I’m not here to look for sympathy and mainly just venting my frustration and telling the wow classic devs of my dissatisfaction with how they handled this and things in general with classic wow because I care about this game.
I very much dislike this zero communication approach wow classic team has to changing or removing aspects of the game that people care about. I do like how they have at least tried to be more open with the community by joining community podcasts and talking with us but they don’t follow through with it when they are doing changes to the game. #somechanges was supposed to be with things that were problematic but doesn’t really feel that way anymore.
So the issue at hand is that the other day they decided to randomly without warnings nerf Flame Caps in a way that basically makes them useless. Removing the ability for them to be used in raids because they now share CD with potions.
The only reason for this change that I can think of is some people complaining how they are too expensive for them to buy because they are a rare spawn of a TBC herb making them slow to farm. They are an item that gives a very marginal increase to your dps and is in no way needed to perform and if I had to guess only the very top guilds would mandate you to use them. If it was the top 1% of guilds and when 2 or 3 specs use them we are talking about maybe 0.3% of the player base who would have to use them. If that.
I would also expect that if you play on that level you would have prepared and bought these early anyway so it doesn’t really even affect them.
For everyone else, they are mainly something they can pop later on to parse if they want to push their performance that little bit further.
Nerfing them suddenly means that lots of people who did prepare are getting punished and the more you prepared the bigger the punishment. On top of that it removed a cool aspect from the game, an aspect that is very unique to classic wow where cool little things from previous expansions are still relevant in future ones. Things like the wrath of Cenarius, BOED, Felstriker, elixirs of demonslaying etc. have been. Cool things that you can use to get a tiny edge if you so wish but are not really needed. For me and for many players I know these are a fun part of the game and add flavor to it.
If the big problem with Flame Caps was their price, you could have increased their spawns by like 5x as you did with Black Lotus for example or make Ragveil drop them as well. Or if you really wanted not to have them in the game, you could have told everyone: “Hey guys, we don’t like that you can use Flame Caps so we will be nerfing them come Phase 3 so everyone who did prepare can still have some use out of them during Ulduar”. But no, instead without any heads up you make them unusable. Anything would have been better than this zero communication stealth nerf to something that was not a problem to begin with. Flame caps were used back in the day unlike some of the other things found during classic wow.
Flame Caps are not even nerfed on retail 15 years later but they needed to be nerfed without any communications on classic for what reason? Haste Potions cost almost 30g each on some servers in early Sunwell times which would equal +100g in current gold value when you include the inflation that has happened since. But this wasn’t a problem and nothing was done to the haste potion prices, even though they were relatively more expensive and every physical had to use them.
I fully know I’m biased because I had invested a lot of time and gold into Flame Caps. I felt good for making a wise investment into something I will be using for my class. Something I used back in the day when I fell in love with mage during the original wotlk. Anyone could have done this. All of the information was available to everyone. When I try to look at it objectively, nerfing them didn’t fix any real problem and only took away from the game and made a lot of people lose time and gold.
Thank you for reading, rant over.