Currently in WoW there are a ton of world buffs available for players. Darkmoon Faire, Spirit of Lordaeron, Warchief's Blessing (Go Horde!), Spirit of Zandalar, and Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer are used on many of the end encounters of Naxx for first kills or to trivialize the harder aspects of a boss. With the expansion coming out, these buffs are still just as powerful as every buff has a scaling aspect to it (bar some darkmoon buffs).

So a question to you guys.

- Should world buffs continue to have such a large impact on end game raiding? Will we continue to farm for the Heart of Hakkar 2.0 to beat an encounter several tiers above it?
- If no new world buffs are offered, should the old world buffs still be farmed?
- Should end game encouters design themselves to accomidate world buffs? For example, Loatheb seems to balance itself on either farming Naxx for more dps gear or using a world buff. Sapphiron on the other hand seems to not be designed around world buffs, and thus getting them makes the group healing/frostbolt burst trivial.

I think that Blizzard should make world buffs stick to the world where you got them. Meaning that they drop if you zone into an instance.

This should make life easier for [end-game] raiders and Blizzards instance designers. They have to design around gear/flasks/potions only and raiders doesn't have to waste time outside an instance to kill something inside an instance.

There is a new Warchief's Blessing attached to a questline in Nagrand in the Burning Crusade. Exact same stats IIRC.

The mechanic to accomplish this is even already in the game. There's 2 buffs you can get in zangar marsh by talking to the two ancients that wonder the town, each lasting 30 minutes and disappears the instant you leave the zangar marsh zone. All the pvp buffs are zone oriented as well. There's also a "turn into a human" buff I recieved last night when I zoned into Caverns of Time - Durnholdt. I was just messing around so I'm not completely sure how the buff works, and if the horde get it as well, but it also disappared on zone out.

There's also the arena mechanic that (haven't tested personally) deletes all buffs when you zone in, and then limits what you recieve. It shouldn't be too much effort to expand this into the raid instances. First thing everyone does is buff up anyway, so your current buffs upon zoning don't really matter, unless you've got a flask from the night before. In that case, they could just kill you as you zone, and res you when your done loading, without the durability loss.

IIRC, the It's good to be the King buff from Dire Maul drops when you zone out, as well.

Was going to suggest the same thing. They should simply make world buffs get wiped when you zone in to an instance.

I suppose the counter argument then, is why would anyone get them? It seems like the original intent was for it to simply be a scripted reflection of one's achievements (like the first time a Rend/Ony/Nef head went up), as opposed to being something farmed so heavily that you actually have to plan around other guilds dropping it so that you aren't prevented from getting the buff yourselves.

They could always implement the arena system and clear all buffs when you enter 25 man zones... it would be nice if they put in GYs inside the raid zones so you could keep oils and such while you raid.

What about current world buffs? People still running Ony/ZG for those massive crit/stats buffs @70?

the tooltips for world buffs currently in the game have been changed in TBC according to thottbot beta such that they don't spell out their exact benefits anymore. i wouldn't be surprised if they somehow scale with level.

I can confirm that the 15% haste from Warchief's Blessing has been changed to 150 haste rating.

I wonder how much haste that is to a level 10 or so character

Not to devalue the night elf racial; yeah, this please. I don't mind the release/run back mechanic, but please fix that bug that prevents oils from carrying across zones or whatever it was.

Given that the stated reason for removing the persistent temporary buffs was due to server load, and that they said once TBC hardware/architecture was in place server load wouldn't be a concern in this fashion, you'd think we'd be seeing them re-enabled some time soon.

This is already in place in the TBC Beta. I can't speak for Mana/Wizard Oils, but Rogue poisons persist through zoning, and I imagine the same applies to Oils (I can't see why it wouldn't). Not only that, but you can finally click off poisons just like any other buff, which fixes the one gripe I had when they temporarily made poisons last through zoning. I'm quite thankful they addressed this, as playing in the Arena as a Rogue would be rather annoying if either of the above were not true.

if people want world buffs to make first kills a bit smoother, so be it. want to know something? 99.99% of thoe kills would've been kills anyway. we've never ever used a world buff for any encounter (and we're at kt p3) and to be perfectly honest, we suck. the amount of times we've wiped to ppl standing in blizzards, some guys have shitty isps or people on thaddius missing the jump down from the platform is uncountable.
the main reason we don't use world buffs is that if we spend 1h gathering those buffs, we'd most likely wipe on the pull to someone screwing up. and we still killed everything in a reasonable timeframe.
imo world buffs are a lot more psychological then most ppl think. players with world buffs know that if they screw up now, everoyne will point at them cause it took so much time to gather them, so they focus more and theres less people fucking around.

i think doing loatheb/sapphiron/kel'thuzad with 2200 AP and 8k health is a bit more than a psychological edge, but maybe that's just me :-P

What good is the NE racial, anyhow? If you're in a traffic jam, you can only go as fast as the guy in front of you ;)

you overrate gear. ofc you need some amount, but theres a guild thats about to kill KT while their server got online in april this year. their GM is using the mage crafted chest etc. gear + wrold buffs are nice, but in the end perfect execution is ALWAYS much better. any idea how much dps you lose cause some idiot dies early in the fight?
if you have 40 ppl alive all the time, i am sure everyone could unequip 2-3 items and you can still KT, without any world buffs.

and pls explain me, which encounters are exactly dps tests in nax? the frightening loatheb? thats about it. 4h, sapph + KT are in NO way dps fights. keep 40 people alive and it will ALWAYS be smooth sailing. those are survival encounters, nothing else.

i am not saying that world buffs ahve no effect, but EVERYTHING is easily doable WITHOUT worldbuffs and flasks (ok tanks should have them, but ever there KT is easily doable with 0 flasks on raid if ppl pay attention) IF everoyne plays perfect. ofc thats hard to reach (and my guild is about as far from that as anyone). world buffs smoothen things out and give you more room for error, but in the end, guilds that can kill sapph and KT with world buffs can 100% kill them as well without. it just requires a bit better execution then with those buffs.

I think that's kind of the point.

I know my guild got quite a wake up call when we showed up to raid last month after nearly 5 months away, and with tons of rerolled characters. Encounters that were previously extremely easy suddenly got hard again, since we couldn't brute force our way past mistakes.

On fights that require the majority of your raid to do their job, eliminating the chance of mistakes either through shortening the fight or increasing your survivability makes it a lot easier. That's what world buffs and flasks do. Do you want to eat 5-20 more whipes to reduce the mistake frequency, or do you want to blow 3000 extra gold on consumables and 60 minutes running around the world for buffs? The latter is the easier way out, but it's an annoying and plain boring solution. If these buffs didn't exist, encounters wouldn't have to be designed around them, and the kill could be done at roughly the same amount of learning attempts as now - just without the dumb resource-hog at the end.

It doesn't make it any harder or easier to actually get the kill (assuming design takes it into account), but it makes it so "buffing up" takes 3 hours (goldfarm+world buffs) instead of 2 minutes. Buffing isn't challenging or exciting, which is why we aren't (usually) spending 30 minutes on it anymore (Hi Nagafen!).

Run faster back to corpse, so you spend less time traveling and more time alt-tabbed on teh forams. This will be made even better in TBC because of the "Play Sounds Even While In Background" option that will ensure you will never miss a Ready Check because you were alt-tabbed!

That's assuming you want to hear the ready check when you're alt-tabbed ;)

"What? There was a ready check? Oh, for some reason I didn't get it."
- excuse heard more than once (and I KNOW they got it too)

I REALLY think world buffs should be kept as they are.

If a raiding guild put the time and the effort / logistics to get those buffs THEY SHOULD have the extra edge requierd to kill that boss.

Plus doing this on a pvp server is a real thrill. PVE servers see it as a waste of time but we had countless slugg fests with alliance going for world buffs.