The Future of World Buffs in Classic Era

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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We know that there’s a lot of excitement for Burning Crusade Classic, but we haven’t forgotten about the Classic Era servers. One of the defining features of raiding in Classic has certainly been the prevalence of world buff stacking, and while there are some interesting social effects – coordinating turn-ins, leveling alts, world PvP at buff locations, there’s also an obvious negative element – once you’re buffed, you’re incentivized to log off and stop playing to preserve your buffs. If you want to log off to go make dinner or put your kids to bed, that’s completely fine and the timing works in your favor. But if you still want to repair your gear, shop for consumables, or run a dungeon with your friends, then it’s not great to be losing precious minutes on your buffs, or worse, risk dying and losing them entirely. We’ve been wanting to do something about that side-effect, without completely abandoning our philosophy for WoW Classic, so we’re going to try something new in Patch 1.13.7: The Chronoboon Displacer.

What is it?

The Chronoboon Displacer is an item you buy which takes a snapshot of your world buffs, such as Rallying Cry of Dragonslayer, Songflower, etc. and saves them for use at a later time. Of course we don’t want to change things too radically, so it comes with some significant restrictions: While you are under the effects of the Chronoboon Displacer, you can’t benefit from any of the world buffs that it’s holding for you. That keeps you from getting a second set of buffs, and then still feeling like you need to log off. Also, when you release the buffs from the Chronoboon Displacer, it puts the item on a 1 hour cooldown so that you can’t toggle your buffs on for bosses and off for the rest of the raid.

How does it work?

First, you collect all your world buffs the way you normally would – getting your summon to Dire Maul, a portal back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar for your Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer, a quick trip to Yojamba Isle to turn in the Heart of Hakkar, or whatever subset of world buffs your raid expects or that you feel comfortable with. Then you activate your Chronoboon Displacer, which creates a Supercharged Cronoboon Displacer in your inventory and an aura which holds the captured state of your world buffs. You can mouse over that aura at any time to see which buffs are stored, and how much time is stored on them. You can then go about your business, secure in the knowledge that your world buffs are saved and ready for use when you need them most. When you’re ready to restore them, simply activate the Supercharged Chronoboon Displacer and it will break apart, releasing the stored auras back onto your character.

Where do I get one?

Well, given the complex temporal mechanics involved, you obviously need to make a deal with a Bronze Dragon, and you can find a friendly one named Chromie located in Andorhal in the Western Plaguelands. Of course she’ll likely want your help repairing the time stream first, but once you’ve helped her out with that, she’ll be happy to sell you as many Chronoboon Displacers as your heart desires.

Why now?

We launched Classic with an intent to keep the game data the same as it was originally, and we wanted to make sure we delivered on that promise, but now that we’ve been through all the content phases we planned before launch, we took a step back to consider what it really means to have the world buff system stay this way in Classic Era. A persistent world where everybody is traveling around for magical items and spells to maximize their power is fine, but one where they then stop playing to avoid wasting them seems wrong. Having an additional stop that lets you “bottle your buffs” seems like a thematically appropriate change to alleviate that problem.

We know this is a change, and any change to Classic is something we want to be careful with, but in this case, the fact that playing optimally literally requires you to stop playing was just too much for us to sit idly by. If you have any concerns about ways this might be abused, please post them here so we can address them. We hope you’ll all find this change as exciting as we do!

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First I thought this was a very refined april fool’s joke, like Blizzard acknowleding players turned their beautiful virtual universe into an optimized maths formula over the years. No one is really guilty, old game played by old players bounded to IRL obligations, market evolved…etc

and then I realized there is 31 days in march

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This is great news!

Personally I would prefer to have wBuffs not work in raids at all. They should just be a fun perk to have but it’s broken when you stack them in raids.

Or if we get Classic Vanilla Fresh have them not work in raids for 1 month after the raid opens.

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hmmm
/10 char

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Not a fan of this.

I honestly thought Blizzard would be against stacking of world buffs to make content trivial as they was never meant to be used this way in the first place the original developers added these buffs to be a cool little bonus for killing a raid boss or clearing a dungeon.

World buffs in my eyes ruin the raiding scene in classic, they basically make gear upgrades seem trivial since you gain more from WB’s than you do from the upgrades themselves (18% spell crit from Ony, SF and DMT buff).

They make fights even more trivial than they already are and in most cases let you skip boss mechanics entirely. Not only that some classes benefit far more from WB’s than others - case and point; Warriors.

It’s a shame but once again you’ve managed to water down the game just like you did with retail over time. This will be abused even if you take measures to stop it I can already think of several ways:

-Enter raid 1 hour early, pop your buffs and log off.
-Log back on for raid time and any potential wipes and you can save your buffs again as the hour cooldown has been reset.

Also it’s kind of laughable that this has been introduced at the end of classic again I don’t like the change but you really only decided to address world buffs near the end of P6…really?

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I think there can be two reasons:
1- Its a premature April fools joke.
2- Classic + is on the table they are considering making changes to improve the longevity of Classic +.

There is also something I read on the US forums:

" WoW Developer Pazorax-1880
(https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-future-of-world-buffs-in-classic-era/923110/36)
That’s the direction we intend to go in Burning Crusade Classic. In Burning Crusade Classic we intend to have world buffs removed at the start of raid encounters.

I realize that’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but I did want to clarify that our intent is to preserve the World Buffs in Classic Era, while moving away from World Buffs in Burning Crusade Classic.

I hope that clarifies things for you!"
That means WB’s can be used in dungeon farming if needed.

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this change really just puts the image of a firetruck arriving to put out a fire after the building has crumbled to rubble into my mind… no offense, but this comes about 9 months too late to be of any use to anyone by this point.

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I just got answered on the US forums:

Pazorax:
This is NOT an April Fools joke. The proximity to April 1st is an unfortunate coincidence.
I’m just a software engineer; they don’t trust me with humor
So my second reason stands they are starting to build up something in Classic.

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Well I feel your kind of right here but not about Classic + I feel they are making these changes to improve the longevity of Classic WoW itself and have already been laying the foundations for this for a while.

To expand on what I mean: I feel Blizzard are well aware that the last few expansions haven’t been well received and while the initial release and hype draws a lot of players back it doesn’t retain these players and year by year the player base keeps dropping they probably know that they have a few expansions left in them before they stop creating new content for the game.

The TBC level boost is a good example the real reason behind it is it’s meant as a safety net to try retain subs from players who are either bored or fed up of retail. Giving them the option to jump right in (for a fee ofc).

That’s where Classic, Classic TBC and eventually Classic WoTLK comes in. I feel they plan to keep the company generating profit from these games just launching fresh servers every so often and with that will be a cash shop full of different options: Mounts, faction change, level boost, appearance change, server transfers and eventually the WoW token.

It’s no surprise Blizzard hired Holly Longdale who is someone who managed to keep a game like Everquest alive and generating profit long after the game had it’s hay day. For them it’s a perfect opportunity as it means they can make money from an old product that requires little maintenance and no new content other than fresh servers every year or so and use the time they spent on WoW to work on other projects.

I could be wrong but it feels like that is the direction World of Warcraft is heading.

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so bad lmao, just disable all world buffs in classic. This is what people actually want.

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Since when is I, we?

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Apart from the common world buffs granted in cities such as Heart of Hakkar, Warchief Blessing etc’ there are also less common ones like Songflower Serenade, Traces of Silithyst or even the buffed Battle Shout received from finishing the warrior Sunken Temple class quest.

Will we be able to contain those buffs as well?

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Except that is wasn’t, because Vanilla WoW never had this level of server wide player-side organisation allowing for worldbuffs to be plannable, enabling the World Buff Meta in the first place.

This is a nice change for the era servers, but here is the clincher: It should have been that way from day 1.

For the majority of the playerbase, who lived through this unfun meta and leave classic behind forever when TBC launches, this change improves nothing, because its about 6 phases too late.

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As far as I understand WB’s will be available until lvl 70 and only not work in Raids.
Does this mean it will work in Arenas?

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I’m completely flabbergasted at how you seem intent to never make the logical decision at Blizzard.
The WB are a toxic meta, that push people to jump into hoop to constantly collect huge buffs which completely distort the game while they were never designed to be used this way, destroy the content and ruin the fun.

There was an extremely simple way to fix EVERYTHING and put the game back to its initial intended design : disable the WB while in a raid.

But it was probably too simple, so you bother to invent some completely ridiculous system to PRESERVE all this crap…

I just can’t understand how you can find so consistently the worst, most convoluted solutions, when very obviously better and simpler ones are plastered all over. You amaze me, it’s like you’re being stupid purposely…

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Isn’t it better to just disable buff saving feature in raids? Because without CD it will make more opportunities to catch sudden heart/head drops without the need to logging off to wait for CD.

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If at least it was a firetruck lmao… Not only does this came too late to be relevant, but the fix on its own is whack

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And throw Classic on it’s head, when it’s so close to being “done” (in the sense that most ppl will go to TBC), instead of doing what they are doing now: making sure people can use the WB’s but can also keep playing their chars.

If you follow your logic they should remove every stupid, unbalanced or nonsensical thing in classic.

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What about fixing WCB for Alliance? Maybe have it go out in Stormwind when we turn in Nef/Ony. Will people even pop world buffs on classic eras lower user base? How about giving out WCB/Ony every hour like on Chinese servers?

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Just let it die and launch fresh again and again. There is little reason to feed progressed Classic realm with changes.

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