For some guilds, the buff is the difference between progressing or not on certain bosses. Moving into AQ/Naxx, that will increasingly be the case as content becomes more difficult relative to people’s equipment level.
I have blue shoulders from Black Rock Depths which are basically good as Mantle of the Blackwing Cabal from BWL. Mantle of the Blackwing cabal are these best stand alone +spell power shoulders you can get during this phase of content (and they remain some of the highest +spell damage shoulders for casters into AQ40). Lack of progressive itemization really nerfed a lot of early content pretty significantly…that and updated talent trees that made people’s character’s significantly more powerful.
Guilds could still ‘speed clear’ content without world buffs. It’d obviously be slower. If everybody doesn’t have world buffs, the playing field is totally level sans the consumes people choose to bring. If the focus is beating your best prior time…you can trying doing that without world buffs. If the focus is competing with other guilds on a level playing field to see who runs the best comp/raid execution…that’s again achievable without raid buffs.
To answer your question about what world buffs would be useable for if not instances…
World buffs aren’t something that was designed to be used in order to clear raid content. The vanilla raid encounters (most of them) weren’t tuned on the assumption that most guilds would be rolling through them with world buffs from Diremaul North/Ony/Nef buff etc.
The world buffs were an extra ‘fun’ buff you got that temporarily made you more powerful. The truth is that many players used to just use world buffs out in the world…doing 5 mans…in a battleground… It didn’t really matter.
You are looking at world buffs through the lens of someone who analyzes the most optimal way to utilize an extremely powerful resource. Obviously, if most of your time in classic WoW is spent blowing through the existing raid content…then raid-logging until you blow through it again in 2-3 hours next Tuesday/Wednesday etc…then yeah… Dropping Onyxia/Nef head at any other time is ‘wasteful’.
The philosophical question the dev team is going to have to settle on is basically;
What did we envision the purpose of world buffs as being? Did we intend for them to be something players could use all the time in raids? Did we intend for them to be something players used occasionally on really difficult fights? How common was world buff stacking 15 years ago? Did we not address it because it wasn’t a design/balance issue or did we not address it because the practice wasn’t nearly as widespread? Is restricting world buffs going to hurt people’s enjoyment of the game? Is allowing world buffs to remain common place going to trivialize the game’s remaining content? Does the player base’s obsession with world buffs create behaviors that are undesirable/toxic?
There weren’t any significant ‘world buffs’ in WotLK; however certain zones (like Icecrown) had a stacking buff that kicked in after a while to artificially nerf the content’s difficulty. Would a system like that be more ideal than the current system?
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Im legit laughing, because since you posted this reply, on Pagle now theres always a few Alliance trying to kill the Horde Priest that Mind controls the NPC. Theres now always at least 2 dps on the priest and a couple healers dispelling the NPC if the MC breaks to keep the dots from killing him.
They still always eventually succeed in killing the guy, but it takes a few times to do so in the evenings now. Everyone wants to be famous I guess.
Tbh, I don’t know whether it’s comical or sad the development team won’t draw a line.
They just don’t seem to have any sense of agency/spine when effectuating change.
I don’t know whether it’s laziness or fear.
If and when they make changes…they are slow to make them and have so far done a poor job when making changes.
Alliance abusing their ability to drop queue and basically create mass premades?
No bans for that…basically ever. Anybody that took advantage of that when it was possible was rewarded for the bahavior.
Blizz didn’t like what they saw, so they rolled out a series of changes to try and mold players behavior to match with their idea of how the game ‘ought to be played’.
They made changes that addressed undesirable behavior from Alliance players dropping queue repeatey and premading…but they approached the issue in a vacuum.
I dont think for even a minute anybody on the dev team discussed in a meeting ‘Hey, this queue drop/premade behavior is a problem/needs to change, but how will our change affect a faction with a dramatically smaller talent player pool of players that enjoy/are good at PVP?’
It wasn’t an actual question. World buffs should be used for whatever we want to use them for.
guilds that gain the most value in progression raiding from world buffs are also the most likely to lose them before gaining said value.
its a catch 22. if world buffs were removed, the best guilds would be the same, and the best performers from those guilds would be the same. world buffs puts pressure on high performance guilds to keep world buffs in raids so they can keep up with other high performance guilds.
In your mind it’s not a question.
In the mind of developers based on comments made on this thread and comments devs or their forum conduits have historically made regarding how people play the game…it is a question.
Blizzard is very much a company that believes and has made changes over time relative to how they believe people should be playing/experiencing their games.
lol why do you think the best guilds lose their buffs so easy?
thats not what i said or at least what i meant. guilds who have subpar players can overcome shortcomings with world buffs…but they’re also the most likely to lose them quickly
It’s no longer against the EULA, as evidenced by the blue response.
Either they leave it alone, or they simply remove the cooldown on buffs. Players circumventing the timer by colluding with the other faction to have them kill the NPC responsible for the buff – sounds like clever use of game mechanics to me. And it beats feeling pressured to be online at very specific hours of the day prior to raid to ensure I get world buffs. The best each server can do is use a discord that keeps track of when world buffs are going out/will be available next but even that can be screwed up royally by people ninja dropping buffs at extremely odd hours which can ensure a buff won’t be available when most raiding guilds need it due to the 6hr cooldown.
So either leave it alone and let it continue or shorten the cooldown? Or, don’t tie the cooldown of the buff in with the Runthak/Saurfang NPCs. Not sure what else you can do. Either way, I personally have zero issues with people circumventing the buff timer by killing the npcs.
You left out the important detail of subpar players.
I think they should get rid of the cooldown. The cooldown works for vanilla capped servers. Not these 2-3x vanilla pop servers.
You can always grab the buffs from a DMN tribute run if you can’t get Ony buffs. Just cycle people in and out of the instance. Or run multiple groups.
We have a group clear DM north; while that is going on, we have summoners outside the instance bringing people over to cycle in to get the buffs there. After people do, they walk out of the instance and others get in. While that is going on, we have summoners at Felwood to bring people fresh out of DM up to Felwood for the Songflower buffs. After that, usually folks hearth to Stormwind and log off until the Ony/Nef head is going to drop. We get the head buff, then port back to Ironforge, and immediately go to the raid entrance.
With Darkmoon Faire, we go DM north -> Darkmoon Faire (10% damage buff) -> Felwood -> Stormwind -> raid instance.
When ZG comes out, we’ll probably go DM north -> ZG troll isle -> Darkmoon Faire -> Felwood -> Stormwind -> raid.
They should have these buffs be removed when you zone into a raid instance. This pre-raid buffing sillyness surely wasn’t the original intent. It is, however, a way to min/max. You know, like min/maxing a certain way in AV, which was changed to not work.
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I honestly dont think many people bother with DM buffs. The current content just isn’t difficult enough to bother traveling to feralas via summon to buff 40 people. Ony buff and ZG and to a lesser degree, songflowers from Feralas.
Nefarian is here and that’s a whole boatload of new heads that need to be dropped. Figure all the heads of nef being dropped weekly and people spreading them out over the weeks.
It isn’t about the difficulty of the content (yet, at least, for most people). It is about min/maxing, and parsing high, and justifying your raid spot, and feeling that you are doing your utmost to do well in a gaming situation when surrounded by other skilled folks.
Yep, its entirely compulsory and toxic in a more than a few ways, ie being unable to play your character.
The only remotely compelling game play is the “protecting your buffs on the way to the raid” pvp battles, which to me don’t outweigh the negatives. I would be fine with them being disabled in raid.
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Like I said before, I would hate to have to do that on a PVP server. Props to you folks for having that dialed-up level - not really my happy spot, but again, hats off to you.