World Buffs reduce the difficulty of content for most players. Yes, someone needs to defeat the boss without world buffs first. But once it’s on farm, so basically a few hours of its released – given Blizzard doesn’t screw up tuning again – this “nerf” kicks in. The issue is that World Buffs do not persist through death, which causes fairly casual guilds to get stuck on bosses they may have cleared last week.
Losing a full tier’s worth of power is a massive loss. Because you are expected to come relatively prepared – world buff, some consumes – it’s a gigantic difficulty spike from these groups cannot recover from.
In addition, World Buffs are effectively mandatory for parse culture – which is a massive part of endgame raiding. Progression is done, now people want to get BiS and pump big numbers. If you pull threat and die, you literally just lost your chance to parse – is your guild going to let you grab another? Almost always not.
So, why are world buffs good again? Because they make you interact with the world? No, they just sorta pop up and you move on. 99.9% of the time, you just fly to Booty Bay, or your faction capital, and there it is! Boon’ing.
World Buffs:
- Ruin “parse culture”. (Compeititve players cannot compete without it, 1 death, done for the week.)
- Make raids harder for the casual crowd (wiping = harder raid)
- Don’t make the world bigger. (Passive RP yelling.)
You said preparation is what makes raiding in Classic good. I’d agree to an extent. The issue is when your prep work can be taken away in less than a GCD – that’s not good. The amount of times I hear “I lost my buffs, gg” when we have a hiccup is very high.
Turn in some tokens for an outdoor buff which doesn’t work inside the raid? Awesome.
Dungeon-specific buffs? Awesome.
World Buffs as they currently exist? Dumb.