I have a quick update on Gnomish Battle Chickens;
With restarts this week, we deployed a hotfix for a bug where Illidan was not respecting the “initial cooldown” on some of his abilities, such as his Phase 5 Enrage. The TL;DR here is that in the original World of Warcraft, creatures would ignore the initial cooldown period for certain support spells (such as buffs or summon spells). This behavior was removed in patch 2.1. This correct behavior was not present in Burning Crusade Classic until this fix, which is why Illidan’s Phase 5 Enrage was not properly delayed as it should have been.
A knock-on effect of this fix is that the Battle Squawk buff from the Gnomish Battle Chicken can no longer bypass its initial cooldown period as it could in pre-2.1 World of Warcraft. Battle Squawk now observes its correct initial cooldown rules as it did starting in patch 2.1.
While this hotfix wasn’t specifically targeted at nerfing Gnomish Battle Chickens, it did restore the correct post-2.1 behavior. We’ve discussed it at some length and decided that we are not going to try to deliberately re-break Gnomish Battle Chicken actions to maintain this behavior, as this specific interaction was never originally possible during the later patches of original Burning Crusade.