World buffs have the double edged sword in vanilla of being fun to collect and keeping the open world relevant and always active, but also completely trivializing raids that are already easy.
The best of both worlds would be to rework them so the raids are balanced around having them (either nerf them or buff the raids so world buffs don’t completely obliterate everything), persist through death, and the chronoboon is in from the start so they can be used as a consumable.
Now the 0.01% of speed runners probably would not prefer this change, but for the majority this would maintain the positive aspects of world buffs without facilitating a meta around turning every already easy raid into a glorified target dummy.
Can you discuss more on the benefits of keeping world buffs in the game? Fun to collect aspect and keeping the open world relevant is lost on me. We stood in our capital for a world buff and farmed dire maul every week. Balancing a raid around them will only justify requiring them to be done every week.
its called the chronoboon u buy it from chromie in western plaguelands. there should however be an incentive to raiding with and without world buffs so guilds can choose their playstyle
World buffs are so strong that it’s impossible to balance the game around them.
They also benefit melee far more than they benefit casters, which leads to severe imbalances in raid compositions. In particular, pets/DoTs/HoTs gain nothing from world buffs, which makes hunters/warlocks/druids worthless when world buffs are part of the meta.
World buffs can never be allowed in raids if the game is going to evolve.
This is why they need to be nerfed. Fundamentally they are a fun idea and make the WORLD of warcraft active, the problem is implementation. If they worked like regular consumables instead of mega buffs they’d be fine.
They would never be fine because they 1) have a set duration, and 2) they disappear on death.
Either you balance the game around them and then raiding becomes more hardcore than it has ever been at any point in WoW, or you don’t and then they trivialize the content.
World buffs will live forever on classic era. That’s where you go if you want to re-live the world buff days. They don’t work in seasons with changes though.
Not really. The fact that they keep the world vitalized and relevant is part of what makes classic special. That it’s a full fleshed mmo where the world matters. You take out world buffs, the world and old content matters considerably less.
There is nothing wrong with world buffs as a concept. The problem is they are stupid OP and trivialize content, and you are forced to raid log with them.
Nope, not really. For one, as long as content is at a minimum completable without them casual guilds won’t require them, or at a minimum only the easiest ones to get (those same guilds that don’t require flasks and food buffs will still exist plentifully).
I presume you claim it would make raiding too “hardcore” because they are expensive (and that’s assuming you don’t get them yourself and just straight raid log). The high price is only a problem because of unchecked RMT. If we get classic+ or another season the answer is simple, have a zero tolerance policy on cheating and permanently ban the buyers.
You still need to farm consumables in the open world… the game is actually balanced around consumables. It’s not balanced around world buffs.
Nope, not really. For one, as long as content is at a minimum completable without them casual guilds won’t require them
If the game is balanced around NOT having buffs, then world buffs will always trivialize the content.
The only way to solve that is if you make the buffs so unimportant (1% damage or something negligible) that it barely matters… but then people won’t bother with them. No one is going to care if you kill them and take away their 1% damage buff. It’s not going to have the effect that you want it to have.
Just take a look at Blasted Lands buffs. +25 strength, can only be farmed in that zone. This is actually stronger than 1% damage. It’s more like 3% damage for a warrior raiding Molten Core. But this was not exactly a PvP hot spot in SoM. The buff just isn’t that important. People don’t care that much unless the buffs are so powerful that they literally break the game.
You can clear any content in every classic iteration of WoW with no consumables. Casual guilds often don’t even require flasks or food buffs and can still get content done eventually.
You are greatly underestimating the lengths sweaty players will go even when buffs are literally inconsequential (which I’m not advocating they go that far for world buffs). Think of the warlocks spending thousands of gold on dark runes for virtually no benefit in TBC. It made no difference to clearing any bosses, but people still bought it for that tiny increase in parse. If it’s an upgrade you sure bet people will take it.
Loatheb is not possible with no consumables and no world buffs. Twin Emps and Patchwerk are not possible without tank and healer consumables (DPS can probably get away without them).
It took my guild 22 wipes to kill C’thun in SoM. Other horde guilds were around the same amount.
If we needed to fully world buff before every attempt, that would require 22 full ZG clears + 22 Onyxia clears + 22 DMT clears + leveling 22 alts to level 60 and completing the Onyxia attunement to drop 22 Rend buffs.
That’s a hell of a lot more hours than it takes to kill any one boss in retail.
Realistically, we would have never actually killed C’thun if that were the case and raiding would just be inaccessible for us.