Blizzard’s blue post on US forums regarding Battle Squawk indicates that they are very reluctant to make any changes. They don’t want to irritate the vocal part of the community - people who invested time and in-game gold to reroll Engineering because of how overpowered the buff is. It’s obvious that they will be mad if it’s nerfed.
Reading a few topics on the US forums, including Blue posts and Community Council discussion, I’m very disappointed at the quality of it. My main complaints are:
Blizzard seems not to be aware of the current scale and the dynamic of chicken abuse, with more and more regular guilds following this unhealthy meta
Blizzard’s spokesperson on this topic is not aware of how Drums of Battle work (uptime) when making comparisons, casting serious doubt on finding a good solution
Community Council makes a lot of valid points, but has a conservative approach to the nerfs and doesn’t seem to notice the full impact of Battle Chicken meta
While some regular users’ posts go as far as removing the “degenerate gameplay” chickens from the game and they receive a lot of upvotes, there are many posts from chicken abusers who justify it as a means for the melee to compete with ranged DPS
From my point of view, the most important negative impacts of the current situation are the following, without any particular order:
forcing melees to go Engineering, the same thing Blizzard wanted to avoid with Drums of Battle change
logging only 70% of chicken abusers’ damage makes you feel bad and useless
chicken usage becomes the most differentiating factor in the game for melee, leaving personal skill, itemization, and group synergy far behind
even a single Battle Squawk is MUCH better than the drums because of 100% (most of the fights) vs 25% uptime
a low-level trinket is the best item for boss fights throughout the whole expansion what ruins the gear progression concept
trying to trigger the chickens before the fight is a huge annoyance for the whole raid
the buff even from a single chicken is so powerful that it overshadows class buffs, breaking class, and spec identity
5 chicken stacks give the melee group the same DPS benefit as bloodlust but for 4 minutes instead of 40 seconds making this iconic spell, considered to be the strongest buff available, a joke
another factor decreasing game difficulty, as if using the newest TBC patch, years of training on private servers, class theorycrafting, rolling only the top specs, or optimal boss tactics available for everyone from day one were not enough
the gain from haste pots and scrolls becomes irrelevant in comparison, the prices on my server went down the drain recently while they should start increasing before the new phase
people are already forced into ench/lw/crafting proffs anyway.
u are not using engi properly if it is slowing down ur raid. you shouldn’t be spending extra time to trigger chickens, if that is ur issue then u got an issue with u being in a parse guild
Funny how this is seen as a problem now, and not back in Classic when it was just as, if not more widely used.
Got any proof of this? Because I find it really hard to believe “regular” guilds even bothers with chicken stacking. The “regular” guild doesn’t even want that many melee to begin with.
Engineering is the most solid profession for melee through out TBC, excluding the chicken. A melee that cares about parsing would have engi anyways.
People who uses haste pots and scrolls already clear current content in well under 1h30m without many deaths. And from history, consume prices doesn’t start to rise before very close to, or on launch day. There could be other factors here as well, like bots going more rampant then ever etc. The battle chicken also has a 20 minute cooldown, which makes it not that much of a problem.
While I don’t care about the chickens, I don’t support blizzard to make any change. But Warcraftlogs are looking eventually change how many stacking chickens you could have before the log is blacklisted.
Personal skill will always outshadow players even with or without that 20% haste buff. Also no one forces anyone. Scrolls are not low on price because of battlechicken… they still apply dps increases on top of it.
totally agree. they MUST nerf battle chicken and add Sated debuff for bloodlust. otherwise all logs are pointless. ppl abuse those like crazy. there is no point to watch logs with such mechanics.
this is actually ridiculous they destroyed drums but added (dont remember if chcken was a thing during original TBC) something x10 times worse than 80 haste. how is even possible to ruin TBC like that
Adding sated is not really fixing anything. You still have PI, innervate, boomkin aura etc. in wrath u even have tricks, hysteria and probably more trash. On top of this gear is more impactful than a nth lust ever could be.
If anything it’s reducing the, albeit too much, value of shamans. 6 shaman is a pretty standard raid comp where u double lust the 2 best dps grps instead of healer/mixed grps
Your arguments are completely missed because nothing compares to even a single Battle chicken buff. While LW is respectable, the gain activation is limited to 1 person per party. Enchanting (rings) is 10-15 DPS gain in sims. 5% haste results in about 100 DPS in current BiS gear and optimal buffs.
73 DPS in the sim for enhancement shaman. My raid setup is non-perfect and gear is far from the current BiS. Because it scales with gear, it will surely touch 100 DPS in T6 BiS. Remember that it is NOT only personal DPS increase.
I can’t speak for enh shamans, as I’ve never played one and know nothing about them. But for warrior in current BiS it’s 40 DPS. Me and my guild doesn’t use chickens because we can’t be bothered. But I just don’t understand why it has to be nerfed. Melee is already disadvantaged enough in TBC, it’s just the top end parsing guilds that use them anyway.
While I agree parsing has become a meme in TBC compared to Classic, the problem isn’t chickens, it’s the community, where you have 4 hour SSC runs where only a a few people are allowed to AOE.
False. From dozens of sources over the internet, maybe a few considered engineering to be among the top raiding professions before TBC launch. It was mentioned almost exclusively in PvP context.
Engineering in PVP is always a safe bet, but engineering is the top dog in pve aswell as it brings a tons of explosives that does high amount of damage. And blindly follow guides aren’t really a wise choice.
EDIT: Most guides are based on single target sims, which makes engi worse.
Is fixing the abuse of a low-level item from the old content “this much”? Is accepting the broken state of something your solution instead of trying to find a remedy?
His reason to “fix” it and also give bloodlust a sated debuff like in wotlk is because he thinks its unfair that people who (a)buse it (i have no idea if its a bug/exploit or just one of 1000 unbalanced tbc things) have better logs than he has, and considering that there are way more things to get big advantages in logs even if they would fix chicken and give bloodlust a sated debuff makes it look like a poor reasoning to me.
Thats why I said, accept that logs are a meme and by no means an indicator of skill, if some people wanna get out of their (and their raids) way to get super high logs for their epeen, just let them do it.
I managed to get a 95 on pre-nerf Vashj even with sub-par gear (server died, then another guild disbanded). Going so low as a personal attack doesn’t say anything good about you though. And yes, it’s harder to get any good parses when the meta is based on exploits that I will never use.