Hi Sixxfury,
So this is something we actually talked about quite a bit internally and we’ve actually already made some adjustments to. Notably, we put out a hotfix a few weeks ago that prevents the Battle Squawk buff from persisting when logged out, with the intent of preventing the case where players would stack dozens of this buff on themselves outside of a raid, and then zone in and get summoned to a boss to do Mega Damage ™.
When developing that fix, our first thought was to simply prevent this buff from stacking entirely as you suggested. After some additional discussion the team decided to hold off on going quite that far to start with and went with the more conservative fix for the real abuse case. Currently we are in a bit of a “wait and see” pattern following that fix.
That isn’t to say the team won’t make further adjustments, but we were somewhat leery of being too heavy handed here as in order to get the full benefit from this buff, you have to take a somewhat convoluted set of actions to trigger it reliably, which becomes even more cumbersome if you are trying to get the full 5 stacks going just before a boss pull, and even more cumbersome still if its being done on a boss that is not already on farm. I’m quite sure that the guilds that care to do so can pull this off quite readily, but it’s still not exactly an apples to apples comparsion with drums, which are simply a button press every 2 minutes. As goofy as this is, it is an authentic interaction, and one that some guilds did take advantage of in some way in the original Burning Crusade. As with any change, the team simply wants to be very careful and not be too hasty (pun intended? maybe?).
As for log detection, that might be something we can look into and try to make better if it’s inconsistent, and it might be ideal if this was something that we could let the parsing community self-police, or not. I’ll follow up on that with the team when we get back from our holiday break and see if there are improvements we can make there.
Thanks for bringing it up in any case. We’ll likely keep talking about it, and let everyone know if we decide to make any more changes here.