With the introduction of World of Warcraft Classic back in 2019, there was a firm stance from a vocal portion of the playerbase that the revived MMO game would remain a pure, untouched re-release of the vanilla World of Warcraft experience. As time has passed, that stance has softened to an extent, with players opening up to fixes of old foibles, and Blizzard subsequently adopting the ‘some changes’ philosophy heading into the re-release of the Burning Crusade expansion.
One broader change which has recently hit the wishlist for Feral Druid players revolves around tweaking an old Burning Crusade system change re-introduced in last week’s pre-patch, which dampens their DPS output. According to lead software engineer Brian Birmingham, however, feral Druid players shouldn’t get their hopes up for changes any time soon.
Speaking to PCGamesN ahead of the WoW Classic Burning Crusade release time, Birmingham tells us that changes will only be made where they “fit the design intent at the time, but the implementation doesn’t really match the intent”.
In Classic, as Birmingham notes, one example of that philosophy coming into effect is the fix to attack power in the Dire Maul North tribute World Buff. For Burning Crusade Classic, the biggest example so far has been Paladin players receiving each faction’s seals in order to ensure the parity originally intended back in the day.
A new boosted druid asked me to make them a Wolfshead Helm last night. I *had* to offer to make them some potions too. They didn’t know. from classicwow
The system change in this instance, which altered the way in which the game delivers resource ticks, was generally positive in how it helped certain spells like Innervate and Evocation. However, an unfortunate side effect of this change slowed the Feral Druid power shifting rotation, resulting in lost DPS. Although a long-standing issue for Feral Druid players throughout TBC, Birmingham maintains that it is still aligned with the design intent when the system update was first introduced back on patch 2.2.
While this means Druids will not have an official resolution to their issue for the foreseeable future – Birmingham stating that there’s “not a lot of hope” right now as Blizzard is intent on maintaining patch 2.4.3’s systems when the Dark Portal opens – he also says that the studio is “definitely aware of the discussion”, and is monitoring the situation.
For a full primer on the system change, how it affects Feral Druids, and the Weak Troll’s Blood potion method currently being used to circumnavigate it, check out this post from Wowhead’s NerdEgghead here. Also, keep an eye out for more from our Burning Crusade Classic interview with Brian Birmingham coming soon.