I agree, but they don’t want to. There’s this entire insidious subculture that measures your worth by your parsing/accomplishments, and that subculture is what causes people to push this min-maxing meta garbage to the extremes and not see or care how detrimental it is.
You can’t fix that. The peer pressure is too much, and has spiraled out of control the past few years to where it’s not containable anymore. So something else has to be done to reel it in, however heavy handed it might be.
I know we are speaking the same language. And I know I to often hold out hope that things can change. I am a fool, after all.
Thanks for the discourse Nobleshield.
I wish it were otherwise, I really do. I hate how ingrained the min-maxing extreme is in gamer culture, and how often it kills off everything else. But alas 
2 Easy Fixes -
1 Drums are raid wide instead of group, or
2 Drums dont require Leatherworking to use.
Hell, it would be great if you removed the “requires specialization” to USE any item. Classic was fine with needing the specialization to craft various items (Armorsmith and such), why not use that for “Classic TBC” in that the specialization is needed to craft, but you dont have to have it to USE the item.
Isn’t that what Randy spoke about in the second bluepost?
Hilariously, 2.0 was basically braindead easy due to the Scorpid Poison bug that BM Hunters had that wasn’t fixed until 2.2 I believe, so for basically all of T4 and T5, BM Hunters were doing just insane levels of DPS (the Scorpid Poison itself was essentially doing another raid members’ worth of DPS). Now back then people weren’t class stacking the way guilds do now (in both Classic and Retail) and the bug wasn’t found til a little later into the tier’s life, but the Drum change would without-a-doubt have less of a “make this content easier” impact than if they were to retain some of the bugs that existed in release TBC.
Wow…it wasn’t an early April fools after all. Why are we giving these people money? They lie about nearly everything they do anymore. There is a video of them saying they did not want to have LW feeling mandatory. That video was not a spur of the moment thing. It was produced before hand. It was done carefully. And they have literally went reverse course on what they said they would do.
They could have allowed the game to be free of min max non sense but instead…promote it.
Good deal. /eye roll
I appreciate this commitment to authenticity in making sure drums stay important to high tier raiding. Love them or not, it’s important that they stay an incredibly valuable consumable alongside like flasks and runes and such.
However, you can still preserve that authenticity while at the same time allowing raiders more choice with their crafting professions by making the drums usable without needing to be a leatherworker. One of the points you brought up is that you don’t want to make LW feel less valuable, but making it so all the big raiders need to buy drums from them would be a massive increase to how much money LW can bring in. Before, LW was at the same time mandatory but worthless, because everyone who cared was one already so nothing you could do felt special since they were all doing it. At least this way LW preserves it’s importance to raiding while also giving players some extra choice.
Just take away the LW requirement, and make em stack to 10. That way LW make some decent gold and people still buy them for raid just like they will haste pots and other consumes. Easy clap
And this could have been handled for once. THERE WAS A CHOICE HERE THAT COULD HAVE TAMPERED DOWN THE MIN MAX NON SENSE. And Blizzard…promoted it. Good way to look out for your community, Blizzard. Good job. Always consumer first, amirite?
Please tell me the team realizes that the words “Authentic”, “feel” and “Experience” are three different things.
To further elaborate, the drums can still be a part of the “Authentic experience” and “Feel the same way it did back then” by just making them into a consumable.
Players nowadays on retail buy consumables, as they do back in classic currently for min maxing, removing the requirement of being a leatherworker for using them makes the game as authentic as back then, But it also makes it feel better because you can choose to go a different route.
All the while keeping Leatherworking profession a good profession, that is useful for something outside of “Crafting armour”. If the seal pala thing was enough to make you decide to add it to both race… etc I think you can see where i am going with this.
Homever if this is just a distraction from the issue of the boosts and deluxe editions… Then that is a failed tactic.
We don’t want this gameplay whether it’s authentic or not. The community VASTLY prefers to not force LWing or drums down our throats. Just implement any of the myriad of easy/popular fixes that have already been suggested and stop telling us how WE WANT to play the damn game.
I’d lack to add my voice to the chorus of criticism here. This stance is simply baffling. The dev interviews seemed to indicate that Blizz understood the problem: that people do not want to feel forced into leatherworking. And they were met with nearly universal praise from the community for announcing that change! Yet suddenly drums were a “meaningful part of the raiding experience?” Like, I realize you aren’t the one making these decisions and are just trying to put the best spin you can on them, but this is some serious gaslighting hogwash.
Just as importantly, the justifications being offered here are just absolute nonsense. Adding the tinnitus buff would leave leatherworking as a highly valuable profession for the classes who should want it (hunters, shaman, rogues and druids) and given how fast raiders have burned through content in Classic, there’s no reason at all to think re-tuning would be needed to compensate. And even if there was, the alternative solution of making the buff raid-wide would accomplish the same thing while also leaving the existing raid-tuning unchanged.
Stop trying to tell us what WE want! We are telling you what WE want, you’re not listening! This whole debate is ridiculous. A bunch of cash cow, greedy elites (Blizzard in a nut shell). There’s a reason why your revenue and Shadowlands subscribers has dropped (you don’t listen to the community). Ashes of Creation will destroy this game (when it’s released) if you keep choosing money over player feedback! This needs to stop! Anyone reading, make sure if you are invited to the beta that you go LW, grab drums, and stack up to show Blizzard that this changes NOTHING (during beta raid testing)!
Just qouting this because it’s true and I agree
Because I believe every voice matters in getting Blizzard to understand where the “community” falls on this topic, I will use your own quote:
You do understand that BS and Tailoring feel compelling because they are making you GEAR, correct? It FEELS good to grind then craft our own gear without having to fight for people over loot. But there are also other classes that could use Tailoring or Blacksmithing that don’t because the gear isn’t as good for them. Elemental Shaman could go for Tailoring for Spellstrike, but 4pc T4 is important so it is a big trade off. Spellstrike would be better in short fights or to go for a high parse, but the 4pc T4 will be better for progression into T5. This is a decision each Elemental Shaman can make.
You are not proposing a choice or decision. Each and every raider, no matter if it is a Shadow Priest or a Fury Warrior or an Enhancement Shaman, is now going to have to go Leatherworking. And not for gear, oh no. For a SINGLE consumable item. They will not help the LW market at all, because the only reason they are using this profession is to make a single consume. They will not use any of the T5 LW recipe drops, they will not take Skinning and help the Skinning economy. They are forced into a profession they want no part of just to be competitive.
This is antithesis not just to the spirit of Classic, but to the spirit of Blizzard Entertainment. For over a decade you have fought against things feeling mandatory, not just in WoW but in every IP you’ve owned. This is a clear example of something being unhealthy and mandatory for raiding and would be a perfectly acceptable target for a change using the tried-and-true Blizzard philosophy.
Your mistake is trying to think that Classic and TBC Classic are the same game, like they were back in 2006. They aren’t. Classic and TBC classic are now separate games, and blizzard offered an option for players that ONLY want to play TBC can skip having to play the other game.
For the sake of AUTHENTICITY
The game play will be the same boost or not. Like others had said, in game there is not difference between a player that boosted and those that came from Classic.
Again, this post shows a tone deaf response to the desires of your player base.
You say you want LW to be meaningful and not be to the wayside but without changing things, you are making it so far ahead of any other profession it is unreal. If over 75% of a raid is the same thing, there is an issue with said things. It can be class, race, faction, or profession.
If all raids were 75% druids, you guys would sit down and nerf druids or buff other classes as that isn’t the intent of the game design. At no point in TBC did the devs all come together and say “let’s make 75%+ of the raid all the same profession because that is what we feel it should be”. They came together and said what you did, “we want to make LW more picked”. The difference between you and them is that you do have the hindsight of their decision. You already know where this leads and are wanting to go there anyway.
#somechanges was a mantra said at Blizzcon by the staff there. This is some changes. Get this fixed and your players will be a lot more happy than “we kept everything the same in terms of LW!”
If this was #nochanges round 2, I’d agree with what you are doing. However, this isn’t #nochanges anymore. We have paid boosts, we have 2.4.3 talents and items for all tiers, we have BoE nethers. There are changes to the game that change a whole lot of things already in, but the single change that a majority of the player base is asking for is not something you are willing to do.
Why? Why is LW where you draw the line? The “authentic” game you are looking for is already gone. Stop trying to cling to a lie to push this through.
The levels of degeneracy has gone up in WoW since TBC. Any tiny advantage will be massively used as the culture of the game is parse/speed clears. I get the desire to keep it the same, but the players aren’t the same anymore. You either change with them or see a lot of people drop out due to an annoying meta you easily could have fixed in the interest of fun.
The issue with LW is EXACTLY the same as world buffs in classic. It was left the same because people didn’t know any better. Seeing the levels people go to world buff is not something that happened in vanilla outside of extreme top end guilds. My guild was US 33 at the end of vanilla and we only world buffed Ony/ZG for Loatheb and KT. There was no DMT’s constantly clear, there was no SF, there was no alliance WCB.
#changeLW is needed. Get it done or TBC will face a lot of the same player retention issues as classic. That isn’t an threat as I’m playing no matter what. I love the game and will put up with all the dumb decisions because I enjoy the game and people I play with. However, there are a whole lot of people who aren’t like me and will easily quit when things get too annoying/expensive(in gold or time).
For the health of TBC and future expansions you guys re-do, you need to embrace the hindsight of previous decisions and change things accordingly.
Advertising in interviews that TBC Classic will see drums adjusted in a way that makes them less mandatory, then leaving their effectiveness intact is a contradictory move when compared to the statement. Blizzard should know better by this point. Players are going to use the most effective tactics available to them. We’re known for feeling compelled to play optimally vs what’s more fun in terms of mechanics.
Blizzard is on the record, stating that BC would be less about the original experience. Classic was to be as true to the original release of the game as possible, to bring back that authentic experience. Even still, we saw changes that deviated from the authentic experience.
There will always be a meta. That doesn’t mean Leatherworking for has to be taken by 80% of a raid team, especially when players are so much more informed and putting out higher numbers today than they did back in the original version of the game. The majority of players didn’t stack world buffs and consumes for Vanilla, but raiders did in Classic because it was optimal. We’ve already diverged from the original experience.
Will players be required to use drums to down content? Maybe not. Will it feel bad choosing to do less damage or healing, knowing we’re limiting our potential? Yes.
No, the community is making it OP. The community will force players into drums rotations. The community is the ones that will force players to go LWing if they want a raid spot.
Don’t act like blizzard is twisting your arm here.
Many guilds cleared SW with out using 25-man drums setups. just because you are chasing orange parses as some form of validation, doesn’t mean that everyone else needs to follow suit.