World of Warcraft: Classic is meant to be a perfect recreation of the original 2004 Vanilla version of WoW, and it serves for that purpose – for better or worse. When you recreate something perfectly, you bring the flaws along with it.
Of course, what we’re discussing today isn’t a flaw, per se, or even a bug to be exploited. Rather it’s the cooperation of players on opposite factions from each other to get a powerful buff for one of them.
If you’re unfamiliar with WoW: Classic, there’s a raid boss named Onyxia, the Broodmother. This fierce black dragon is one of the most well-known WoW mobs, and has a double use in Classic. When you kill Onyxia, you’ll be able to loot her head. Ignoring how you fit the severed head of a giant black dragon into your backpack, you can return to your capital city – Stormwind for Alliance, Orgrimmar for Horde – and give the head to an NPC. Doing so prompts a city-wide announcement and significantly powerful 2-hour buff for everyone in the faction.
The exploit in question regards the timer of this buff. As it takes two hours, the buff cannot be renewed for two hours either – so players that weren’t in the city or logged on are out of luck. If you log on two seconds after the buff is given out, you won’t be able to get it for another two hours – assuming someone else has another head of Onyxia to turn in.
This buff is powerful for everyone, but when you give it to a low level character (which are incredibly plentiful in capital cities), the difficult leveling grind becomes noticeably easier. This has prompted players to find a way to end the timer faster by having a priest of the opposite faction come into their city and mind-control the buff-giving NPC. Doing so turns them hostile to their faction, allowing players to slay the NPC and restart the timer when they respawn.
Of course, not all players are okay with this “exploit,” and most enemy priests are still kill-on-site when they enter an opposing city. Many players have been reporting those committing these actions for cheating, which has finally prompted a response on Blizzard’s part.
In short, they won’t be doing anything about it. Classic is meant to be a faithful recreation, and this “new” exploit is something that was alive and well in 2004. While they feel that having the two warring factions cooperate in such a way is somewhat antithetical to the gameplay, it isn’t strictly against the rules.
Overall, Blizzard will be allowing this to continue, and are hesitant to make any sorts of changes to the Vanilla-faithful title now or at any point in the future. It seems like if we want to make it stop, all we can do is kill the priest.
