World of Warcraft: Classic is dedicated to remaining as faithful to the Vanilla experience as it possibly can. This can come off in some fantastic ways, providing some excellent nostalgia and difficult gameplay to players that want to recapture that feeling or experience it for the first time.
However, this can also manifest itself in having some of the original bugs and glitches from Vanilla pop up in the new Classic experience. When this happens, Blizzard fixes some of them, but generally prefer to leave them there to remain faithful.
This may sound bizarre on the surface – a developer willingly leaving a bug in place just because other players once had to deal with it? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the developers to take this opportunity to fix problems they couldn’t before?
Regardless of how sound that logic might seem, Blizzard is completely dedicated to bringing the Vanilla experience back, as they promised. Generally, players are a fan of this – the title doesn’t have the same double-XP buff that the Retail servers have, which has been viewed favorably.
But sometimes this can get a bit confusing, leading Blizzard to need to step in. This arose with issues over the extra elemental damage that a handful of weapons are supposed to be dealing, as players weren’t able to see the extra damage.
Blizzard has clarified that the extra elemental damage from weapons like Thunderfury, while unintuitive, is working as intended in #WoWClassic.https://t.co/twDkzpAgow pic.twitter.com/G9iTy0zgWp
— Wowhead💙 (@Wowhead) July 3, 2020
This specifically deals with weapons like Iceblade Hacker, Warblade of Caer Darrow, and the legendary Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker. Responding to a user report, Blizzard publicly discussed the bug in question.
“We wanted to take a moment to clarify that the extra elemental damage from weapons such as Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, Iceblade Hacker, and Warblade of Caer Darrow are behaving as expected in WoW Classic and do not actually cause additional non-physical damage to the target.”
Blizzard clarifies that these weapons do still inflict extra damage as stated, but that this is added to the damage being dealt, leading for it to not be present in the combat log separately. This damage is instead calculated as additional physical damage.
To add to the confusion, the combat log will display the damage if an enemy with an elemental shield blocks it. While Blizzard admits that this isn’t quite intuitive, they also state that it’s working as intended, despite technically being a bug.
“Ultimately the way these weapons function is a very old quirk/bug with how original World of Warcraft was built,” they state. “While definitely strange and uninuitive, these weapons are behaving exactly as they did in the original game and we have no intention of changing them to behave differently in WoW Classic.”
