Corruption

In World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth, Corruptions are now available for sale from MOTHER.

One thing that's going to happen in Shadowlands is, we'll eventually shelve our Hearts of Azeroth and no longer have access to them or to the Azerite Traits that depends on them to work.

Whether you're just coming back to World of Warcraft for patch 8.3, or you've been playing for a while and you just decided to get your alts up to speed with the gear options like Old God Assaults, one thing you may not really be prepared for is just how quickly Corruption can get out of hand.

Blizzard surprised us all this week by announcing changes to Corruption and Echoes of Ny'alotha, as well as to how quickly you could level up your Legendary Cloak, and then almost immediately hotfixing some of those changes live.

Starting this week, you'll be able to buy specific types of Corruption to apply to gear, removing the randomness from the system — and making it a lot easier for new 120s to gear up.

Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas did an interview with Sloot wherein he talked a lot about Shadowlands (check out the  liveblog from Wowhead if you'd rather read than watch), including the intricacies of loot drops.

It's easy to fall into the mindset that all Corrupted gear is a detriment to you by default, and you should therefore be avoiding it like the plague -- but that's not the best way to approach the system.

World of Warcraft has a tendency to do iterative design, which is to say, design elements from one expansion can be reworked and made part of the next expansion.

World of Warcraft's replacement for Titanforged and Warforged gear, Corrupted gear, has gone through a lot of changes in the three weeks since patch 8.3 dropped -- not too long ago, for example, we saw Infinite Stars and a host of other Corrupted gear abilities get significant nerfs.

I am simultaneously terrified of and intrigued by Corrupted gear in World of Warcraft.