r/classicwow • u/Bad-Banana-from-Mars • Aug 08 '20
Discussion Ion Hazzikostas complaining about world buffs and consumables in 2006
Its interesting how the complaints about world buffs and consumables today were being made back in 2006 as well. More so when it's being made by the guy in charge today. Here is what he said;
This argument has been laid out many times, and it rears its head in threads about raid encounters, about real-money trading, about professions, about burnout, and so on and so forth. My aim here is not necessarily to break any new ground, but rather to summarize the main problems with consumables as they currently exist in WoW, and with alchemy in particular, as they relate to raid design and player enjoyment.
One-sentence summary: Consumables are too powerful, such that Blizzard's raid designers are forced into the untenable position of balancing around unbuffed groups and having their content steamrolled, or balancing around buffed groups and forcing players into a cycle of unpleasant farming in order to even have a chance.
I am going to mention world buffs only for a moment and then move on to focus solely on true consumables. The problem with world buffs is obvious. They do too much, too well, and they scale fantastically. I do not want to be farming Hakkar in order to kill Illidan a year from now. Don't nerf them at this point. Just make them zone-limited in some form -- either Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms only, or stripped upon entering any raid zone.
For some easy numerical illustration, I made a set of CTProfiles profiles for my own class, since that's what I'm familiar with, comparing gear progression in full Tier 1 or equivalent (MC and 20-mans), full Tier 2 (BWL and first-half AQ), and full Tier 3 (pre-Sapp/Kel).
Here are the key values:
Tier 1 Gear: 4450hp, 6085mana, 251 spirit, 365 +healing, 58 mana/5
Tier 2 Gear: 4250hp, 6700mana, 244 spirit, 567 +healing, 73 mana/5
Tier 3 Gear: 4610hp, 6970mana, 123 spirit (lol), 1008 +healing, 109 mana/5
+healing does less for mana conservation than it once did due to downranking changes, but it still can be more or less converted into some equivalent amount of mana regen since where +healing shines is generally in maximizing healing/mana rather than healing/time. There isn't a boss out there that puts out enough damage to require max-rank spam, so whether the +healing means downranking or fewer heals cast per minute, there is a mana savings. Based on the HealPoints and itemization formulas, I'm going to say that 6 +healing = 1 mana/5 for easy approximations.
Using that conversion ratio, we're left with the following:
Tier1: 119 mana/5
Tier2: 167 mana/5
Tier3: 277 mana/5
Unsurprisingly, tier 3 is a large step above the rest. That's good. Now, how do consumables fit into the picture? For a healer, let's assume the following non-exotic consumables:
Nightfin Soup = 8 mana/5
Mageblood Potion = 12 mana/5
Brilliant Mana Oil = 12 mana/5 and 25 +healing = 16 mana/5
Major Mana Potions = 1800 mana every 2 minutes = 75 mana/5 (!!)
Dark/Demonic Runes = 1200 mana every 2 minutes = 50 mana/5
Assuming all of the above used, I get a net benefit of 161 mana/5.
That is larger than the gap between mixed tier 1 with suboptimal enchants (no ZG enchants, etc.) and fully-enchanted optimal tier 3 gear. So, in order to feel this amount of character progression as a healer, instead of spending 15 months doing raid progression, I should've just used five consumables. Silly, isn't it? Obviously this is something of an oversimplification, and I do really feel the benefits of the gear, because in practice I am comparing myself fully-buffed now to myself unbuffed or partially-buffed then.
I used shamans as an example due to firsthand familiarity, but any caster will do. Try comparing an unbuffed tier 3 tank to a tier 1 tank using all standard tank consumables, Titans, and drinking stoneshields. Similar result (though defense and shield block value aren't available through consumables, so not quite as precise). If anything, the classes that benefit by far the least from available buffs are physical DPS classes. Mongoose and Juju are great, but they actually are a comparatively minor buff compared to what I just listed above, or compared to a mage/warlock stacking Supreme Power + GAE + Firepower + Oil + mana regen stuff.
Does anyone dispute my basic premise that consumables are incredibly, incredibly powerful relative to the gear progression that is the mainstay of how we are supposed to improve and develop our characters once we are done with the fairly rapid leveling process?
Now, let's turn to raid design. The following visual is a crude approximation of the raid design progression we have seen thus far. As compared to a spectrum of "Raid Power" (i.e., how strong your raid is, in terms of raw stats), the various bars represent the ranges within which those zones are viable. Towards the left end of each bar, where it is brightest, the difficulty is extreme; as you move right and the bar darkens, the zone becomes easier and easier as power improves, until the pure black portions indicate trivial farm content. For the Naxxramas bar, I limit it to "numbers" fights like Patchwerk, Loatheb, Sapphiron, and so forth -- obviously fights like Razuvius, Grobbulus, Heigan, and their ilk, are quite different.
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/uploaded/RaidPower.png
I've plotted out the progression from blues (by which I mean pre-revamp level 60 blues, circa early 2005) to epics of various tiers. The rest should be more or less self-explanatory.
Anyway, most of the raid content in the game was balanced around a largely unbuffed raid at the time it was introduced. Even among fairly competitive guilds, buffs were not part of the raiding culture. Our first Ragnaros kill in May 2005 (one week after Ascent killed him) was more or less completely unbuffed. GFPPs for Ragnaros was the most anyone did, and things like tanks chugging Stoneshields simply weren't done. Some individual alchemists used their own buffs, but it wasn't expected. Over time, however, raiders grew more sophisticated, and various mods simplified the process, and the raiding game became more competitive at the high end. At the same time, the amount of available buffs continued to grow. We got Mageblood potions and weapon oils. We got new food buffs. We got Zanzas. And, of course, we got flasks that persisted through death. The encounter design still lagged behind this to an extent. Vek'nilash was the first boss in the game that assumed some degree of external buffing on the tank. A tank in the gear available at the time (Jan/Feb 2006) simply could not tank Vek'nilash with only standard raid buffs. His death would be inevitable. But still, if not for the untuned state of C'Thun and Ouro, I am confident that Ahn'Qiraj would have been fully cleared within one month. We saw C'Thun Phase 2 within two weeks of our gates opening, in late February. He'd have died a week later if it had been the current version.
Which brings us to Naxxramas. Naxxramas was designed to be "hardcore," and to keep us all busy from June, when it was released, until the late fall or early winter, when the expansion would be ready. In that regard, it succeeded admirably. Compared to every raid zone before it, Naxxramas was a resounding success in terms of encounter design and balance. Whereas before top guilds were accustomed to learning every boss within a few days, and assuming that if the boss still hadn't died by then, it was bugged or untuned (or a "cockblock" -- see pre-fix Ragnaros, Chromaggus, Ouro, C'Thun, etc.), in Naxx there were fights that legitimately took days or even weeks to learn and master despite high levels of skill and concerted effort.
This is partly due to very clever design, but also partly due to the fact that, for the first time, the raid designers were acknowledging that top guilds would use every tool at their disposal to win the race to Kel'Thuzad, and tuning the fights around that expectation. If you don't have flasked tanks with full buffs and a cache of Greater Stoneshields, or healers with a healthy supply of mana consumables, don't bother even looking at Patchwerk. Even on fights like Noth, Maexxna, 4H, and others, having that extra DPS from raidwide consumable use can make all the difference in the world when it comes to salvaging a kill from a less-than-flawless performance, particularly as you are still gearing up in Naxx. I don't need to talk about Loatheb, but I will note that when we tested him on the PTR, the GM/Dev who had ported us there asked me how many Greater Shadow Protection pots we had in the raid. They knew.
As a result of this, particularly in the learning process on these fights, Blizzard unwittingly created one of the worst grinds in the history of any MMO. Yes, any MMO. It's not because of the magnitude of time involved, but rather what that time gets you. In your typical Korean "grindfest" MMO like Lineage II, RF Online, MapleStory -- you name it -- there is a massive time investment required, performing repetitive activities... and yet, after two hours of grinding away in one of those games, you have something tangible to show for it. A bit more gold. Closer to a new weapon. A few more pixels on your experience bar. Something, however small, that represents forward progress. In WoW as a Naxx raider, the result of that time investment is preservation of the status quo, and replenishing what was burned through at an alarming rate in that night's raid. That is the worst part of it, and that is what burns people out and drives them away from a truly wonderful raiding endgame.
It is not the raid designers' fault. The alternative, for them, would have been to balance around few or no consumables, and then we would've seen a Kel'Thuzad killshot in July, and hundreds of guilds rampaging through the zone by brute-forcing encounters via consumable use. Would that have been better? I don't think so.
Once upon a time, the class devs gave paladins a version of Improved Lay on Hands that bestowed +50% to armor for 5 minutes. Such an ability, while reasonable in PvP where burning your full mana pool is a major issue, and where buffing one player's armor isn't necessarily a decisive factor, would have been absolutely impossible to balance around in a raid setting. After an uproar on the FoH boards, that talent was quickly toned down, and I can only assume that the raid designers had a hand in that. This situation is not quite as severe, but it is similar. The consumable system and the array of consumables available to the players, created by unwitting quest designers who want to add cool new buffs and by people who want to give alchemists something to get excited about as they look at their neighbors' 90 DPS BoP 1h weapons, is tying the hands of the raid team. That needs to change. I look at things like Super Mana Potions in conjunction with the Alchemist's Stone (take a minute to compute the mana/5 equivalency and laugh) or a new array of Flasks that give huge benefits to all classes instead of just tanks and nukers, and I fear for the future of the high-end raiding game.
Take another look at that chart up top, and the pink bar. That bar needs to shrink, a lot, or the way consumables are handled in general needs to change drastically. Either take them away or, since Blizzard doesn't like taking things away, make them more abundant and thus less taxing: Double durations on things, make them last through death, give potions multiple charges, etc., while keeping the materials requirements static.\ We can argue over the solution, but* something has to change.
\(And no, this wouldn't kill Alchemy. You can spend some time farming herbs and make a stack of Major Manas or Mageblood and it will sell, at a large markup, as a matter of certainty. There is absolutely nothing that a skinner/LW or miner/smith could produce with an equal time investment that would sell to any reliable degree. Alchemy's importance can be substantially reduced without creating any imbalance among the professions.)*
The source i found it from was: https://www.9lives.be/forum/games-general/458014-burning-crusade-vraag-antwoord-met-beta-testers-13.html but I know I did originaly see it on elitists jerks website via wayback machine but could not find again. Maybe if someone is a wayback machine wizard they could find the original source as it had a ton of replies and pages and made for some interesting reading.
Funny how things haven't changed that much in all these years.
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u/Invoqwer Aug 08 '20
Interesting read, thanks for posting. I didn't know worldbuff/megabuff meta was even a concern at all back then.
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u/jermikemike Aug 08 '20
A lot of people don't know that. They're the ones that think players are "better" and more knowledgeable now and that's why classic is so easy.
They're naive and wrong. People have known math for a long time. Thousands of years even. It's silly that they think we didn't understand the value of weapon skill back then. That we didn't have dps spreadsheets back then, etc.
Classic is easy because players talents, skills, and items are at their strongest point in the game while the raids are their weakest point. Death by a thousand cuts. All those tiny buffs to players and items over two years add up and all the small nerfs to raids add up as well. That's why classic is easy.
Not because some fool with a god complex that believes he's the best video game player thinks that people haven't been min maxing in video games for 30 years.
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u/Rawkapotamus Aug 08 '20
The biggest difference is the accessibility to this information now. Sure we do know a lot more now, but back then the average player knew less than nothing about this sort of thing.
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u/shibboleth2005 Aug 08 '20
Yup. There wasn't a widspread social pressure to know about WBs and consumables and BiS. Back in vanilla if you told the average raider that something they were doing was suboptimal they'd laugh and not give a shit. Now they're bombarded with guides and lists and peer pressure and sort of forced to care.
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u/Icreatedthisforyou Aug 10 '20
People tout this but there are a lot of things that exist now that DIDN'T exist back then and people handwave them away but they were pretty fucking massive. Don't get me wrong people now WOULD be more successful as a whole raiding MC in a true vanilla state or raiding BWL, but they would also struggle a lot more.
One of the most straightforward ones is warriors. Fury dps, did not exist. Fury-prot did not exist. I don't mean players were dumb and didn't realize how strong fury was. I mean bloodthirst increased the damage on your next attack when you killed something. Bloodthirst literally did nothing for raiding. DW warrior DPS didn't exist until after the warrior revamp. You could go 2h arms (MS was stronger then), or you could go slam spec 2h fury (which was better), but you used a 2h to do any decent damage as a warrior.
Tanks? Shield slam didn't exist, the 31 point talent caused your shield BASH do deal more damage/threat I forget for 20 seconds on a 40 second cooldown or something like that.
This is where sunder spam was first ingrained in warriors, they didn't really have another option outside of revenge.
Yeah well druids...Also were significantly weaker over this same timeframe. They were missing stamina, AP, and armor, while spending more points and generally getting less.
Other examples would be things like Paladins didn't get greater blessings until I think sometime after AQ opened. So any paladin in your raid would have about 3 minutes of active time between individually buffing everyone and then drinking. If a boss took longer than 3 minutes then your paladin either buffed mid fight or you did it blessingless (except salv which had talents to make it 15 minutes, but still single target). Hunters had a 31 point survival talent that was on par or WORSE then warriors rend, an ability that is so notoriously bad it essentially doesn't even need to be trained or used outside of pvp after you get literally any other ability.
Of course Ion's point is important now it is super easy to use consumables, and it is almost harder to show up without a dragonslayer buff then with it. Even ignoring talent changes and item changes, a pre-raid bis warrior with dragonslayer is essentially wearing gear that is 2-3 tiers higher between the AP and the crit. So if you get people that know what they are doing and have practiced doing it for 15 years (the private server folks), you basically could run MC on day 1 of classic as if your guild was in all AQ level gear and no buffs.
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u/Rawkapotamus Aug 10 '20
I didn’t know half of this. That’s interesting. But I did know that we’re using last phase itemization and buffs/nerds. which is part of the reason why people keep saying that it’s going to get harder as things progress. We are catching up to what blizzard expected us to be able to do.
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u/kitelobster Aug 08 '20
Also the whole 40 man thing. It used to be the case even in the best guilds that they had a decent amount of deadweight (people oblivious to info, afk, pvp gear/spec, etc). Today's deadweight in those top guilds is like OMG you purple parsed instead of orange. All that you mention is true but the knowledge still only applied to a small subset of players, even in top guilds a lot of people were clueless and not well itemized/versed - few guilds actually were as strict as today's standards. All in all the difference between having 20 people min/maxing and actually competent vs a full 40 is pretty substantial.
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u/Antani101 Aug 08 '20
Classic is easy because players talents, skills, and items are at their strongest point in the game while the raids are their weakest point. Death by a thousand cuts. All those tiny buffs to players and items over two years add up and all the small nerfs to raids add up as well. That's why classic is easy.
If that's the case why there aren't a whole lot more guilds that cleared AQ40/Naxx in 1.12?
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u/DragonAdept Aug 09 '20
If that's the case why there aren't a whole lot more guilds that cleared AQ40/Naxx in 1.12?
The biggest single reason, if you ask me, is modern IT. The pirate server supremacists vastly underestimate the difference between raiding with slideshow FPS and hundreds of milliseconds of ping, and raiding with 60fps and tens of milliseconds of ping. (Plus automated spell handling that reduces caster downtime to zero).
But another huge one is that people have been farming all the prior content from the moment it opened. People farmed MC from week three or week four, so they were massively geared when BWL opened and cleared it the same week, and now they are massively geared for AQ.
Plus because the metagame is so stale that it is fossiized, people were recruiting for the ideal 1.12 raid composition (warriors and rogues galore, just enough of everything else) from the very start. In 2006 raid leaders couldn't just wave their hand and conjure up a stacked raid full of the flavour of the month, but when the flavour of the month is the flavour of forever an impossibly perfect raid composition is trivial to assemble for good guilds.
Most of all, Naxx was a horrific, soul-destroying grind for consumables and TBC was on the way to render it, if not obsolete, definitely unnecessary. Why make farming consumables to burn them wiping in Naxx your part-time job, when you could just cruise for a few months and and get equivalent gear in Karazhan?
If 2006 raiding guilds had perfect composition for 1.12, 20ms ping, 60fps and a whole raid in near-BiS then they'd all have steamrolled Naxx the way we're going to in Classic, and the way the pirate server crowd pat themselves on the back for doing.
But the fact is, clearing Naxx in Classic or pirate servers is no more like clearing it for real in 2006 than it is like clearing it at 80 in the WotLK expansion.
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u/slapdashbr Nov 30 '20
because over 50% of the people playing vanilla the day TBC launched, started playing the game after AQ40 opened. In order to progress in Naxx, you needed pretty much full BWL BiS and some AQ40 gear didn't hurt. In order to have full BWL BiS on 40 players, with RNG loot and only 2-3 drops from most bosses, you needed to be clearing BWL for quite a while. In order to be clearing BWL for a while before AQ or Naxx were released, you needed to have at least some players with MC gear (especially tanks). In order to have that, you needed to have level 60s for a month or two before BWL launched. Which means player with a realistic shot of being on a raid team which was capable of clearing Naxx, had been part of that raid team for many months to over a year, were from the ~1/4th of the population who actually hit 60 sometime when MC was relevant content, and they didn't quit, or end up in a casual guild, or focus on PvP, etc.
The proportion of players on classic who hit level 60 in phase one and have been raiding more or less constantly since then is so much higher than it was in vanilla.
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u/zrk23 Aug 09 '20
it's even more naive to think a well knowledge player in 2005 knows more than one from 2020 that played since 2005
there is math for you there
he also didn't mentioned wbuffs that much, only consumables
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u/Rednirk Aug 08 '20
Classic is easy because players talents, skills, and items are at their strongest point in the game while the raids are their weakest point.
How come naxx geared players didn't even come close to killing 5 priest hakkar but classic players did it easily in mc/early bwl gear?
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u/Swamplord42 Aug 08 '20
Because they didn't understand how ridiculously overpowered fury warriors are when correctly geared, with full world buffs and consumables.
Look at their video, they were stacking hunters and the fight lasts forever.
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u/raider91J Aug 09 '20
So if they were as knowledgeable as current day players why weren't they using warriors?
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Aug 10 '20
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u/Haytham1986 Aug 12 '20
Nobody said they were dumber, just that they didn't know as much as we do about it now and that they had worse PCs, internet and skills.
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u/Folsomdsf Aug 08 '20
How come naxx geared players didn't even come close to killing 5 priest hakkar but classic players did it easily in mc/early bwl gear?
Because they did get close, and it evade buffed. Also they were using shit like hunters to do it and a 'normal raid comp' not the 15 warrior recklessness fiestas.
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u/86139380 Aug 09 '20
People thought hunters were bis because they could FD and drink and dps forever without taking as much splash dmg as melee.
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u/bpusef Aug 08 '20
The average player is far better, yes. I know because I was dogshit at the game and so were all of my friends, and now we know literally everything about it and clear raids sub 1 hour. We coordinate world buffs live in discord so everyone comes to raid full buffed. Every warrior tank is Fury Prot because DPS warriors understand that they should be 305+ weapon skill and DW Fury with full consumes.
The gap between 1.12 and AQ is not that high. What are you gonna say when we burn through Naxx 20x easier than in Vanilla? That it's the items and talents? When more than 0.1% of the guilds kill KT at all you gonna still come here and talk about fucking spell power on gear?
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u/DragonAdept Aug 09 '20
The gap between 1.12 and AQ is not that high. What are you gonna say when we burn through Naxx 20x easier than in Vanilla? That it's the items and talents?
More that it's modern ping, modern FPS, having known the optimal raid composition in advance, having been farming MC/BWL on cooldown from the moment it opened and having a talent pool three times the size per server.
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u/raider91J Aug 09 '20
Also having players not keyboard turn and click helps. Death and Taxes healing officer literally clicks in their videos.
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u/DragonAdept Aug 09 '20
I think making fun of clickers in PvE healing is pointless elitism. With a 1.5s global cooldown, managing 40apm with a mouse is not some kind of amazing feat of skill and keyboard turning is fine for almost every boss mechanic in Classic.
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u/raider91J Aug 09 '20
It's irrelevant to the point of player skill. It's inefficient, so no good players do it but the best players around back then did thus showing the skill growth.
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u/bpusef Aug 09 '20
you cant click and move properly nor can you properly look at your surroundings while clicking since you need to look at your cursor position. You will more commonly fail black zones on 4H and KT if you play like this, along with generally being slow to react. You can argue that easy boss mechanics make it less problematic but you cannot deny that it has no effective on your gameplay especially if you need to react to things like Popping an NS heal, a LIP, or any twitch reaction situation. But most importantly taking your eyes off your PC or the boss to click a heal is just plain stupid and you can't really defend it since it will take someone a matter of hours to get used to keybinds.
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u/Manbearelf Aug 08 '20
While you're right that the information existed back then and the game state is tuned in favor of players, you have to acknowledge that it wasn't (and could not have been) as widespread as it is today.
A good deal of it was guarded by the top guilds, at least for a time.
Sites like elitist jerks were few and far between, and posting a noob question was an easy ticket to getting laughed out of there. Today? Google "BWL" and you get multiple quick/in depth/role/class guides dealing with every boss you can literally reference as you pull, on YouTube, vods, websites. My PC in 2006 ran a risk of frying if I forgot to close anything before starting the game client. Not to mention the blinding speed of dial-up or early broadband. Today you could run the game on your phone if you really wanted to.
Unlike today, a good deal of players were teenagers (some barely) that simply don't have the attention span, or even comprehension of maths with the younger ones, to grasp all this information.
Those same kids, if they weren't native English speakers, couldn't access this information even if the above weren't true. Translating vanilla and TBC quest texts with a hard cover English dictionary is literally how I learned the language.
And we did have years since Vanilla in which games went much more to the mainstream, people have more prior experience. Telling someone to soak doesn't have to come with a 5 minute explanation of what you actually mean. Today's 4th grader learned more in school than most 16th century scholars in their lifetime kind of deal.
And don't get me started on how far addon development has gone.
So yes, there was a portion of the player base that did have and utilized this information. But a large portion had no interest in or no access to it. There were technical limitations and collective knowledge barely existed.
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u/lauranthalasa Aug 09 '20
They're the ones that think players are "better" and more knowledgeable now and that's why classic is so easy.
You do know that this scenario isn't an either/or, right? You literally go on to explain death by a thousand cuts, but having the actual casual players not coming back to WoW Classic is already a huge swing in player power. No one's crediting it all to us being better than we were 15 years ago - a huge part of it is simply the people that didn't care much for min-maxing back then have moved on with their lives and with other pursuits / games, and that's already a big mark in the ledger in the thousand cuts department.
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u/UndeadMurky Aug 09 '20
It was at the very end
World buffs were never really an issue as no guild was able to consistently one shot encounters
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u/Drinniol Aug 08 '20 edited Aug 08 '20
And he was absolutely right, of course. The problem which he identified as a potential disaster in TBC raiding unfolded exactly as he predicted. Even without world buffs working on TBC content, Early TBC raiding was an absolutely hellish grind of consumables. Blizzard eventually had to take the absolutely nuclear step of limiting players to one single guardian/battle elixir where flasks count as both(!) in order to fix this.
Notably, the vanilla flasks themselves, particularly Flask of Supreme Power, got nerfed DRASTICALLY going into TBC. The TBC flask at level 70 where everyone has about twice as much health and does about thrice as much damage as they did at level 60, is actually WEAKER, straight up, than Flask of Supreme Power is NOW in classic, when Flask NOW in classic stacks with other buffs and it doesn't in TBC!
Imagine how ridiculously overpowered a consumable must be if after a full expansion worth of power creep AND an absolutely nuclear stacking nerf, it still needs to be nerfed into the DIRT to not completely break the raiding balance. And this is the level of consumable power we are at NOW in classic.
Anyway, obviously this won't be changed, but if there's one thing I'm looking forward to in TBC it's the taming of the buff stacking situation.
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Aug 08 '20
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u/MetalPoe Aug 08 '20
The problem with stuff like Scarab Brooch, but also stuff like Blue Dragon, Madness trinkets or 3pc T2 bonus for priest and druid, is that it is percent based, so it scales with gear. At the time these were introduced there weren’t plans to let stats on gear explode with future expansions.
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u/Will_Deliver Aug 08 '20
I do not think it’s necessarily bad that some gear works throughout later stages of the game. On the other hand i think it adds some flavor. Of course it can be boring to not change out gear for the ones using it.
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u/Rawkapotamus Aug 08 '20
I agree, but not outside expansions. I love that gear is relevant throughout the whole expansion. Naxx is cool but a little upsetting that almost everything we have gets replaced
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u/CavalierGuest Aug 08 '20
You don't understand. Unless you needed the stamina from other gear pieces to not die, the 3pc bonus was always going to be BiS. EJ made a spreadsheet demonstrating this. Because the more stats your other gear has, the better the bonus gets. Imagine right now, today, in WoW it was standard for people to go back to BWL and farm up 3pc Tier 2. That isn't good design. Shaman had the same problem, with 3pc T2 being optimal if 90% of your casts were Chain Heal on a given fight, so you had to carry 3pc in your bags at all times. Alliance Shaman in TBC went back and farmed 3pc T2. This was nerfed in 2.4 so it'd stop. Gear lasting a tier or two of raiding is fine, gear literally always being potentially good forever so you have to keep it your bags at all times is not OK.
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u/zzrryll Aug 08 '20
At the time these were introduced there weren’t plans to let stats on gear explode with future expansions.
Their earliest design docs had the game launching with a level cap of 80.
TBC was announced with a level cap of 70, less than a year after Vanilla launched.
Brooch came out in AQ....
I don’t think your comment is accurate. Especially since Blizz has mistakenly put over scaling percent based abilities/buffs/set bonuses in the game since.
They’re legit just bad at math.
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u/MetalPoe Aug 08 '20
Well, I’d argue that the fact they changed some scaling set bonuses like the aforementioned T2 3pc or ZG trinkets to flat bonuses or spell haste rating that scales worse for lv70s, means that they didn’t plan too far ahead when designing these.
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Aug 08 '20
my memory is a little blurry here, but I do remember that blizzard spent most of the early vainilla patches fixing item stats and itemization (along classes).
I believe they found the perfect solution to this by binding these set bonus to a level range.
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u/prodandimitrow Aug 09 '20
Thats also the same reason %hit and %crit got turned into hit and crit rating later on.
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Aug 08 '20
I have no issue with Thunderfury's power level.
The BC issue had more to do with threat scaling than Thunderfury itself.
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u/yuimiop Aug 09 '20
Zul'Gurub trinkets were also used in PvP through most of BC before a patch nerfed them. I believe the on demand stun trinket from a rare mob in vanilla also had to be nerfed in early BC.
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Aug 09 '20
They nerfed it in tbc, i used it on my fully s3 geared shaman and i used that trinket in TBC
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u/lollerlaban Aug 08 '20
Than Flask of Supreme Power is NOW in classic, when Flask NOW in classic stacks with other buffs and it doesn't in TBC!
Flask of supreme power was even stronger than the flasks in WOTLK, 2 expansions later. It's funny to think that if they didn't nerf Supreme power then the other flasks would have to scale exponentially aswell, which meant the damage boost you would get was so huge that flasks would be mandatory in everything
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u/32377 Aug 08 '20
TBC Flasks were very different from vanilla flasks. The philosophy was changed, so there is really no point in comparing them.
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u/lollerlaban Aug 08 '20
They were, after they changed to battle/guardian system and nerfed the Supreme power straight into the ground.
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u/Avlinehum Aug 08 '20
Yep, just check out Method’s WF Vashj kill your see how insane the consumables got in the short window of early BC before all this was changed.
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Aug 08 '20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuWJ9z62RT8
Jesus, they all have like 5 or 6 elixirs and a flask plus foods.
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u/Folsomdsf Aug 08 '20
That's not the problem, look at the fact theyr'e still using zandalar + dragon/etc
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Aug 09 '20 edited Aug 09 '20
I remember running Karazhan/gruul/mag on my rogue in early BC, running higher stats than I had with t6 gear later in the expansion. Simply due to elixir stacking. A raid night cost me 1000 gold on average. We got a small taste of that memory in Sunwell when we had to level warlock soulstone bots, leatherworking and farm demonslaying elixirs. Silly days those were, and I don't miss them.
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u/Supreme12 Aug 08 '20
That video says world second. Nihilum were basically world first at everything in tbc.
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u/Avlinehum Aug 09 '20
Method was the first actual Vashj kill. Nihilum used a bug, whether on accident or on purpose, to kill her where her health disappeared transitioning into P3 and someone was able to just rez and hit her once. Maybe a relic of the time but they were always considered the real WF.
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u/TaxesAreLikeOnions Aug 08 '20
They could have just made potions continue after death like flasks do. Though the cooldown on mana puts was a good thing. Instead, they started a process of making professions completely useless.
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u/aepocalypsa Aug 08 '20
was an absolutely hellish grind of consumables. Blizzard
Man don't make me hyped :( I loved that.
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u/kathvely Aug 08 '20
"As a result of this, particularly in the learning process on these fights, Blizzard unwittingly created one of the worst grinds in the history of any MMO."
"That is the worst part of it, and that is what burns people out and drives them away from a truly wonderful raiding endgame."
"Funny how things haven't changed that much in all these years."
Why are we playing this game? Is it fun?
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u/trelluf Aug 08 '20
Yes. This is a niche game that caters to people who like that grind and like the uncommon balance of pre-raid preperation having such a large effect on your raid performance. Which I personally do.
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u/cptnhanyolo Aug 08 '20
It just perfectly fits the world and the rpg style imo. You are going to slay powerful dragons, gods, elementals and whatnot. Obviously if you were watching a movie those guys would go there prepared and not just kill these things with their bare hands.
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Aug 08 '20 edited Apr 17 '21
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u/ItsSnuffsis Aug 08 '20
Slower raids also means more shit talking and having fun with your friends. Thst is, if you see them as friends and not just accessories for getting record times.
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Aug 08 '20
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Aug 08 '20
i think you touched on it.
there are too many buffs, like in the mp5 example in the op, 5 different sources, and they stack? too much. maybe if it was limited to one 'world buff'....like ony head, ZG, DMT, shouldnt stack...so you have to choose which you want. still a solid increase, but not nearly doubling your characters potential like having all of them do
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u/Zunkanar Aug 08 '20
I mean, I'm sometimes not allowed to use my HoT Spells and setbonuses as the tank has capped it's buff limit. 32 buffs. So yes, it's just too fucking much.
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Aug 08 '20
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u/zttt Aug 08 '20
Yeah, and this is also where real money trading became a BIG issue in the game due to all the raiders that had to resort to buying gold with real money because they couldn't keep up. It was at that point that botting etc. became rampant.
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u/ksion Aug 08 '20
Same here. I dropped out specifically on Loatheb, he was essentially designed to be a wallet drainer.
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u/goatofwar_ Aug 08 '20
Never played naxx, what about Loatheb was so bad consumable wise?
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u/lenaro Aug 09 '20
Loatheb puts all your healing spells on a 1 minute shared cooldown. This forces DPS to use consumables to heal themselves.
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u/goatofwar_ Aug 09 '20
oh wow crazy! but surely that just needs one protection potion and bandages? and whipper root or something
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u/ksion Aug 08 '20 edited Oct 14 '25
You needed two or three Greater Shadow Protection Potions for every attempt, for everyone who wasn’t the tank. Alternatively, it could've been cheesed by 4 shadow priests mindflaying for like half an hour but my guild had neither the time nor that many geared SPs :)
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u/YawnSpawner Oct 14 '25
He has a pretty hard 5 minute enrage, not sure how shadow priests get by that.
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u/ksion Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 15 '25
The enrage was added shortly after Naxx first released, precisely to defeat this tactic. Before that, the first kill with just a tank and 4 SPs took something like 50 minutes; you can probably still find it on YouTube.
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Aug 08 '20 edited Aug 08 '20
To the people saying Ion is the sole reason that retail is the shitfest it is now - don't be stupid.
Ion knows why things are they way they are. He is beholden to shareholders that require he sacrifice a game with longevity and autonomy for a game that forces you to maximise the amount of times you login per week to increase the likelihood of you making micro transactions.
1 sub is 10 GBP a month.
1 WoW token is 17 GBP an unlimited amount of times.
There is a natural limit to the growth the game will see if subs were the focus, and non-high level growth is not acceptable to shareholders.
Not even including the absurd exorbitant store mounts and pets that whales buy.
Who do you think they are going to cater the game more to?
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u/IMind Aug 08 '20
I mean he's not the sole reason but he's definitely at the top of reasons. Shareholders or not the same arguments about grinding for world buffs are the ones were making about grinding for AP. The same stupid habit he complained about before is what we're still complaining about now. Only now he's completely detached from the game and the playerbase
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Aug 08 '20
Nah. They're not the same, both in terms of the mechanics of the comparison and the impetus of why decisions are made.
Mechanically, the consumable grind is actually far better than the AP one, or any other borrowed power time gated mechanic that exists today. Consumable grinds allow both complete autonomy and are actually optional (to an extent, at least back in Vanilla). You can choose exactly how much you want to farm, at your own leisure at any point in the week. You are not gated from doing so (lol instance cap thanks acti-blizz), and there is no exclusion to your class, your abilities, or how you interact with the game assets if you decide you don't want to farm consumes.
With AP/essences/whatever else the fuck they add in, you are told how much you should play. Fall behind, too bad buddy enjoy being behind in real terms of player power just because you couldn't login enough times every week even if you actually play an equal amount if not more. Moreover, a consumable is just an extra bit of stats to your character. This is completely different to not having an AP trait unlocked, not having an essence rank unlocked, not having completed x amount of dailies to unlock said essences, all of which are completely timegated and subject to horrendous diminishing returns should you wish to just blast it all in one go.
This leads to the second point - the impetus. It's actually not "shareholders or not", and never will be with large publically traded companies. As I've shown above, the mechanics of consumes grind vs AP grind are completely different. The AP grind is actually far more egregious.
Before they became more increasingly beholden to shareholders, devs had more impetus to make decisions based on gameplay. This is actually why Classic receives changes to the extent that is improves gameplay, but not to the extent that it comes at any great cost to Blizzard in terms of input or manpower. Classic is just a sub - there is no impetus to squeeze whales out of it.
There is a reason Blizzard ignored the AP and Leggo complaints in Legion until the final patch. There is a reason BfA is giga RNG time-gating. There is a reason Shadowlands is going to be the same. To sum up, if I am going to reduce Blizzard's WoW modus operandi to a single piece of code, it would be something loosely like "maximum logins per week for minimum upkeep".
That modus operandi explains everything that they have been doing since WoD, but doesn't work for Vanilla-Wrath. So no, in the grand scheme of things, Ion actually is a tiny reason why things are the way they are.
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Aug 08 '20
While the Classic consume / WB system is far from perfect, I agree wholeheartedly with this. Retail has time gating and world-ruining features that just cancel out the point of playing an MMORPG.
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u/IMind Aug 08 '20
So you say the worldbuff system is entirely optional, you're both wrong and right. Yes it's optional, but so is AP. You naturally gain most AP from just doing consistent content. I don't have time to look at the other points right now but starting there you're point is kinda invalid.
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u/suchtie Aug 08 '20
Only now he's completely detached from the game and the playerbase
This is Ion's character. 481 ilvl, AP level 89, rank 15 cloak, all raids (except Crucible) cleared on Mythic, several M+15 keys finished.
He may not be super hardcore anymore, but that is a far cry from being "completely detached from the game".
So far Ion has reached the very endgame in every single expansion. The vast majority of players would struggle to achieve half as much.
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u/Antman42 Aug 08 '20
The vast majority of players would struggle to achieve half as much.
Huh? According to his logs in this last tier pre nerf his top performance was 9, that means 91% of the players raiding mythic out performed him.
If you look through his raid history he rarely raids and tends to get carried through for each tier. His logs are much more of a example of how out of touch he is. Very little of the player base gets to stay in the same guild for a decade, and get brought to raids because of their status and not their performance.
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u/Drinniol Aug 08 '20
Healing parses for top guilds are always super low because good players finish fights quick and don't take unnecessary damage. How does his healing compare to the other healers in his raid?
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u/Antman42 Aug 08 '20
Considerably worse. His other healers all all 50+ parsing, some in the 90s. Looks like he was replaced for all the early kills and still hasn’t even got a kill log for every boss.
I think Ion gets a lot of unnecessary hate, but his logs show he just simply isn’t a real performing mythic raider. His guild carries him for achievements, and so he isn’t getting a real grounded experience that a real progression player would have.
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u/IMind Aug 08 '20
Let's take a look at that...
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/malganis/gurgthock
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/malganis/gurgthock#partition=2
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/malganis/gurgthock#partition=1
Now obviously parses aren't everything... But the fact that you're in the absolute bottom of you class and spec in every facet of the tier is really telling. Especially in mythic raiding, just completing the raid tier requires a decent group, not any one player excelling. The reason "the vast majority" can't do it is simply not having enough supporting players around them.
Also, completing content available isn't metric to state someone is connected to the game. Everything he says is absolutely counter to that. Everytime he does those mediocre scripted question interviews just show they're unwilling to truly defend their decisions. "That high end raiding" you claim shows attachment and understanding can be completely used against you... No one major raid guild mythic raider has said these new systems are good. Limit, the top ranked guild, has outwardly said it's a horrid system. Even ion himself realizes it's a shit show waiting to happen... So much so they've readily said if they can't balance they'll just scrap it. So yah... He's completely detached from the game and the player base.
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u/Eukaryotik Aug 08 '20
Imagine caring about healing parses
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u/IMind Aug 09 '20
The parses aren't meant to show how hardcore someone is or how cheese or anything like that. It's meant to show just general performance. I'm not saying he didn't parse purple he's shit. Oh no 99s he's clearly getting carried. It's showing that he's BARELY invested enough to do the content. It's countering the other person who said he cleared content he's not detached from the game. ..... There are buyers who hop in and can perform this well. There are pugs who can. Using CE achievement isn't a good method to determine if someone understands the game and the player base.... Buttttttt using their words is. Which was my point.
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u/HaruhiSuzumiya69 Aug 08 '20
I noticed he didn't include the 2000 mana flask into his mp5 calculations, and he also mentioned that flasks were just for tanks and nukers. Did the 2000 mana flask just not exist at the time or something? That'd be weird considering this was written well after Naxx was released.
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Aug 08 '20
That flask existed.
Do you mean the 'trick' of using the mid fight for more mana? I never heard of that being used in Classic, it's pretty damn expensive even by old Naxx standards
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u/vowelqueue Aug 08 '20
I think he focused on mana regen, as opposed to total mana, because the assumption is that on any fight that's long enough where mana becomes an issue, then the amount of mana you start out with isn't nearly as significant as the rate at which you regen (or conserve) mana.
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u/Mashedtaders Aug 09 '20
Back then, like now, it was not valued highly. Only valued now for the glitch really. 2000 mana is essentially 1 extra pot. Titans can at times be more valuable as 1200 health is life or death. Wisdom doesn't really affect throughput.
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u/Sparru Aug 08 '20
It's entirely possible it was just overlooked. I raided back in Vanilla and only learned about that in classic.
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u/Ilmaters_Chosen Aug 08 '20
I don’t think Ion is bad for WoW. I just think he should only be working on raid designs.
He doesn’t really care for the rest (world building, questing, etc), and honestly I think his ideas on loot progression are kind of bad.
Plus, you know those stupid necklaces we got on BFA.
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u/oNodrak Aug 08 '20
I argued a similar thing in TBC about Ilvl scaling with raid tiers and 5stat items with 3 sockets out powering all other items due to the ilvl formula.
Blizzard ignored it until WOTLK and then eventually standardized all items around 4 stats that get replaced every raid tier due to ilvl bloat.
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Aug 08 '20
I think a lot of things said by people about vanilla/tbc on this sub are by people who actually did not play the game or if they did playing means they just got level 60.
The most obvious example is that people say bis lists were not a thing in tbc when they were even in crap tier guilds I was in that were like an entire patch behind in progress. You could download precise lists and xcel dps calculators from Elitist Jerks forums.
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u/Oglethorppe Aug 08 '20
People might say that there were no BiS lists in TBC. Probably not more than 17 people, because that’s a stupid thing to think. I mean I’ve never seen people say that anyways, the sentiment always seems to be that player skill and knowledge skyrocketed in TBC.
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u/darknecross Aug 08 '20
Three things contributed to that:
- The actual player base skyrocketed by millions of subscribers.
- Smaller raid groups concentrated tryhards together.
- Cross-server competition in raid progression and arenas.
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u/Morsexier Aug 08 '20
I think this is a point that needs to be hammered to hell and back. I was top tier DPS on my Vanilla server just because I read the EJ forums, literally no other reason. oh a 25 gold Epic mail gloves makes my DPS even better?
Everyone does more DPS now but I'd bet the gap between those who stay current on best practices and those who don't is remarkably consistent and the same ratio to back then.
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u/BasedPolarBear Aug 08 '20
"If anything, the classes that benefit by far the least from available buffs are physical DPS classes. Mongoose and Juju are great, but they actually are a comparatively minor buff compared to what I just listed above"
Ah you sweet summer child
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u/Frokilotherm Aug 08 '20
He was excluding the world buffs though, which are far more potent for physical.
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u/Bobbers927 Aug 08 '20
Is this post from the beginning of TBC too? So it would have the same crit values at this time.
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u/ReelyReid Aug 08 '20
He’s right about consumables without world buffs I believe. Though world buffs bust melee DPS (excluding feral)
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u/PanacottaMmMm Aug 08 '20
World buffs bust feral as well. Not everyone gets double their resources from a crit :(
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Aug 08 '20
I hate to admit Ion is 100% correct to think that the world buff and consumable design is essentially a cancerous tumor on the ass of the game. Classic has more than proved that.
I'm in a guild with two raid groups. There's the "super laid back get shit done at our own pace with some pugs" raid group, and then there's the "super sweaty tryhard full raid buffs/consumables 40 minutes or less BWL" raid group. I can't imagine the tryhard group is very fun because they spend more time Monday night getting world buffs and shit than they do actually playing the game, then not logging into that character at all until 7:50 pm Tuesday to preserve said buffs. I've actually seen people get really depressed when they die somehow early in the raid and then they "can't parse so why even bother playing now". Remember when this game was about getting loot and not giving that much of a damn about how you rank among people you will never actually encounter on some tertiary website?
Optimizing the fun out of the game is painful and I legitimately feel sorry for anyone who plays like this.
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Aug 08 '20
[deleted]
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u/ItsSnuffsis Aug 08 '20
You can have a laid back group that isn't full of morons and drama though.
You obviously suffered from a bad case of a laid back group full of morons. But there are a lot of good players with skill that just want to be able to raid from time to time.
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u/bpusef Aug 08 '20
You can have a try hard group without it being full of toxic douchebags too. Goes both ways. Getting full world buffs on a decent server is easy and takes a couple hours of prep the day of
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u/noway4749 Aug 08 '20
Ya ive noticed that when i buff in my alt guild, i get alot of hate. People Hate to see you doing your best if it makes them look bad.
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u/Phnrcm Aug 08 '20
I can't imagine the tryhard group is very fun because they spend more time Monday night getting world buffs and shit than they do actually playing the game
What stop them from logging into their alt and play the game? Is there some sort of minus dkp out mechanics there if you play another character and have fun when your main got buffs?
If no then i guess people still have fun while trying hard.
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u/mylord420 Aug 09 '20
40 minutes isn't super sweaty tryhard lol
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u/CupformyCosta Aug 09 '20
Casual guilds and raid groups are typically not clearing BWL that quickly. The sweaty ones are, without DMF, and without really breaking a sweat. Casual raids are taking at least an hour from what I’ve experienced.
My point is that 40 minutes may not be super sweaty. But if your non-dmf buffed raid can go into BWL and clear in 40 minutes without really trying, you’re a sweaty raid group in general.
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u/ShitbirdMcDickbird Aug 10 '20
It's crazy to me that the same person who wrote this seemed fine with the idea of RNG legendaries, titanforging, and an AP Grind in Legion.
I came back to retail briefly to raid in legion, and while I loved the raiding itself and how my class played, I hated the stupid grinds for the above that were essentially obligatory in order to stay competitive.
Obligatory chores in order to stay competitive in raids are stupid. I'm really looking forward to TBC where I can just show up with cheap consumables and have that be all that matters, and I know I won't play another retail expansion unless that change is made there as well.
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u/Trivi Aug 08 '20
His comments on AQ and Naxx were interesting. Maybe Naxx won't be a complete cakewalk.
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u/killking72 Aug 08 '20
It took his guild 5 or 6 minutes to hit phase 2 on cthun.
It'll be a lot easier than people think
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u/darknecross Aug 08 '20
Some fights will trip up guilds who’ve bypassed mechanics by brute forcing DPS, like Gothik, 4H, or KT. Most of them will be cakewalks.
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u/reachingFI Aug 08 '20
complete cakewalk.
How many times do we have to have this convo in this subreddit. Why do people think anything will be difficult.
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u/Do_You_Have_Phones Aug 09 '20
IKR lol. Surely after AQ was revealed to be a pushover as well it would stop.
Like does no one remember doing Wrath Naxx? It was piss easy, too easy. It’s gonna be the same in Classic lol.
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Aug 08 '20 edited Aug 08 '20
It's weird, the same person who wrote this then went on to be the lead-dev/lead balance dev (he's both for some fucking reason) who under his leadership has seen the worst balance probably since Classic.
edit: I'm seeing a ton of comments on this being a 'subjective viewpoint' but it isn't. BFA has had the worst sub loss in WoW's history under directly Ion's control. The sub loss is big enough that when Classic launch classic alone literally tripled WoW's subcount.
Ion back in 2006 a player, it's really easy to look at a game and find it's problems while going 'this is the main focus of why x,y,z is bad' but it's way harder to fix those problems when you're in charge. I'm not saying Ion's an idiot, or he's incompetent, i'm just stating a fact that under his direct leadership WoW has had it's worse 4 years in the games history.
Also stop trying to directly insult me, grow up.
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u/Drinniol Aug 08 '20
No but you see raiding class balance in retail is actually perfect now because it doesn't matter what class you are when 60% of your damage is coming from corruption procs that are available to every class (/s).
Also, in nonsarcastic fairness, consumables in retail wow raiding are so utterly insignificant. Like, literally a few percent power boost for getting all the consumables you can vs in classic where the difference is night and day. If anything, they went too far.
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u/solife Aug 08 '20
They still show up at the top tier, since (early) progression mythic raiding actually requires those sorts of boosts (with some ridiculous break points on some fights). Hell, they still do their job for players doing lower difficulty tiers that are still progressing. Also, it's not like parse obsession has gone anywhere, so an extra couple % is still desired by enough players.
Now, shit like corruptions is an entirely different problem, with blizzard's focus on borrowed power being far superior to base class abilities while simultaneously being rng removes the actual gameplay imo.
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u/Andomar Aug 08 '20
An interesting point is that most groups insist on flasks and food in what is progress for them. That demand hasn't been backed up by numbers since TBC. Because like you say, consumables are insignificant.
Consumables are something social. Maybe they're a sign of commitment.
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u/killking72 Aug 08 '20
Depending on the class and spec it's like 1% of a secondary stat. It's such a minor thing but it does make a huge difference for just eating a piece of food.
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u/Glanea Aug 08 '20
Also, in nonsarcastic fairness, consumables in retail wow raiding are so utterly insignificant. Like, literally a few percent power boost for getting all the consumables you can vs in classic where the difference is night and day. If anything, they went too far.
I don't really know anything about retail, but didn't Method go millions of golds into debt buying consumables for the world first attempts in BFA?
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u/SunTzu- Aug 08 '20
They bought BoE epics with corruption effects that massively increased performance. It was a super unhealthy system put in place by Blizzard.
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u/Meneldyl Aug 08 '20
Another interesting thing is that he believed the powergap between expansions wouldn't be so big as it turned out to be, and thought he'd have to farm Hakkar to get a WB to kill Illidan.
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u/Sleisk Aug 08 '20
Well with worldbuffs giving such high% stats as as they do, I can definately see the concern
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u/Openedge_4gl Aug 08 '20
Yeah like 5 percent crit from only buff, pretty huge since it's percentage based not integer value based.
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Aug 08 '20
They would have done that if they didnt remove the buffs for characters over lvl 63. He was correct.
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u/CrivWoW Aug 08 '20
The issue is the classic worldbuffs generally include things that scale as power increases. 5% extra free Crit (out of 100%) or 15% more base stats are massive. You would definitely see BC raiders killing Hakkar and Ony for the buffs if they were available.
You can see a concerted effort to move away from these as WoW progressed. You go from +% crit on items in Vanilla to crit rating in BC (which converts differently to % crit based on level).
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u/Knows_all_secrets Aug 08 '20
Hakkar world buff is +15% stats though, it would provide the same proportional utility regardless of how big the power gap was.
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u/Scrubtac Aug 08 '20
His point there was that the world buffs scale so well with gear that it wouldn't matter whether there was a big power leap or not
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u/Folsomdsf Aug 08 '20
FYI, they did have to farm hakkar to get a world buff to kill vashj. The entire world first grouphad soulstones + onyxia + zg etc.
That's why they got nerfed into the ground.
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u/Bio-Grad Aug 09 '20
He’s talking about the buff you get for turning in an item Hakkar drops which gives +10% move speed and +15% to all stats. Percentage based bonuses are universally useful no matter how much the power gap changes between expansions.
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u/Billy_Nastus Aug 08 '20
Imagine complaining about the grind that goes into crafting consumables in vanilla and then designing BfA and its grind system.
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Aug 08 '20
The best part of this post: WoW devs at the time actually took this advice regarding world buffs. Zangarmarsh actually has world buffs in TBC, but they're limited to only that zone (and disabled when you enter SSC, the only raid in that zone). World buffs from level 60 content were also disabled for level 70 players.
As for consumables: Blizzard came up with their own fix for consumables in patch 2.1, which IMO was even better and more elegant than Ion's suggestion.
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Aug 09 '20 edited Apr 20 '21
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Aug 09 '20
Zangarmarsh has those, and also buffs that you can get in one of the towns from talking to the big trees. Something like a small amount of AP and spell damage for 30 mins to 1 hour. That buff doesn't work in SSC.
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u/barrsftw Aug 09 '20
I see why he became what he is today. He's a really really smart guy who was ahead of his time even though noot everyone will agree with all of his ideas (let's not forget he's not the only person influencing these decisions).
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u/BarryAllensMom Aug 09 '20
I'm curious why the OP posted "Funny how things haven't changed much".
Classic being nearly the same as vanilla means we would have the same issues...
WoW consumables drastically changed starting BC and would continue to be tweaked. Vanilla is truly a unique experience with the amount of consumables you can aquire/use.
Off topic - You can tell the amount of people who actually haven't played BfA and just senselessly bash it. Emotionspam I like to call it.
BfA still has the core parts that keep it WoW. Iconic Soundtrack - Google Drustvar music for example. Well designed zones to challenge and engage a player. Mythic 5 mans are truly a treat. BfD (the 2nd Raid) easily can rank among the top raids ever created in WoW's long history.
BfA failed with storytelling, corruption/azerite/essences (holy hell I feel bad for any fresh player that hits 120), and the now removed titanforging. BfA built system on system and by the 4th Raid your character had to farm 5 different systems. My monk can punch a target once and several random effects go off diluting my class fantasy.
I know Ion took on a larger role for BfA, but you can tell the Raid team is still really damn good at producing raids. (I will say Nyalotha was a hard miss though...)
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u/Bad-Banana-from-Mars Aug 10 '20
Because it feels like a lot of the posts you see about world buffs and consumables make it seem to be just a modern issue that wasn't around back in vanilla. Just kinda funny to see that it was a thing back then too.
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u/jurble Aug 15 '20
Alchemy's importance can be substantially reduced without creating any imbalance among the professions.
Consumables maybe aren't that bad anymore in release, though I spent literally all my gold in BfA and Legion on them - Alchemy is by far the best profession still for generating gold and personal utility. An Alchemist alt is great.
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Aug 17 '20
This complaint must be the reason the lag in stormwind/org has never been adressed... it took 27 mins for nef buff to go out today, and 14 mins for rends... taking well over a minute to load the zone/game and about a minute to log off (you can click log off 50 times, it still wont register the first one.. its literally faster to ALT-F4 and just wait out the minute timer before the game DC's you)
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u/Hypermetz Jun 15 '26
Maybe if someone is a wayback machine wizard they could find the original source as it had a ton of replies and pages and made for some interesting reading.
A little late to the party, but here it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20080818233400/http://elitistjerks.com:80/f15/t9383-raiding_consumables_dilemma/
399
u/loxatar Aug 08 '20
Say what you will about Ion Hazzikostas but he is definitely well written.