I’m a bit disheartened by the post by Blizzard here https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/burning-crusade-classic-not-a-bug-list-may-18-2021/279764 stating that “Bloodthirst damage does not scale from attack power gained via Improved Berserker Stance or Unleashed Rage.”
This can easily be seen as not true from an old video from TBC of a Illidan kill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX7w8kZyssw where at 0:26 the warrior in the video hits Illidan with a bloodthirst crit for 3076 damage.
At this point Illidan already has 5 stacks of sunder and faerie fire. The warrior in the video has battle shout, strength of earth totem, ferocious inspiration, disdain from the Shard of Contempt trinket (showing that this is also during the Sunwell patch), and executioner. No other short term effects that could potentially effect bloodthirst’s damage are on the boss or the warrior in the video at this point.
Now at 0:38 into the video the warrior in the video casts bloodthirst again, this time critting for 3381 damage. Once again if you check the effects on the warrior and the boss himself to this point everything is the same EXCEPT rank 5 unleashed rage is now on the warrior. What does unleashed rage do? Increases all of the shaman’s party members melee attack power by 10%.
What is 3076 * 1.1? 3383.6, just 2 damage off the 2nd bloodthirsts damage. This can easily be accounted for by rounding errors in the game (Go hit a dummy with bloodthirst in the beta and you can see it sometimes hit for slightly different amount even though your attack power is remaining the exact same)
No other procs are up when both of these bloodthirsts occur. The only other potential possibility is a hunter’s expose weakness or improved hunters mark are up at this point and increasing the damage which would be difficult to see with all the debuffs being applied, but these two talents ALSO DON’T WORK IN THE BETA WITH BLOODTHIRST.
Bloodthirst’s damage has been bugged multiple times throughout Classic, such as when it wasn’t interacting properly with the Argent Dawn attack power against undead trinkets so it would not surprise me if it did get broken in other ways. But this is clearly bugged behavior.
Bloodthirst should be scaling with all attack power gains on the character, this includes things like Improved Berserker Stance (seriously why wouldn’t a talent in the same tree as bloodthirst not increase the damage of bloodthirst, think Blizzard), Unleashed Rage, Expose Weakness, Improved Hunter’s Mark.
Blizzard please fix this by TBC launch or early into it. It’s kind of ridiculous to have a class that will already struggle in TBC be hit with a nerf bat of a bug that didn’t exist in original TBC
