Corruption Deep Dive

Those looking for corruption vendor recommendations might find the following more up to date as this was written as a PTR preview.

Titanforging is dead. In its place, Corruption. Every season 4 piece of gear you get in 8.3 will have a chance to roll one of eighteen different “corruption affixes”. They range from stat increases to fun cooldown-reduction to huge damage procs. We won’t spend much time here looking at the Corruption system itself so if this is the first you’re hearing of it then I’d recommend starting with this Wowhead primer here. We’ll instead focus on analyzing the different Corruption effects through the lens of a healer. All of the information below is from the 8.3 PTR and can change before the patch goes live. Corruption Score is the HPS or DPS of the effect divided by its corruption cost, the hps per corruption if you will. It should give an easy way to compare different ranks to one another.

Numbers are based around the following default stat profile which should represent early Ny’alotha gear:

• 13000 intellect.
  • 22% critical strike rating.
• 10% versatility.
• 20% haste.
• 1.6:1 secondary stat weights. 3.2:1 for Leech.

All Corruption effects are now additive. This is a change from earlier PTR iterations and means that two 6% crit damage corruptions will now give you 12% instead of 12.36%.

I won’t talk too much about the corruption negative effects here except to say that 39 is a reasonable “cap” starting out. You’ll be able to wear 2-3 corruption pieces right away. You can compare Corrupted items in QE Live.

Article updates from PTR to Live (Last updated 5 February)

• Echoing Void now procs off healing spells in addition to damage spells.
• Leech Corruption costs were changed from 10/15/20 to 17/28/45. These are now significantly weaker, though still incredible. They would have been too strong in Ny’alotha at previous values because multiple fights contain heavy rot damage. The article has been updated with the change.
• Crit damage & healing was changed to increase crits by 2/3/4% down from 2/4/6%.
• Infinite Star nerfed by 25% and then nerfed again to scale with item level.
• Flash of Insight is currently bugged and only increases the weapons intellect rather than overall. It’s expected that this is a bug.
• Void Ritual doubled in strength (almost).
• The Versatility proc has been increased by 10%.
• The Crit proc had its duration doubled.
• Echoing Void nerfed by 50%.

Stat Corruptions

Stat Increases

Additional Data: 2000 of the relevant secondary stat used for % stat increases. Crit dmg / healing slightly more valuable than pictured on Holy Paladin.

The percentage secondary corruption effects all work the same way and they are reasonably easy to understand. If you have 2000 crit and pick up the tier one 6% increase then it is worth 120 crit. Your second piece is worth another 120 crit and so on. The increase applies to all stats, including those you get from Azerite traits, essences, buffs and procs. Early in the tier this shouldn’t change the way you gear much. Increasing the value of a stat by 6% isn’t significant enough to change a general item level > all gearing strategy. This can be reassessed later in the tier when you have multiple of the same percentage stat corruptions available to you. The crit damage / healing Corruption effect is unexceptional.

Leech is unsurprisingly solid. It’s weaker on Live than it was on the PTR when it cost 10/15/20 Corruption but will still pull excellent numbers, just without the small DPS contribution of some of the alternatives. It’s unlikely to make your best in slot set but you still like it.

Stat Procs

The stat proc corruptions are all a little different but the end-result is similar. Here’s how they each read:

• Racing Pulse: Your spells and abilities have a chance to increase your Haste by X for 4 seconds. 5 procs per minute.
• Deadly Momentum: Your critical hits have a chance to increase your Crit by X for 15 seconds, stacking up to 5 times. 5 procs per minute.
• Surging Vitality: Taking damage has a chance to increase your Vers by X for 20 seconds. 2 procs per minute.
• Honed Mind: Your spells and abilities have a chance to increase your Mastery by X for 10 seconds. 3 procs per minute.
• Void Ritual: Gain Void Ritual, giving your spells and abilities a chance to increase all secondaries by X every second for 20 seconds. The spell data suggests ~0.83 procs per minute when alone and about 1 when with 2+ allies. Mass logs data is showing you should expect closer to ~0.75 procs per minute which puts it half way down mid-tier.
• Flash of Insight: Gain between 1 and 8% intellect at all times. Value randomly changes through the fight. Basically an average of 4.5% free intellect.

Paladin Notes: Flash of Insight is quite a bit worse than pictured because of how little the spec scales with Intellect. Drop it to around ~70 Corruption score. 

The Versatility proc has variable uptime depending on the fight. You won’t find the vers or crit procs on many wishlists but they aren’t terrible.

Void Ritual gives you a ton of secondary stats. Following its recent 100% power increase it’s now an excellent choice. It isn’t particularly consistent which can be a little annoying as a healer but

Flash of Insight gives you an average of 4.5% extra intellect for a very very reasonable cost of 20 corruption. It is only available on the one handed axe weapon in the raid.

Cooldown Reduction

Glimpse of Clarity

Glimpse of Clarity gives you a buff a couple of times a minute that reduces the cooldown on your next cast by three seconds. I was initially unimpressed with Glimpse of Clarity. Then they doubled the proc chance. Now it’s just ok. Three seconds has little to no effect on any of our huge cooldown spells and you usually have rather precise time frames in which you plan to use them anyway. There’s no value in 3 seconds off a Tranq, or Evangelism, or a Revival. Especially a Revival. Remember too that the effect is random and you’ve a low chance of having it up when you plan to use any of those spells regardless. The power here is in reducing the cooldown of a short-cooldown spell. Bonus points if the spell is so good you basically cast it on cooldown. We’re going to look at how much healing we get out of reducing a Wild Growth, a Holy Shock and a Renewing Mist. This is honestly a tough one to analyze based on numbers alone and we’ll need some live testing to make sure the reduction can be included in a smooth rotation.

So, decent numbers but these are all very optimistic. If you Glimpse of Clarity an ability and then don’t use it almost immediately as it comes off cooldown you get no value. We’re going to go into more depth when servers are live and we have more data.

Ineffable Truth

I wasn’t able to test Ineffable Truth myself since after opening 300+ PTR Mythic+ caches I still didn’t have one. This should still be a fair assessment but we’ll take another look when the patch goes live. Yes it’s fair to say there’s a large amount of RNG this patch. Here’s how it appears to function:

• Procs randomly once per minute. No haste scaling.
• While active, for every second that passes, your spells that are on cooldown have their CD reduced by 1.5 seconds. Yes I’ve reworded that sentence twenty times and I’m still struggling with it.
• If I’ve got Tranquility on cooldown and Ineffable Truth procs the cooldown will be reduced by 15 seconds over its duration instead of 10.
• Trinkets and Essences aren’t impacted in any way.

To get value out of it you either need multiple spells on cooldown at a time, or spells that are so good that getting more of them is incredibly potent. “Unreliable” cooldown reduction tends to be annoying to work around because you can’t easily move major cooldowns around based on the chance they might come up earlier. Fight damage patterns often render them especially useless. We really need to see value from our minor cooldowns, and then any advantage we get to our Healing Tide Totem or Evangelism is all a bonus.

So, what spells do you have on cooldown regularly that you would use as soon as it came back up?

• Resto Druids have Cenarion Ward, Wild Growth and Ironbark. This is poor value. Glimpse is better per corruption spent.
• Mistweavers have Renewing Mist, Essence Font, Rising Sun Kick and Thunder Focus Tea. This could be ok here.
• Holy Paladins have Holy Shock, Crusader Strike and… let’s be honest those are the only two abilities you care about. This seems like a slam dunk on Glimmer Paladin and numerically it could be strong but I really want to see how it plays before I come to any hard judgments. You need to be able to weave two free Holy Shocks into the rotation for it to justify its price.

I’ll update this article with some numbers once the raid goes live and we can analyze it properly.

Live Update: This is proving insane for Holy Paladin, Rising Mist Monks (Despite a Renewing Mist bug) and Holy Priests. It’s weaker for Resto Druid, Resto Shaman and Disc Priest. They’ve also added a rank 1 version of Corruption in the past week which is incredibly overbudget with a low cost of 12 Corruption for 30% CDR.

Damage Procs

All damage procs appear to drop at the same rate as any other corruption effect which means you’ll see a few of them regardless of loot spec. I’m going to leave the decision about whether to cleanse these or not up to you but given the high value of additional DPS in Eternal Palace there is a fair chance these will be very valuable. There are damage procs in addition to the three of these, but they’ll need to be evaluated post-launch since I was unable to get them on the PTR.

Infinite Star

Has been changed to scale off item level since these numbers were published. It is still very good in single target scenarios.

Infinite Star gives you a chance to strike a nearby enemy for a percentage of your spell power and it increases damage they take from future Infinite Star procs by 25%, stacking up to 10 times.

Pure Single Target – 5 minute duration

Three target fight – 5 minute duration

In addition to its potent DPS, Infinite Star has one key advantage over its competitors. It procs off healing spells. This is key for the non-Disc, non-Paladin specs that are unable to maintain a 90%+ DPS uptime. You do need a good single target fight to get good value out of this. There’s no prioritization of enemies that already have the debuff, nor does it pick the closest target so if you’ve got waves of adds flying through the fight every 30 seconds then you can put this away. Unfortunately that represents most Ny’alotha fights. Keep an Infinite Star piece in your bags and you’ll almost certainly use it at some point – it just isn’t good on every fight.

Twisted Appendage

A rather straightforward tentacle proc. Only procs off damage spells. There isn’t much to add here because it functions the same as any other DPS proc would. I think this adds too little damage to justify its rather high corruption cost.

Echoing Void

Echoing Void gives you a stacking buff for every offensive spell you cast. After any cast your stack can explode and you’ll lose one stack per second while dealing damage split between all nearby targets.

• Only hits a small range around you.
• Healing spells don’t build stacks which means even Disc Priests and Holy Paladins lose too much value for this to be viable.  This is no longer the case.

With the Live server change to proc off healing spells this is now quite good, so long as you can stand in melee.

The Tier List

This is rough and aimed for general raid use. Specific fights will shift the value of each Corruption. You’ll use QE Live to compare Corruption gear but this should be useful as a quick reference to see what you got.

S+Tier: Ineffable Truth R1 (Paladin, Mistweaver)
S Tier: Ineffable Truth R2 (Paladin, Mistweaver), Infinite Star (fight dependent), Flash of Insight, Gushing Wounds
A Tier: % Leech, Echoing Void, Percentage Secondary Stat Increases, Void Ritual, Haste / Mastery stat procs, Ineffable Truth (Druid, Shaman, Disc)
B Tier: Crit / Versatility stat procs

Patch 8.3 preview series

Corruption | Ny’alotha Trinkets | Essence Analysis