WoW Classic Era Patch: Changes Removed for World Buffs & Druid Polearm Ability

Greetings everyone,

Last week, we announced several updates to our Classic Era realms. These updates included changes originally developed for Season of Discovery but intentionally brought to Classic Era as well, such as one that specifically addressed a longstanding imbalance in World of Warcraft Classic, by providing Alliance players with the Might of Stormwind buff as a comparable buff to the Horde’s Warchief’s Blessing.

In that time, we have listened to the community response to changes in Classic Era and the concerns about what updates like this could mean for the future. Thank you for your feedback.

Effective immediately, we are reversing the following changes to Classic Era:

• Alliance players now have access to the Might of Stormwind, to a version of the Warchief’s Blessing world buff effect.
• Druids can now train and use polearms.
• The 6-hour wait between applications of Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer and Warchief’s Blessing has been reduced to 1 minute.

For everything it does perfectly, Classic Era is also beloved for its wonderful imperfections. These ‘perfectly imperfect’ elements and balance make up the texture of the overall experience, and we recognize that making changes to these, even with the intent of adding ‘quality of life’ updates – and particularly without discussing them with the community first – was shortsighted. Thank you, again, for your feedback.

Likewise, we want to provide a bit of insight into UI changes in WoW Classic, and specifically the recent Guild UI update in Classic Era. As we have spoken about in the past, one of the challenges the Classic team faces is recreating Classic experiences while running on modern World of Warcraft code. However, the games gain significant benefits from having this be the case – including at the most foundational level of being able to integrate with Battle.net services in the first place – but it also means that we can share backend code and bring in UI elements as updates from the modern game.

With respect to the Guild UI in Classic Era, although we have received feedback from Guild leaders that the updated UI improves their Guild management, we recognize that allowing in an unexpected change like this in Classic Era is substantively jarring and has an impact on the overall experience. We are committed to doing what is right by our players, and we are discussing additional options for the Guild UI as a team, while continuing to look to the community for feedback.

Just as importantly (if not more so), we recognize that all of these updates to Classic Era came abruptly and without warning. This lapse in communication was not in line with our values, and we need to do better here. As it stands now, the Classic team philosophically has very little desire to bring gameplay-impacting changes to Classic Era. Moving forward, we will endeavor to discuss any potential community-led desire for changes with the community, well in advance of actually implementing any updates.

We have said since the beginning that World of Warcraft Classic has been a journey that has been cowritten by you, the players. Thank you, as always, for your passion, feedback and partnership.

Sincerely,

The WoW Classic Team