Have you guys seen the Drums of Battle change?

Not wanting to carry people like you is one of the main reasons why I ended up switching guilds when we were into Naxx. It’s good and all as long as content goes down, but when we actually end up having to progress and we have dead weights like you who don’t even pull the effort, I’d rather raid with people who do take things seriously.

Still, it’s pretty fun to see you claiming that “you don’t need wbuffs to perform” and then admit you’ve been carried all along.

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I think you people are underestimating just how many clefthooves roam Nagrand, as opposed to the amount needed for each raid^^

This has to be the worst change imaginable, how would one even arrive at this change? There are three reasonable changes for drums in my opinion (that I can think of atm);

  1. Give a debuff like sated/tinnitus to all partymembers who gets the buff. (And possibly increase the duration of the haste bonus)
  2. Make the buff a raid wide effect so you dont need 20 LW’s.
  3. Make them usable without leatherworking. (You can make something personal to offset the loss of drums for LW’s)
    I don’t want to be rude but this reminds me of an out of seasons april fools joke.
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Leatherworking isn’t a value profession anyway, never was. Realistically if your plan is to make money off a profession in TBC you’re probably going to be a gatherer. Other than that, there wont be anything significant to make you lots of money.

Secondly, people are going into TBC with gold cap and Blizzard will not change that. Gold is not at all important… DRUMS and PLAYSTYLE are important to the expansion.

“Tinnitus” literally gutted leatherworking completely upon implementation. It’s a DEAD profession in WOTLK. Nobody at all uses it. Adding a debuff to drum use just makes it a dead profession in TBC, too.

So, you’re saying you didn’t clear Naxx.
GG.

But not adding a debuff to the drum would make it a requirement for most guilds.
If the drums were raid wide, it’d work better… so the majority of your raid group doesn’t need to be leatherworkers.

But it’s always 5% even after wipes. It’s pretty huge when you think about it, and it scales. And being the only “world buff” makes it so much more desirable.

The question is not if it is mandatory. The question is if it FEELS mandatory, and it does. Even blizzard said so in this thread, and that was what they was supposed to fix.

We’ve followed this discussion carefully, and we have a couple of thoughts that could stand to be clarified.


Looking Back

Drums of Battle were a meaningful part of the raiding experience in 2008. Sunwell Plateau was tuned with the improved Drums in place, and guilds tested the 2.4 PTR using them, and then all of the first Kil’jaeden kills in 2008 used them. Changes to how Drums work in this later phase of Burning Crusade Classic would make Sunwell Plateau harder or easier than it was in 2008. That would compel us to do raid tuning, which goes against our goal of establishing as much authenticity as possible. Yes, we’re planning on a progressive tuning model for the raids, but we want that to approximate how the original Burning Crusade played out.

The importance of professions in The Burning Crusade is part of the fabric of The Burning Crusade. While today the focus is on Leatherworking, we know that many casters will feel the need to pursue Tailoring, and PvP-focused warriors will feel that Blacksmithing is vital, and so forth. The changes made in the original Patch 2.3 were aimed specifically at bolstering the value of Leatherworking relative to those other professions.


Looking Ahead

In The Burning Crusade Classic, we want to provide an authentic experience. This means that while we are making some targeted changes where we think they’re appropriate to preserve the spirit and intent of The Burning Crusade’s original game design, we haven’t been planning to cause the value of Leatherworking to go way down over the course of the expansion.

The separation of Drums into two eras of items gives us a basis on which we can make tweaks as we navigate toward release. Players in 2007 felt that the early versions of the Drums were not really worth using. They had a cast time and a very small radius. Our intent in restoring that older version of the Drums for the first three phases of Burning Crusade Classic content is to approximate the evolution of professions through the early patches of original Burning Crusade.

Even though we’re only three days into the beta test, we’re looking forward to raid testing and endgame testing where we try out this pre-2.3 version of Drums. If they end up still feeling mandatory in a way that makes the early phases play out very differently than the original game, we’ll re-evaluate our design.

We’re also tweaking the Sunwell version. For example, the early design of the Drums in the beta today doesn’t include a change that we’ve put in to remove the additional resource costs on the Greater Drums. I think you’ll see that in next week’s new build of the beta.

We’re open to making further alterations, especially where a tweak still isn’t bringing the game to the authentic feel we’re going for. As always, we appreciate your constructive feedback on this issue and everything else.

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Just remove the leatherworking requirement to USE the drums, but keep the requirement to make them.

Problem solved. Actual leatherworkers can make some money, people get to pick their profession and Blizzard don’t have to retune anything.

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Well that debunks the idea that they are not required.

The question is if you should be able to use them without the profession or not.

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So what about

Remove drumms from pre 2.3 phase and add it to lw trainer to 2.4 phase and it be raidwide ?

I am 10000% sure ppl will still neeed to be lws and stack 8 yards to chain the drumms so its even more annoying. If pre 2.3 raids were designed without drumms ni mind, simply remove them from pre 2.3 phases and readd later when sunwell releases…

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Then it’s literally required to be a leatherworker in your guild.
Remove the requirement for being a leatherworker to use the drums.
If you want to keep the drums the way they are, simply remove the requirement of being a leatherworker.
Not everyone wants to be forced into being a leatherworker.

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It’s weird how Blizzard have talked about how the drums FEEL mandatory and how they wanted to fix that, several times, only to now double down and confirm they literally are mandatory and that the raids was balanced for them.

After the discussion about who can use them, we need to discuss how to farm the limited mats for the required drums on these mega servers.

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I don’t understand how they think they can make drums too annoying to use. Have they learnt nothing from the world buff meta? even bad guilds require them, because they just copy the good guilds, drums will be no different.

If they are so intent on keeping the LW requirement for drums then just give us the greater drums the whole time rather than forcing us to use the 8yd range.

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But what of all that talk at Blizzconline about not making the leatherworking feel mandatory? What your entire post boils down to is we are supposed to all switch to LW as soon as ZA phase begins. Might as well have it from the start and use the gimped drums. As a caster I would have to be a tailor anyway, what is the point of levelling enchanting or jewelcrafting and collecting patterns for them if I know there’s a deadline looming when I absolutely have to be LW anyway.
Even all that is pointless, with the green, 8yard, cast time drum in game as it is, it would still be mandatory with today’s mentality regardless.
Time to gather the 1-325 leather while it’s cheap I suppose.

5% haste is almost directly 5% dmage output, so basically a songflower without 15 stats or half of Ony.

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How about you follow up your carefully following the thread, by telling us what exactly the updated drums, both uncommon and rare versions are supposed to be doing exactly?

And I am not talking about how they enable you guys to “make tweaks” and so forth, I am talking about actual, and clearly described effects and numbers of said effects.
Are the tooltips we see right now an accurate representation of the current state of design? If not, are the buffs meant to be raid-wide? Group wide? What exactly is the buff? How are the rare recipes obtained exactly? Did anything change about the uncommon version compared to pre 2.3?

Also, please give us specific information about how stated design intentions are to be achieved. If LW is not meant to be mandatory for optimizing a raids output, how are the drum changes supposed to achieve that?

Yes, we are aware that things will change.

We are aware that whatever numbers, effects, and so on we are given are subject to change as the beta (and game?) progresses.
That is fine. That is normal in any development process.
Just tell us the current state of things, So we can have a discussion about it.

If you want to engage with the community, and discuss the changes you are making, then the community needs to know your current proposal first. Otherwise, we will just enter another round of speculation, rumors and half-baked assumptions on youtube.

Information is the basis of Discussion.

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Did you really follow this discussions all over the internet? Literally all the community agreed that forcing all raid members to be leatherworkers is annoying… You identified the issue yourself even. Do something to fix it. Keep the two types of drums you proposed but at least make it raid-wide buff (not party-wide).

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Sorry for the mistakes, English is not my main language.

In your reasoning you completely ignore the evolution of the mentality of the players and the experience gained by them on private server. Currently, the version before patch 2.3 is considered optimal and will be used by ALL members of a raid except a few rare guilds who will intentionally ignore the benefit provided by them. The version after patch 2.3 will only be used on bosses where players cannot regroup.

After patch 2.3 the developers also realized that the up had put forward a way to “break” the games and we made a correction with the release of LK (a weakening after using them) in order to rebalance this job.

And for those who say it will be like classic engineering here is a little comparison of things usable for ALL classes in between.

Classic engineering:

  • Sapper charge (opti raid)
  • Dynamite
  • Grenade (PVP stun)
  • Teleporter
  • Parachute
  • Means of opening locked doors
  • a lot of trinket - some gadget (world enlarger, etc.)
  • Pet
  • Goblin Jumper Cables XL
  • repair robot

Leatherworking in BC:

  • drum

You can correct the drum in several ways already listed in another post.

  • Removed the leatherwork prerequisite. (I prefer this one because it allows to keep an importance to the LW and will allow them to trade)
  • Added a debuff when use.
  • Decreased the power of the buff.

Only one of these three modifications would solve the problem unlike the modification you are proposing which is absolutely useless.

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On the contrary, it completely gimps LW and makes it a useless prof that you can maybe pick on one of your alts to craft your own drums. Or one alt per guild to craft drums for all members. a drum will have 50 charges so one single drum will suffice for a few raids.
The gold one will make from selling drums is almost nothing compared to how much one can make from tailoring, alchemy, jewelcrafting, enchanting etc. but then all these other professions also have other perks to improve player performance.
I tell you, if drums dont require LW to use, there won’t be a single LW in top guilds. Not a single one.

This is the correct choice. Tinnitus debuff that persists for 2 minutes. It will make guilds bring 5 LWs and 5 shamans to raids, everyone will be happy. None will be completely excluded from raiding and the least amount of issues for everyone.

Naw, it’s not a huge buff anyway. It’s only 5% haste, but with the minmaxing of today, people tend to go after even the smallest buff or advantage that they can get. Wouldn’t fix the issue.

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By the way, thank you for communicating with the community after all this feedback you received. Hope you keep around and don’t vanish again.

Tinnitus debuff is the good choice that will fix the issue of drums as Brian described on the BlizzCon panel.
https://clips.twitch.tv/BashfulPiliableGoblinGivePLZ-nxnDHMrObutxZ-10

And since you mentioned that you want to provide an authentic experience, you might want to stop the paid character boosts and adding new mounts through deluxe edition to the game. They didn’t exist in TBC and are not authentic to the game.
You can maybe start selling digital trading cards via your website store(not an ingame shop) and lucky players might get to use their TGC mounts like spectral tiger or magic rooster. They were authentic to TBC and you can also make some money this way.
Good for both parties.

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With each post on this, you guys sound more and more disconnected.

You really don’t need a beta tester to tell you that your fix won’t work. To be clear you were meant to prevent drums from being mandatory.

We’ve just spent a year and a half gathering world buffs and that’s what Leatherworking will be - the new wb meta.

You really think adding an 8 yard restriction will change the requirement to it? It’s like making the Only/Nef buff only affect players within the INN of Stormwind or Orgrimarr.

Do you need a beta tester to tell you that everyone won’t just stand on top of each other?

I know this isn’t your decision mate, your the messenger but I know there is good devs within Blizzard screaming, telling the decision makers ‘your new drums won’t work’.

The person or persons know they messed up the drums, otherwise they would not be trying to justify them by saying ‘we want it to be authentic’… if they actually cared about it being authentic they wouldnt have changed anything… but instead they are offering you a level 58 boost. Nothing authentic about that.

I welcome some changes to TBC but you’re still completely missing the changes that the community want - drums to not feel like a mandatory profession.

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