The Future of World Buffs in Classic Era

That’s correct. You use the Chronoboon Displacer, and it removes them from you, storing their remaining durations in a new aura, and prevents you from benefitting from any of the buff that are currently stored. The idea being, if it didn’t do that, you’d just get double buffs, and still have to log out to save the second set.

In addition the “Supercharged Chronoboon Displacer” is unique, so you can only be storing one set of buffs at a time, but the “Chronoboon Displacer” is not unique, so you can stock up on them ahead of time, so you aren’t required to make a trip out to Andorhal every week.

This is NOT an April Fools joke. The proximity to April 1st is an unfortunate coincidence.

I’m just a software engineer; they don’t trust me with humor.

That’s the direction we intend to go in Burning Crusade Classic. In Burning Crusade Classic we intend to have world buffs removed at the start of raid encounters.

I realize that’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but I did want to clarify that our intent is to preserve the World Buffs in Classic Era, while moving away from World Buffs in Burning Crusade Classic.

I hope that clarifies things for you!

Yes, it’s the same version on PTR right now, and will remove spell batching as well.

You’re welcome!

I know some people would prefer we remove world buffs entirely, while others would prefer more radical changes, so it’s a challenge to find a good line. You should be able to try it soon on the PTR, and I hope it meets your expectations.

It will come out before Burning Crusade Classic is released.

Hey everybody!

We know that there’s a lot of excitement for Burning Crusade Classic, but we haven’t forgotten about the Classic Era servers. One of the defining features of raiding in Classic has certainly been the prevalence of world buff stacking, and while there are some interesting social effects – coordinating turn-ins, leveling alts, world PvP at buff locations, there’s also an obvious negative element – once you’re buffed, you’re incentivized to log off and stop playing to preserve your buffs. If you want to log off to go make dinner or put your kids to bed, that’s completely fine and the timing works in your favor. But if you still want to repair your gear, shop for consumables, or run a dungeon with your friends, then it’s not great to be losing precious minutes on your buffs, or worse, risk dying and losing them entirely. We’ve been wanting to do something about that side-effect, without completely abandoning our philosophy for WoW Classic, so we’re going to try something new in Patch 1.13.7: The Chronoboon Displacer.

What is it?

The Chronoboon Displacer is an item you buy which takes a snapshot of your world buffs, such as Rallying Cry of Dragonslayer, Songflower, etc. and saves them for use at a later time. Of course we don’t want to change things too radically, so it comes with some significant restrictions: While you are under the effects of the Chronoboon Displacer, you can’t benefit from any of the world buffs that it’s holding for you. That keeps you from getting a second set of buffs, and then still feeling like you need to log off. Also, when you release the buffs from the Chronoboon Displacer, it puts the item on a 1 hour cooldown so that you can’t toggle your buffs on for bosses and off for the rest of the raid.

How does it work?

First, you collect all your world buffs the way you normally would – getting your summon to Dire Maul, a portal back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar for your Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer, a quick trip to Yojamba Isle to turn in the Heart of Hakkar, or whatever subset of world buffs your raid expects or that you feel comfortable with. Then you activate your Chronoboon Displacer, which creates a Supercharged Cronoboon Displacer in your inventory and an aura which holds the captured state of your world buffs. You can mouse over that aura at any time to see which buffs are stored, and how much time is stored on them. You can then go about your business, secure in the knowledge that your world buffs are saved and ready for use when you need them most. When you’re ready to restore them, simply activate the Supercharged Chronoboon Displacer and it will break apart, releasing the stored auras back onto your character.

Where do I get one?

Well, given the complex temporal mechanics involved, you obviously need to make a deal with a Bronze Dragon, and you can find a friendly one named Chromie located in Andorhal in the Western Plaguelands. Of course she’ll likely want your help repairing the time stream first, but once you’ve helped her out with that, she’ll be happy to sell you as many Chronoboon Displacers as your heart desires.

Why now?

We launched Classic with an intent to keep the game data the same as it was originally, and we wanted to make sure we delivered on that promise, but now that we’ve been through all the content phases we planned before launch, we took a step back to consider what it really means to have the world buff system stay this way in Classic Era. A persistent world where everybody is traveling around for magical items and spells to maximize their power is fine, but one where they then stop playing to avoid wasting them seems wrong. Having an additional stop that lets you “bottle your buffs” seems like a thematically appropriate change to alleviate that problem.

We know this is a change, and any change to Classic is something we want to be careful with, but in this case, the fact that playing optimally literally requires you to stop playing was just too much for us to sit idly by. If you have any concerns about ways this might be abused, please post them here so we can address them. We hope you’ll all find this change as exciting as we do!