Gnomish Battle Chicken Banned On WarcraftLogs TBC Classic

• Author: Pride
• Date: February 6, 2022
• Updated: February 6, 2022
• Expansion: TBC Classic

5 days ago, Blizzard made an announcement regarding changes to the Gnomish Battle Chicken, wherein a change made to creatures in general caused the Battle Squawk buff the chicken casts ignore its cooldown period. This is what allowed players to guarantee the Battle Squawk would occur by utilizing a very specific trick. With this change, it is no longer possible to guarantee the Squawk — it is completely random if you get one or not.

As a result of this change, the parsing community on WarcraftLogs.com was left in a very awkward situation. Melee (and to a lesser extent, hunter) parses would now essentially be 100% determined by luck — you could get 5 Squawks on a fight and do extremely high DPS, or you could end up with 0 or 1 and deal significantly lower DPS than others who managed to get multiple Squawks, despite playing optimally in every other way.

As a result, a lot of players expressed resentment towards this change, and the outcome it would have to parsing, as the incredibly high luck component would jeopardize the integrity of the competition of rankings on the parsing site. The WarcraftLogs admins decided that they agree that the randomness of the Battle Squawk proc inherently hurts the competition, and WarcraftLogs will be banning it outright, starting with logs on February 15 onwards.

What this means in practice is that logs that are found to include a Battle Squawk buff, will not be valid for rankings. If a single player in your raid uses the Battle Chicken and it procs its buff, the entire raid’s log will be disqualified from rankings. That includes other players who did not get the Battle Squawk buff, such as caster DPS.

This decision will have a huge impact on parsing. So give your raid’s melee DPS players a reminder to delete their chickens if your raid cares about parsing at all — you don’t want them to disqualify your logs accidentally!

What are your thoughts on these decisions? Are you happy that the “Chicken meta” is now over, or would you prefer that either Blizzard or WarcraftLogs handled it differently? Let us know in the comments below!