) so once you get it, you don’t need to worry about doing it again. The idea of making it possible to wear more Corrupted items due to increasing Corruption resistance in this way gives players a goal to strive for and a less lateral means to get more powerful as the patch goes on, but it also risks feeling like a grind festival in a different way than simply grinding Artifact Power would have been.

Still, I see this as a positive change, overall. Having to grind Artifact Power is not a very interesting mechanic, and making it possible to raise your Corruption resistance in a different way doing content you were going to be doing anyway has an appeal to me.

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