The increased popularity of World of Warcraft’s Race to World First (RWF) has led to top guilds taking the competition more and more seriously in this expansion. But with the introduction and tuning of “corruption” gear, top players are frustrated with Blizzard’s lack of foresight.
Corruption was initially released in this patch as a way to move from the “titanforge” system that many players didn’t like because of its randomness. The “forging” system would make it so that occasionally when a player acquired a piece of gear, it’d be a few item levels higher with slightly stronger stats.
But that system’s replacement, corruption, hasn’t been as popular so far with many professionals.
Immediately upon becoming available to players, these random gear enhancements called “corruption” were extremely powerful, sometimes accounting for 20 percent or more of people’s damage when equipped, regardless of the item’s power level.
In the past week, Blizzard has made at least three hotfixes to address the way corrupted pieces work, nerfing many of them. Last night, Complexity-Limit GM and raid leader Maximum tried as hard as he could to express his frustration, all while ending his tweet with a smile.
“Really wish Blizzard would make changes before heroic week,” he said. “Really sucks for players to put a ton of time and effort into a gearing a character based on the tuning they give us all just to nerf them by 8% before a raid comes out giving no time to adjust.”
That was posted before Blizzard even announced its hotfix last night, in which the developer made almost 10 changes to the way that corruption works, focusing particularly on nerfing just a couple types of corruption.
But the most interesting thing of all is that Max’s tweet about how frustrating it is to deal with last-minute changes came before the hotfix was even made.
“To be clear nothing has been nerfed yet,” he said. “It just happens a lot. Limits your creativity.”
Of course, in all likelihood, Max was speaking with some degree of authority or inside information about potential nerfs that were coming. In the past, top guilds like Limit and Method have had players who managed to get inside information on changes before they actually happened.
Hotfixes that come through this week are looked at under a particularly strong microscope, too. Because of the release of corruption gear and the latest raid on heroic difficulty, top guilds have spent countless hours farming raid bosses and dungeons to gear up for the Race to World First that begins in the North American region today.
As the best guilds in the world race to kill every boss in Ny’alotha, The Waking City, every bit of gear matters.
But while the changes are upsetting to the world’s top raiders, they might ultimately be fair in spirit because everyone has to deal with them and plan accordingly.
