It’s the end of another World of Warcraft expansion, and you know what that means: it’s time to utterly wreck the power curve. Here’s how to buy your own Corruptions in Battle for Azeroth.

World of Warcraft: Preserved Contaminant Guide

For those who are just joining us: Corruption effects, introduced in patch 8.3, can appear randomly on any newly acquired piece of gear in Battle for Azeroth zones. They’re also guaranteed to show up on items you earn via the Visions of N’Zoth scenarios, and certain raid drops in Nya’lotha have predetermined unique Corruptions. Each Corruption effect conveys a set benefit, ranging from the extremely powerful (direct damage, a big whack of Leech rating, inflicting a powerful bleed) to the extremely underwhelming (Avoidance, Glimpse of Clarity).

*: The exact damage done by the effect scales based on the piece’s item level. It was previously determined by the user’s attack or spell power, but was hotfixed to keep players from feeling like they had to use low-level gear with beneficial Corruptions.
**: The Devastation beam has a 12-second internal cooldown and deals half damage to enemy players.
***: The amount of damage Gushing Wound does is roughly equal to 91% of your attack or spell power. Its damage is scheduled to be nerfed by 35% after the 5/26 server reset, to keep people from stacking it on every item and bleeding entire raid bosses out.
****: This is very common, and somewhat better than it looks. Your first item from an invasion cache is always a set of bracers with Rank 1 Void Ritual.

As a trade-off, the more Corruption you have and the stronger it is, the more detrimental effects accumulate on your character, and the more you start looking like you got caught in some kind of demonic oil spill. You can compensate for some of it by equipping and strengthening your cloak from Wrathion, as well as using the various azerite essences introduced in 8.3 like Breath of the Dying, but Corruption can accumulate a lot faster than your resistance to it ever will. You can purge Corruption from an item permanently, along with its beneficial effect, by having MOTHER purify it. This costs 5 Corrupted Mementos, which are obtained from the Visions of N’Zoth scenario.

Related: ‘Small World of Warcraft’ Transforms the Beloved MMORPG Into a Tabletop Experience

Like a lot of other things about Battle for Azeroth, Corruption has turned gearing up for raiding into even more of a random numbers game than usual. In particular, the difference between great and mediocre DPS in Nya’lotha was largely down to your available Corruption effects. That changed abruptly on May 19th, however, as Blizzard introduced Preserved Contaminants. These items are sold by MOTHER in the Chamber of Heart in exchange for Echoes of Nya’lotha, and each one allows you to apply a specific Corruption effect, at a specific strength, to a previously uncorrupted piece of equipment. Shenanigans are about to ensue.

Blizzard has not taken the brakes quite all the way off the train, however. Each Preserved Contaminant costs 2,500 Echoes, and while the rate at which Echoes drop has been multiplied by 5, you’re still not going to get more than about 2,500 of them per week from all available sources. This is designed as a steady weekly DPS gain, not a sudden power spike. Here’s what you can do to farm Echoes: 

MOTHER only sells a set number of Contaminants at a time, which will rotate twice a week at the same time the minor invasions switch over. Hence, at server reset on Tuesday and 7 PM on Friday nights, MOTHER’s Contaminants stock will switch over. At time of writing, she’s selling two rank 1 Contaminants (Ineffable Truth and Honed Mind), two Rank 2 (Strikethrough and Masterful), and two Rank 3 (Expedient and Twisted Appendage).

Another related change has made it easier to upgrade your Ashjra’kamas cloak to Rank 15. Several of those quests would require enough items obtained from clearing deeper parts of the Vision that you’d need to run the Visions scenario multiple times to get past a single step. Now, any given quest along the way can be completed in as little as a single run, which comes with a hefty boost to your Corruption Resistance.

In many past World of Warcraft expansions, Blizzard has directly nerfed raid encounters’ damage and health, or provided grindable ways to directly increase endgame characters’ health like the ring upgrades in Warlords of Draenor. This time, we’ve been given the option to choose exactly what kinds of horrible little Lovecraftian monsters we want to become. Call it progress, of a sort.

As we warm up for Shadowlands at the end of the year, we’ve also been dipping back into World of Warcraft. Check out some of the guides at our game hub:

• Still working on your Nazjatar reputation? We can help
• How about the Rustbolt Resistance? We got that too
• If you just want a Mighty Caravan Brutosaur, relax, we have some tips for that as well

My biggest problem with World of Warcraft‘s current endgame is that you’d think we’d get more out of avoiding N’Zoth’s power, rather than trying to use it against him. It may be cool and all to level an entire herd of enemies with giant black pillars of destruction, but this doesn’t seem like it could possibly end well. Share my apprehensions with me via our official Twitter, @PrimaGames.