[TBCC] What am I gonna do with allll these chickens?

#2 - Dec. 21, 2021, 7:32 a.m.

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.

#5 - Dec. 29, 2021, 10:18 p.m.

I kind of like the social interaction of min-max guilds planning the professions that will be placed in each group. There’s a social-puzzle aspect of it that I think is worth preserving if possible.

Here’s a half-baked idea: What if the chicken squawk gave you Tinnitus (and was prevented by it), same as drums? I don’t want to just homogenize everything, but the effect is superficially pretty similar (a loud noise that gives you a haste buff). It would reduce the pressure on the social puzzle of planning party professions without removing it entirely.

As Aggrend said, we’ll decide in the new year, I just wanted to throw out another idea to keep the conversation going. Please poke holes in it; I haven’t thought about it deeply.

#12 - Dec. 30, 2021, 7:28 a.m.

Oh you’re totally right. I wasn’t considering the fact that the durations were wildly different. Well, community council is supposed to be for more unfiltered discussion, so you get to see me wearing my noob hat while I’m on vacation.

The diminishing returns idea is interesting, but I think it would be more straightforward to just remove stacking. Both solutions would be susceptible to the “rotation” temptation, but if you’re really min-maxing, the fight often doesn’t last more than the 4-minute Squawk duration, so a single squawk would last the whole fight, and you wouldn’t need a rotation; you’d prefer to have everybody else use a different trinket.

Again, no decision here, just checking in to see what you’re all saying and add some thoughts.

#14 - Jan. 1, 2022, 11:19 a.m.

Yeah, the fact that it wasn’t a rating stood out too.

I also agree with you that part of the charm is these low-level items that actually retain value, especially if their value is situational.

I’m sorry you’re getting flak for it. Any proposed nerf is always gonna have people arguing against it, of course. No matter how reasonable the change is, there’s always people who have dumped resources into chasing it that are sad if its taken away. But if it helps you defend yourself from the flak: this isn’t the first place I heard about it (I think somebody @'d me on Twitter first… and as Aggrend said, it was already being discussed) but this is a more appropriate place to discuss it than Twitter. Thanks for the thoughtful discussion so far!

#15 - Feb. 1, 2022, 10:07 p.m.

I have a quick update on Gnomish Battle Chickens;

With restarts this week, we deployed a hotfix for a bug where Illidan was not respecting the “initial cooldown” on some of his abilities, such as his Phase 5 Enrage. The TL;DR here is that in the original World of Warcraft, creatures would ignore the initial cooldown period for certain support spells (such as buffs or summon spells). This behavior was removed in patch 2.1. This correct behavior was not present in Burning Crusade Classic until this fix, which is why Illidan’s Phase 5 Enrage was not properly delayed as it should have been.

A knock-on effect of this fix is that the Battle Squawk buff from the Gnomish Battle Chicken can no longer bypass its initial cooldown period as it could in pre-2.1 World of Warcraft. Battle Squawk now observes its correct initial cooldown rules as it did starting in patch 2.1.

While this hotfix wasn’t specifically targeted at nerfing Gnomish Battle Chickens, it did restore the correct post-2.1 behavior. We’ve discussed it at some length and decided that we are not going to try to deliberately re-break Gnomish Battle Chicken actions to maintain this behavior, as this specific interaction was never originally possible during the later patches of original Burning Crusade.