Classic

Blizzard Changing World Buffs in Classic Era - Chronoboon Displacer Snapshots Buffs for Later Use

posted 14 days ago by perculia

Hey everybody!We know that there’s a lot of excitement for Burning Crusade Classic, but we haven’t forgotten about the Classic Era servers. One of the defining features of raiding in Classic has certainly been the prevalence of world buff stacking, and while there are some interesting social effects – coordinating turn-ins, leveling alts, world PvP at buff locations, there’s also an obvious negative element – once you’re buffed, you’re incentivized to log off and stop playing to preserve your buffs. If you want to log off to go make dinner or put your kids to bed, that’s completely fine and the timing works in your favor. But if you still want to repair your gear, shop for consumables, or run a dungeon with your friends, then it’s not great to be losing precious minutes on your buffs, or worse, risk dying and losing them entirely. We’ve been wanting to do something about that side-effect, without completely abandoning our philosophy for WoW Classic, so we’re going to try something new in Patch 1.13.7: The Chronoboon Displacer.What is it?The Chronoboon Displacer is an item you buy which takes a snapshot of your world buffs, such as Rallying Cry of Dragonslayer, Songflower, etc. and saves them for use at a later time. Of course we don’t want to change things too radically, so it comes with some significant restrictions: While you are under the effects of the Chronoboon Displacer, you can’t benefit from any of the world buffs that it’s holding for you. That keeps you from getting a second set of buffs, and then still feeling like you need to log off. Also, when you release the buffs from the Chronoboon Displacer, it puts the item on a 1 hour cooldown so that you can’t toggle your buffs on for bosses and off for the rest of the raid.How does it work?First, you collect all your world buffs the way you normally would – getting your summon to Dire Maul, a portal back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar for your Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer, a quick trip to Yojamba Isle to turn in the Heart of Hakkar, or whatever subset of world buffs your raid expects or that you feel comfortable with. Then you activate your Chronoboon Displacer, which creates a Supercharged Cronoboon Displacer in your inventory and an aura which holds the captured state of your world buffs. You can mouse over that aura at any time to see which buffs are stored, and how much time is stored on them. You can then go about your business, secure in the knowledge that your world buffs are saved and ready for use when you need them most. When you’re ready to restore them, simply activate the Supercharged Chronoboon Displacer and it will break apart, releasing the stored auras back onto your character.Where do I get one?Well, given the complex temporal mechanics involved, you obviously need to make a deal with a Bronze Dragon, and you can find a friendly one named Chromie located in Andorhal in the Western Plaguelands. Of course she’ll likely want your help repairing the time stream first, but once you’ve helped her out with that, she’ll be happy to sell you as many Chronoboon Displacers as your heart desires.Why now?We launched Classic with an intent to keep the game data the same as it was originally, and we wanted to make sure we delivered on that promise, but now that we’ve been through all the content phases we planned before launch, we took a step back to consider what it really means to have the world buff system stay this way in Classic Era. A persistent world where everybody is traveling around for magical items and spells to maximize their power is fine, but one where they then stop playing to avoid wasting them seems wrong. Having an additional stop that lets you “bottle your buffs” seems like a thematically appropriate change to alleviate that problem.We know this is a change, and any change to Classic is something we want to be careful with, but in this case, the fact that playing optimally literally requires you to stop playing was just too much for us to sit idly by. If you have any concerns about ways this might be abused, please post them here so we can address them. We hope you’ll all find this change as exciting as we do!It will come out before Burning Crusade Classic is released.
I know some people would prefer we remove world buffs entirely, while others would prefer more radical changes, so it’s a challenge to find a good line. You should be able to try it soon on the PTR, and I hope it meets your expectations.Yes, it’s the same version on PTR right now, and will remove spell batching as well.
That’s correct. You use the Chronoboon Displacer, and it removes them from you, storing their remaining durations in a new aura, and prevents you from benefitting from any of the buff that are currently stored. The idea being, if it didn’t do that, you’d just get double buffs, and still have to log out to save the second set.

In addition the “Supercharged Chronoboon Displacer” is unique, so you can only be storing one set of buffs at a time, but the “Chronoboon Displacer” is not unique, so you can stock up on them ahead of time, so you aren’t required to make a trip out to Andorhal every week.

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Comment by kasper203This sounds really good! im glad they are doing it now, so it will be there for classic era servers, and we got a authentic classic experience without it.Comment by ChanchiThe game is over, the final boss is beaten, and most of us are moving on to TBC.Comment by UnidadCariciaI think a better change would have been to just make Wbuffs undispellable.

By doing this you take away the world PvP that could happen when groups ran to the raids. In all fairness, a lot of guilds just started porting everywhere, but I still have some nice memories of raid on raid PvP with world buffs.
On the other hand, maybe people would be less afraid of PvP and less likely to just port everywhere.Comment by CerebralBeagleI'm fairly neutral/indifferent to this change. I do think it is a good change and better than what we currently have, but I also think it fails to address the core issue of World Buffs.

Once TBC drops, the majority of the player base will move on. I still intend to return to Classic Era, but even as someone who intends to keep playing, I know realistically Classic Era will take the back-burner until TBC is over. I'm sure this is the same for many. I'm aware of the popularity of vanilla private servers. Maybe after server merges and the dust settles it won't be so bad, but there's no point speculating numbers until we see it for ourselves.

Having an item that stores world buffs might seem like a good idea, but that's only in contrast to what we have now... The problem arises when there aren't enough players to sustain the buff drops. What good is an item that stores buffs that never drop?

It also doesn't address my personal gripe with world buffs - that it adds hours of prep-time to each and every single raid I do during the week. "ZOMG, noob! I get all my WBs in 5 min". No, you don't. It takes longer than 5 min just to run through Dire Maul. Coordinating summons, having my hearthstone required to be at specific locations, constantly checking a WB discord for scheduling and moving my entire day around to make sure I'm online for when they drop... these are core annoyances with world buffs and having an item that stores them doesn't solve that.

Also, it's now another item I am forced to carry around. As a high-parsing Warlock, carrying a raid boss set (16% spell hit), raid trash set (6% spell hit), undead set (3/3 + trinket), frost resist, consumables, engineering stuff, soul shards... that 1 item slot is valuable to me. Not to mention my stash is also completely full with additional gear sets like my full SR set for twins tanking, Viscidus Wand + NR Gear, PvP gear, niche PvE and farming gear. I have full 18 slot bags across the board and I'm still out of space. I'm sure your average casual player won't understand this but go talk to your main tank I'm sure they'll get it.

I do think this change is better than no change at all... but I also don't feel it's the right change that solves the core issue.Comment by KaladosThe only people this will upset will be the toxic elitists who love griefing and purging "but MUH worLD PvpEeee!111"Comment by DogerinoGreat Idea. To bad the nochanges group ruined Classic. Imagine we had this tool from the get goComment by EmjaySIt is quite late and there are better solutions but it is still a better solution than what we currently have. A few concerns
- The stored buffs should be usable only once. So, someone cannot turn on buffs for bosses and turn them off again for trash or some form of that. Might be better to automatically retrieve buffs when entering a raid instance
- The storing/retrieval of buffs should not be in combat. So, you can't suddenly decide to store or get your buffs if you are dyingComment by BlueshiftWorld buffs already killed Classic for most. I don't know why Blizzard believes that we think that they're fun. I don't know a a solitary soul that does personally. Do you?

This is not going to entice anyone to start playing again.Comment by EXPERIMENTONGODthe fact that playing optimally literally requires you to stop playing was just too much for us to sit idly by

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