I think you're reading way too much into that quote. It seems more likely that one person talking to an NPC will disable/enable the buff for all players.

This would be against current rules regarding mods, would it not?

Lets be honest though: Unless there are unique achievements and/or extra loot involved, extremely few raids will ever want to turn off the buff. Raids that routinely clear an instance don't decide after a few months of farming to suddenly equip all the gear they had when they initially did the instance again, just for added challenge.

The buff opt-out may be used by a few guilds wanting to prove to themselves that they can do it, since no one outside the guild will care. Everyone else will ignore it unless it offers special rewards.

It seems to me that the buff will be there purely to allow increasingly bad raids to beat the content so that everyone can eventually see it. With that in mind, I imagine that the penalty for non disabling the debuff would be one or both of

- not being able to activate heroic modes.
- not being able to complete other achievements e.g. A Bloody Mess

thus ensuring that the best loot and meta mounts aren't accessible but everyone gets to see the fights.

I just assumed a buffless Heroic Arthas kill would be ICC's Yogg0.

Hey everyone

I have a question : we decided in my guild that the first Shadowmourne would be given to a Death Knight. He crafted his Shadow's Edge friday evening after we killed Rotface. And he only "really" began his "A feast of souls" quest today when we went back in to take a shot at Prof. Putricide.

Anyhoo, he noticed something strange : whenever there would be a pack of mobs, he would'nt get credit for each mob in the pack. For example, the flying Vaelky give 1/1000 each, same for the big abominations or the plague scientists, but with the packs of 6-8 geists, he only got 3-4 each time on his quest tracker. Leading to the question : what makes a mob kill count for the quest? He suggested he might have to deal a "real" attack with the axe to the mob before it died, which he didn't do on the geists since they all pretty much die together. He would hit them all only with spells (diseases, death and decay, pestilence, blood boil), and only a few of these with "real" axe attacks.

If some more people can give feedback on this (maybe a warrior whirlwinding the entire packs did in fact get credit for every mob, for instance, or a paladin using divine storm), that'd be highly appreciated.

Our Ret Paladin is on Feast of Souls too and he just confirmed me that his Holy Wrath was sucessfully tagging all the mobs for the quest. So you don't need a real melee attack to debuff them.

Are we really sure about this? He did around 19k DPS on the 2 horrors + 2 scientists + all the geists (I guess there's about 6 of them, at least), so I find it a little hard to believe that his pestilence/blood boils did not hit all of them. Still, he got credit for only 4 mobs with this whole pack.

I didn't even know the quest applied a debuff to the mobs "tagged" for the quest. Is this something you can see in game, on the target, like a "real" debuff? In either case, do you think it's possible that this debuff might have an internal cooldown? Or maybe the terrible lag we were having is to be blamed?

Shadow's Fate - Spell - World of Warcraft
The debuff appears 1s after you do stuff on the target. Pestilence was enough for me to tag the big aoe pulls (and I'm done with that step).
There was a fix recently, maybe certain mobs don't count anymore. I was able to farm critters, but they and the entrance event don't work anymore.

Confirm that you can't farm critters anymore - or anything spawned, like the geist/bug traps around Putricide.

You should consider that every mob that does not earn reputation for killing it will not count.
Moreover it seems that you need to hit the mob with the blade. Mobs only damaged by spell abilities won't count (based on the trash mobs we killed yesterday).

I don't remember if the skeletons summoned by Precious would count because they have a reputation gain value (2).