Corruption is going away in 9.0, but Azerite Armor and Essences will stick around

Corruption was the major gameplay system added to bring more depth and choices to itemization in Battle for Azeroth‘s patch 8.3, and it’s seen a lot of updates, hotfixes, and changes since it went live. If you’ve been leveling your legendary cloak and putting together a set of Corrupted gear with the affixes you wanted, you’ve been putting a lot of effort into the system. And as such, you may be wondering when Corruption would stop to be a useful tool for you. Would you be wearing Corrupted gear well into Shadowlands because the power of the procs would make it more attractive than gear that dropped as you level?

Thanks to an interview with PandaTV from Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, we now know that the answer is no, we won’t be holding on to our Corrupted gear into Shadowlands, because as soon as the pre-expansion patch 9.0 drops Corruption will be removed from the game. It’s just not going to work at all, meaning you won’t have access to any of those sweet Infinite Stars procs in the month or so before the expansion goes live. Patch 9.0 is when Corruption ends.

However, while we lose Corrupted gear in patch 9.0, we are keeping our Heart of Azeroth and its Essences, and the Azerite armor we’ve collected. Those will keep working in the pre-patch period. However, as soon as we leave Azeroth for the Shadowlands, we’ll find that our Heart of Azeroth and all Azerite gear, including the Essences on our Artifact necklace, are deactivated while they’re in the Shadowlands. This means that you’ll want to upgrade away from that gear as soon as possible, because it won’t be doing anything for you in the lands of the deceased. Still, at least you’ll get to keep using it all in the pre-patch period — your Corrupted gear is just plain going to stop working entirely. I assume this means it’ll be similar to cleansed gear — if you have weapons from Ny’alotha like Sk’shuul Vaz, it’ll still be a working weapon, it just won’t have that proc on it anymore.

So if you’re spending a lot of time on getting the exact right Corrupted affixes, you can maybe relax a little.