Blizzard is hard at work with not one but two releases in the World of Warcraft franchise. With World of Warcraft: Shadowlands set for launch on November 23rd, the developers are also working towards the release of the Naxxramas raid in World of Warcraft: Classic.
The entire point of World of Warcraft: Classic, of course, is to maintain the game in as close of a condition as they can to the original 2004 release of World of Warcraft as they can, which can lead to some interesting decisions.
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Today, Blizzard announced that they were purposefully programming a bug from the original Sapphiron fight in Naxxramas back into the new release. This was done specifically to keep the fight’s difficulty as close to how it was at release.
In short, the spell will now tick every two seconds, which is consistent with the way in which it originally worked. However, there was a random chance for an extra tick to appear, effectively doubling the damage of that tick with a twofer.
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“While the behavior that led to it originally occurring every two seconds instead of every one second was a bug, it was consistent enough to be as indistinguishable from a text bug in the Aura description,” Blizzard writes, referring to Sapphiron’s frost aura.
“Choosing to go with the original intent would result in almost twice as much damage as players experienced in 2006, so in the end that makes this decision pretty clear.”
The developers provided an extensive dive into the mechanic, which you can read more about here and how they managed to create this, as well as what led them down the path of rationale that they chose.
This is far from the first time that Blizzard has made the choice of choosing to keep an undesired effect from the original title versus fixing it now that they have the means and awareness to do so, either, as they typically keep the game as similar as possible.
Back in February, they also addressed fans being upset over an exploit where players were teaming up cross-faction to kill specific NPCs to get a world buff faster. Their answer then was simple – annoying or not, that was how it worked in Vanilla, so it’s staying.
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There’s plenty more that they have in the works as they push closer and closer to this launch, so keep your eyes open and expect to see a few more changes (or similarities). As Naxxramas approaches, Blizzard will soon have to make a decision on the future of Classic.