With the news of DM buffs no longer being dispellable in phase 4 I kind of lost all hope for world buffs to stop being a thing in SoD end game PvE. So with this post I wanted to share some of my thoughts and theories of why I think world buffs are hurting the overall gameplay for end game raiding, no matter the level. Note that I take no issue towards WB’s as a whole within the game and definitely see a fun and somewhat gimmicky aspect of stacking them for PvP or w/e have you.
Let’s start with the positives, because I do think that there are some from experience.
+ High risk, high reward.
Back in WoW Classic (or even vanilla) we didn’t have access to the chronoboon. This made gathering WB’s a dopamine fuelled part of the game that actually took a lot of team effort in order to get them fast and safe. This is why I actually do think WB’s are more fun without the chronoboon because of the community it created for summoning, clearing and gathering buffs around the world. However, the biggest downside of not having the chronoboon is of course the fact that your character basically becomes unplayable once you have started the quest of gathering WB’s.
+ Big numbers are fun for everyone.
Let’s face it, most of us play this game for character progression, but we are per default lazy. Having access to a shortcut via WB’s can make even the worst player feel powerful for 1-2 hours with little to no effort in comparison to how long it would take to gain that power via gear. Sounds fun for sure, but at the same time it kind of diminishes the value of new gear because of how little that matters to your characters overall power.
And now, the negatives;
- Class scaling in PvE becomes harder.
WB’s scaling different with all classes is old news and was confirmed when Blizzard implemented a warrior shout to soften the blow of losing them, simply because of how big a part they play on some classes damage. So why not just balance classes better and remove them? Removing WB’s will in my opinion create an easier game to balance, tier to tier. And imagine if the meta could scale on items and/or set bonuses (like arcane mage with tier 5) instead of just what class scales best with crit and base stats. Heck, even support classes could be a thing of the meta in order to make up for the “loss” of WB’s. In short, I don’t think anyone wants to see the world first Naxx in SoD consisting for 14 warriors, or 14 of any other class for that matter.
- Forced and tedious chore that stacks up with more raids and alts.
Almost every PUG in the game, at least on my server is demanding WB’s in order to be able to join. And this is for a “level up raid” at the end of its phase with WB’s that have way less impact then in 60. This means that unless you are part of a guild that actively don’t care about performance you will have to gather the majority of all the WB’s before every single raid. Add to this that Blizzard are trying to keep SoD alt friendly, meaning you might have to gather all WB’s 4-6 times a week when BWL and AQ is released, and you start wiping on more than one character. Let’s say you pay for summons and scan discord channels for WB drops you could possibly gather them all in a 30 min timeframe of active playtime. That’s 2-3 hours a week just to be able to join a raid, which means that most casual players will have to dedicate 1-2 evenings to just gather WB’s in order to able to play for 1-2 other evenings, which no one can argue is fun.
- Neglects skill.
WB’s power creep is fun for everyone yes, but because of how big an impact they have on your damage even a bad player with somewhat decent gear, stacked consumables and WB’s will be able to press good. Removing WB’s makes player skill more noticeable because of how much more itemization and rotation will matter for your overall damage.
- Makes end game content to easy, to fast.
Raids will always have to be tuned and balanced around a raid without WB’s unless Blizzard want’s to make a new “few attempts / week” kind of boss (this would be neglected by players just spam getting WB’s anyway so don’t try this!). What this means is that as soon as you are able to kill the last boss without a wipe you are going to breeze through that raid like it’s nothing for the rest of SoD. I remember raiding back in vanilla and the awesome felling of going back to say MC after a few progress nights in AQ40. You realized how long your guild had made it thinking back to all those wipes in MC and now you just crushed it like a bug. Way more fun and rewarding then being able to do the same thing two weeks after the raid is released.
- Creates larger gaps between the casual and the normal to hard core raid groups.
Because of the point above there will always be a huge difference between guilds that can clear a raid without a single wipe and guilds that still wipe a few times here and there, or even just have some players dying during every encounter. Being able to wipe, reset with consumables and still have the same chance of doing a good kill is way more fun than a tedious raid that follows a wipe and losing WB’s. This will also mean that people might actually stay longer in a guild that struggles because their personal performance wouldn’t suffer that much from the occasional wipe here and there. Not to mention the self-proclaimed elitists that semi afk once WB’s are gone because “now it’s just not worth trying anymore”.
- SoD can’t be compared to other versions of the game, so why not change this aswell?
Speed runs in Naxx aren’t going to compare themselves between SoD and Classic because it’s already two different games with runes alone, let alone the 20.vs.40 man raids. So WB’s or not it’s still not the same game, hence there’s no reason to keep them just because “they used to be in the game”. Further more all the min/maxers might think this will hurt their experience, but like I said before, this will make parsing harder because a bigger portion of your performance will be from itemization and skill compared to just WB’s.
TL:DR
World Buffs don’t add anything positive to end game raiding in SoD because of all the changes that are already in place, neither to hard core nor casual players. Indirectly forcing every active raiding player to run around the world for 30-60 min before every raid, on every character isn’t going to help the community stay strong for the entirety of SoD. And let’s face it, is probably the biggest reason for all the negative feedback on the biweekly lockout (further strengthening my argument). The whole competitive PvE environment would also be much more fair and skill dependant without world buffs.
I’m just a normal player trying to improve my experience going forward into SoD and I know my opinion matter little. But it’s my 100% honest opinion that world buffs will ruin the experience for all players, and less players = less revenue, so do what you will with that information.
TL:DR, TL:DR
Remove WB’s, it’s bad game design.
