8.3.x stuff

[jsoh]

Update: Blue post w/wowhead commentary saying that items cleansed "recently" can be recorrupted. Items not cleansed "recently" cannot. Blizzard acknowledges that the UX for this is lacking, and is working on that.

Recently apparently means "prior to reset today". Unclear if they'll ever allow non-recent gear to be recorrupted.

Also: Many reports (including your humble interlocutor) that no corruptions are visible on Mother. Ancedata suggest "do both available assaults"
Also also: Gushing Wounds nerf (by 35%) incoming starting with next reset. It'll be fun if there isn't a gushing wounds available on the vendor for a couple of weeks.

[Marco]

Our approximately two day national nightmare is over:

We’re rolling out a hotfix over the next few hours that will make it so that you can apply Preserved Contaminants to corruptible items that were cleansed before maintenance this week.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/using-preserved-contaminants-on-older-cleansed-items/532524

(All other national and international nightmares are continuing as scheduled.)

[Fallowgrey]

(All other national and international nightmares are continuing as scheduled.)

My loud, cracked, hysteric laughter after I read this is maybe not the best sign of mental health.  The look on Sweetums' face when he came over to ask me about it was a pretty frightened one.

This is fine.

[Marco]

A spreadsheet by Dratnos (who is Very Smart) about the best corruptions for each spec and PvE situation, and a reddit discussion thread for it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vQPlWJC64XVWGyeTxgCi4LLoEm6NLwCnkiTF9JYGGyrBoMqtgE0bwBM54aXrZkIVEEN2OoavfT4Tc5E/pubhtml

https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveWoW/comments/gq1aat/cheat_sheet_what_corruption_should_i_buy_all/

I should note that for the targeted audience, corruptions that scale by item level will generally be assumed to be on 475 items.  Raid weapon corruptions like Lash of the Void are outside of our reach at 475, so check bloodmallet for how much it is degraded on a 460 or 445.

[**andius]

Is there any place that is keeping track of the Preserved Contaminants that the vendor has sold?

[**andius]

Did anyone correctly predict what the vendor was going to sell?

[Snique]

What is required to get Preserved Contamination: Twilight Devastation to show up on MOTHER? It was not there when I went looking and WoWhead was not helpful.

[Marco]

Contaminants are available on a rotation, changing twice a week (on the Tuesday reset and Friday at 11pm eastern).  Twilight Dev 2 (50 corruption, 10K echoes) was available in the previous cycle.  We have yet to see Twilight Dev 1 or 3 (the 25 and 75 corruption variants) on the vendor yet, so each of those should appear soon, with a good chance that one of them will appear this weekend.

To answer Andius's questions: all of the usual news sites are posting articles when the corruption vendor changes, but I haven't been able to find any page recording all of the historical cycles in one place, and I don't think anyone has had meaningful predictions.  I think the rotation is fixed and four weeks long, so once we've seen three more cycles we should have the rotation.  Here are the wowhead articles for the five cycles so far:

https://www.wowhead.com/news=316142/corruption-vendor-preserved-contaminants-on-sale-for-may-19th-may-22nd
https://www.wowhead.com/news=316193/corruption-vendor-preserved-contaminants-on-sale-for-may-22nd-may-25th
https://www.wowhead.com/news=316218/corruption-vendor-preserved-contaminants-on-sale-for-may-26th-may-29th
https://www.wowhead.com/news=316265/corruption-vendor-preserved-contaminants-on-sale-for-may-29th-june-2nd-twilight-
https://www.wowhead.com/news=316299/corruption-vendor-preserved-contaminants-on-sale-for-june-2nd-5th-severe-iii
https://www.wowhead.com/news=316354/corruption-vendor-preserved-contaminants-on-sale-for-june-5th-9th-masterful-iii

[Edited to add the sixth cycle.  Twilight Devastation 3 is in this cycle, for 15K echoes.]

[ghoselle]

This has the schedule for upcoming corruptions:

https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/9219-Corruption-Vendor-Rotation-MOTHER-s-Homemade-Contaminant-Preserves-Fan-Art

[Marco]

MOTHER will shortly sell Malefic Cores for 2000 echoes, repeatable up to the current cloak corruption cap.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/faster-legendary-cloak-upgrades/565241

[ghoselle]

I'm both happy and sad about that. 

At the moment I feel like spinning up an alt takes a mountain of echoes, and beyond the time gated sources, they are really slow to farm.  So it both helps but doesn't help enough.

[Piralyn]

I'm both happy and sad about that. 

At the moment I feel like spinning up an alt takes a mountain of echoes, and beyond the time gated sources, they are really slow to farm.  So it both helps but doesn't help enough.

I think it's important to note that while this speeds up one of the things that makes alt(s) or newly leveled characters feel behind, it comes with the cost of the other things falling more behind. It will probably help "delay" some of that feeling, since the Cloak's resistance is a very in-your-face measure of where your character is at/behind, but if you spent 2000 echoes on +3 corruption resistance, that comes at the cost of buying specific corruptions, or catching up on essences, etc. Echoes are theoretically less gated than the Coalescing Visions, since you can also get them via M+s or whatever, but it's still a slog, since if you're significantly behind, you're probably not going to get to do high enough M+ to have that be a significant source of income.

I'm not sure what the answer is here. They obviously want/need some kind of progressive power scaling to keep the game moderately interesting for the dry months leading up to Shadowlands, and they can't/couldn't have that be without some sort of incrementally increasing cap otherwise people would have felt compelled to get 8293892 blobs of resistance increases in the first month.

It might be better if they just let you get more than one blob a week from a full Vision clear, up to the current cap. With the coalescing vision increases, it can theoretically be possible to run a ton of visions a week, so this would further help with catch up without the opportunity cost of using echoes. Might be a bit too early to do that now, but seems like a natural progression.

[ghoselle]

So part of the issue is that this is also the currency for catching up with essences and corruptions.  So if I were to try to spin up a new Hunter to be reasonable to take to heroic raid, I might be looking at wanting 70k+ echoes (and hunter uses cheap corruptions).  And some of that will be reduced by running visions, and getting lucky on loot drops.  But assuming you are doing a 15-keystone, major & minor assaults, 1 vision, all the daily emissary quests, you are getting about 5k per week.  You are still looking at 2-3 months to spin up a new character.

I mean, they could have done something where the cost varies with cloak level.  So if you are getting your first upgrade, it costs 5, but if you are buying the one that caps your cloak it cost 2500, with scaling in between.  So you could probably get a bunch of levels, but would need to do a bunch of content too. 

I guess the real question is, how much do they want you to be able to catch up?  And I think the awkward bit here is you have possibly 3 different directions you need to be catching up:  essences, corruptions, cloak levels.  And they are all sharing the same catch up currency.

[Snique]

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23485198/time-runs-short-battle-for-azeroth

New blue post on what to get done, what will go away with Shadowlands.

[Marco]

+100% bonus reputation during September.

With this buff up, emissaries reward 3000 rep (up from 1500).  I believe post-exalted rep bags contain at least 4000 gold on average, so the rep amortizes to at least 1200 gold per emissary.

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/news/23507733/the-impressive-influence-100-bonus-reputation-buff-returns