Asmongold explains why “corruption” isn’t good for WoW

Twitch’s top WoW streamer Asmongold might not be known for his mechanical virtuosity, but he has a message for anyone trying to prove their skill as a player during this season—you’re wasting your time. 

During his stream yesterday, Asmongold was leading a raid exclusively made of 30 tanks (no healers or DPS) through last tier’s raid, Eternal Palace. As the group took down boss after boss with relative ease, Asmongold checked the damage meters to see how all of these non-DPS characters were doing so much. 

Without fail, every person he looked at who was high on the damage meters was getting multiple procs of high level “corruption” pieces that unloaded massive amounts of damage without the player having to do anything particularly skillful.

While the raid’s ability to blow through content with relative ease was enjoyable to watch, the entire situation left Asmon wondering about the current state of WoW. 

The “corruption” system that was implemented at the beginning of this season in Patch 8.3 makes it so that players can randomly receive gear with enhancements that boost their DPS by 10 percent—and sometimes even more. Players are stuck fighting to acquire gear that comes with corruption and they’re at the mercy of RNG during fights because most of the strongest corrupted pieces have random proc rates.

“This is 8.3. The difference between the best player and the worst player in the raid is a random number generator,” Asmongold said. “That’s it. It’s not about skill. It’s not about rotation. It’s not about avoidance. It’s not about fight mechanics. It’s not about anything else. It’s about one thing, and that has nothing to do with your individual skill. Welcome to WoW.”

With this being the final phase of the Battle for Azeroth expansion, it makes sense that Blizzard would consider unleashing vast amounts of power to players before the entire game is given an effective reset when a level and stat squish come following the release of Shadowlands.

But Asmon doesn’t seem to believe that the corruption system enriches a player’s experience with the game. The fact that much of what prevents one player’s success is predicated around randomness makes it difficult to tell who’s truly skillful. Instead, players are left looking at whether someone’s overpowered corrupted piece did its job without having any control over it.