…so why, in the TBC announcement at Blizzcon, did you keep promoting a “#somechanges” stance?
Are you being authentic, or are you making some changes? Make up your mind.
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Are drums raid wide?
This would be a brilliant fix. It maintains the old play style and raid buff, makes rebalancing raids unnecessary, all while greatly reducing the number of players that need to have leather working.
If drums remain party only, then I will be leveling leather working along with the a lot of people in my guild.
Patiently waiting for confirmation from beta or otherwise
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The problem with the phrase “authentic experience”
The way people played TBC 14 years ago is not the same way they play it today.
So witch “authentic experience” are you looking for? If you want the authentic experience from 14 years ago then yes they will need to make some changes.
If you want the private server meta then ya, no changes.
Personally I don’t like the current drums meta and would like to see it changed.
This comment here shows that you don’t seem to understand the relative power level of the other professions in your own game. Making the greater drums raid wide, one of the suggested changes, does not make Sunwell statistically easier in any way at all. Let’s take a look at all of the professions, and what having alternate professions does for personal or raid DPS in late T6:
•Alchemy - absolutely nothing. Everyone can use their wares, and none of the trinkets are BiS.
•Blacksmithing - absolutely nothing. By Sunwell, all crafted weapons have been replaced by superior raid drops or season 3 weapons.
•Tailoring - absolutely nothing. FSW/SS/SF all replaced by T6 gear
•Engineering - Goggles no longer BiS, bombs situationally good on trash. Not required on Felmyst (other than cheese parsing the skellies) or M’uru (adds are killed single target).
•Enchanting - The ring enchants do not even require the enchanting profession. Can be dropped for something else, as having it adds no power whatsoever to already enchanted rings.
•Gathering professions - LOL
None of those professions, by late T6 and if available instead of LW, are going to make Sunwell easier. Even with the SW glove patterns, you do not have to have the profession in order to wear them–someone else can make them for you. Which brings us to the final profession:
•Jewelcrafting - The neck and ring, as well as JC unique gems, offers a slight boost to some classes. Does nothing for my Ret paladin as the Aldor shatter sun neck is better, and 24 AP gems are no better than 10 STR for a spec that gets +20% STR from talents and kings.
So you see, the ONLY other prof that increases output is JC anyway. That’s it. And that’s a minor amount–my ret paladin wouldn’t even take it. You remove the LW requirement on drums, essentially allowing a 3rd profession, and it does jack squat for overall raid DPS. The design as planned does nothing but make people pitch half their profs in the trash for one patch while waiting for WotLK classic, where they will have to drop LW again and relevel what they really like to 450.
You overshot on LW back in the day, making it 500% better than 2nd place. This devalues all the other professions so significantly that it falls into the category of really bad game design. Don’t repeat really bad game design on purpose and for “reason of authenticity” when you’ve already thrown that out the window with other decisions, and the 3rd place profession does not make Sunwell one bit easier.
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^Yes this
The only thing you accomplish by keeping drums party wide is to incentivize dropping and re-leveling other professions over and over to get all the benefits.
Is dropping and re-leveling professions a fun game mechanic? Absolutely not.
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I can see why Blizzard is purging all in-house development and hiring outside studios to make their games.
That might cost them five figures, however is a multi-billion dollar company going to recover from such a loss?
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Can’t believe I actually thought they were going to do something about drums that would prevent everyone from feeling like they had to go LW to be optimal in raid. I fell for it again!
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As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. RIP TBC and here I thought blizzard had the gumption to address raid tunning.
Kaivax… do you speak on behalf of all the development team or is it only YOU that doesnt understand the issue?
The LW changes went too far … without drum rotation the profession is on par with the perks of other professions (leather/mail gear and a generic leg enchant perk, with them its mandatory) … which most people don’t like.
TL;DR
Dont follow the same mistakes the live game made, you have near universal feedback that we want tinnus/drums changed and you are ignoring it… who are you making the game for if not the fans?
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Kaivax is just the messenger. I don’t think he even speaks on behalf of the dev team. It’s not even directly with the Dev team. There most likely a non tech team that interfaces with the tech team involved to “ok” his posts. Blizzard wouldn’t just let one of their employees run rampant on public forums.
All this yelling at Kaivax does nothing. He’s nothing but a messenger at the bottom of the totem pole.
They are treating classic Era, and Classic TBC as 2 seperate games. Just like classic is gonna have a 68 boost.
Oh no! You mean Blizzard wouldn’t be able to just pump out an existing product and then sit back passively for about 1 1/2 to 2 years while it generates revenue? This isn’t even a new game; it’s entirely recycled content people are just replaying through for nostalgia and the social experience of playing an online game with their friends.
A team of developers and designers created all the actual content 13+ years ago; the current team is just regurgitating an older team’s work product.
It’s too hard for you to re-tune Sunwell, the last raid in the expansion?
The arguments for why the WoW team can’t make an effort to balance drums are dishonest and pathetic to read. Initially it was something a long the lines of ‘We know people really missed the game-play of timing their drums to get perpetual 5% haste buff…’
Really? People were clamoring to have that back? Can you link me some reference posts where large swaths of the community vocalized they missed Drums of Battle? I ask because I recall the exact opposite - specifically people complaining about Drums of Battle and how it made Leatherworking the default profession for many raiders?
Is the current team so creatively bankrupt you can’t even come up with a replacement/balance change for Drums of Battle?
**Edit - My tone would be more respectful if the CMs and or Developers reciprocated. They do not and are often intellectually dishonest - as is the case here.
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My understanding is that Kaivax is a forum guy and not actually a designer.
While decisions like “Will we have paid store mounts / store boosts” may not be up to developers (they probably are not) - other in-game balance decisions almost assuredly are up to someone at a Director / middle management level.
I don’t expect individual members on the design team to make decisions unilaterally they aren’t capable of making- but it’s definitely someone’s decision to make. There’s no reason why (in an operational context) a balance change like this wouldn’t be up to the game-design team. I certainly wouldn’t give the entire design team a pass here because you may want to attribute it to some evil invisible bean counter who exists outside the design team.
There were all sorts of changes they made to Vanilla WoW in ‘Classic WoW’ that artificially reduced the difficulty of the content from MC to AQ40. Naxx was the first “Oh man you might actually have to exert some effort” raid in order to clear it.
If this is the case then he needs to know that the designers are flat out wrong when they say it’ll make Sunwell easier to have drums be raid wide, and that the excuse presented is nonsense.
Fixing drums is simple.
Step 1, make it usable by non leatherworkers.
Step 2 make it so if a leatherworker uses it it has no cast time.
Step 3 make it party wide for non leather workers
Step 4 make it raid wide for leather workers.
leatherworkers have the benefit of their drums being more efficient for no cast time and it’s raid wide.
This means min max guilds will still want leather workers (around 4-5) because it’s far more efficient and doesn’t cause much dps loss due to the cast time.
Basically if your raid has no leatherworkers you will have 1 party member every 30 seconds having to stop and cast for 1.5 seconds to give their group drums, but by having a leather worker in the group it let’s it be instant (no lost dps time to use 1.5 sec drums) and it’s raid wide. Meaning the leatherworker has the benefit of not losing any dps from the cast time and is essentially far more efficient at using drums, BUT LW won’t be required as drums can still be used without LW, just far less effective.
Drums should have 40 yard range regardless of who uses it.
Problem solved.
I really hope the people who are implementing these changes understand that drums in their initial implementation did not suck but we did. We are better now. 8 yards or not. Just like Sappers were good in 2005 its just we sucked back then and didn’t figure it out. I really really hope Blizzard understands what their player base in 2021 values.
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They still haven’t removed the engi requirement for those. 
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That’s because sappers effect your damage, not your entire party’s damage
Its pretty slow to not understand the exponential effect of bringing 30 folks that can sapper into a raid.
1 guy sappers a big trash pack = player dead.
30 guys sapper a big trash pack = trash is dead.
Its ok tho, I didn’t expect you to understand the relation and similarity between engineering nades/sappers (which require engi) and the LW drums (which require LW.)
Keep reading, you’ll get there.
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This does nothing to fix the overlying issue of leatherworker being a mandatory profession
The original drums are STILL going to be considered almost mandatory by most guilds, they are just too strong not to be used. If you really want to make drums not mandatory for all 25 players you need to change them to be raid wide and only one drum buff active at a time.
Also the whole game will still need minor tuning if you want to provide a authentic experience. 2.4.3 classes are still stronger than they were in previous patches, everything Pre-Sunwell is going to be easier than it was on release due to this unless you tune the encounters to make up for the 2.4.3 version of classes.
Please work intelligently on this… #SomeChanges sounds like a great idea but very easily ruined by dumb decision making if you don’t do this right.
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