Because the callers are coming, World of Warcraft has to revise an old boss. Nefarian in Blackwing Lair learns anew.
World of Warcraft is now old – quite old. With nearly two decades under its belt, Azeroth has experienced numerous instances, raids, and bosses that players had to face. Some of them have remained forever in memory and are still updated even to this day. Since the Dracthyr as a new race are added in Dragonflight, one of the earliest raid bosses from “Vanilla” is being revised once again.
Which boss is it about? It is about Nefarian from Blackwing Lair – the raid is likely remembered by many veterans simply as “BWL”. It was the second major raid of classic World of Warcraft and took players high into Blackrock Mountain to fight against the black dragons and ultimately Nefarian, the son of Deathwing.
Nefarian was long considered one of the toughest bosses since almost the entire raid required a special cloak, and the fight spanned multiple phases – something that was rather unusual back then.
Why is he being revised? The revision of Nefarian is due to the introduction of the Dracthyr, or rather the new class “Callers”. Nefarian has a very special ability called “Class Calls”. The black dragon always calls out a single class and then places a negative effect on them. For example, mages start to transform their allies into different animals using Polymorph, while paladins strengthen the dragon boss with their blessings.
The Class Calls are powerful “control effects” tailored to each class individually.
What does Nefarian do with Dracthyr? When Nefarian is in battle with a Caller, that class can also be mentioned individually. Nefarian then says (translated):
“Callers, no more than pitiful whelplings. No wonder my father aborted your experiment.”
Callers will subsequently receive the “Pitiful Whelpling” debuff for a few seconds. This reduces all damage dealt and all healing done by 99.9%.
Is this even important? Not really. Since Callers already start at a high level, they can kill Nefarian with a single ability. In the normal course of battle, a Caller will never see this ability – they really have to go out of their way to get hit by it.
Also, from a narrative perspective, it makes little sense for Nefarian to refer to the Callers, as Nefarian was killed in the story long before the Callers were ever freed from their prison.
Nevertheless, it is interesting that Blizzard, even after 17 years, does not forget to adjust old bosses and their abilities so that all classes can be affected by them.
What do you think? A cool, detailed piece of nostalgia? Or a waste of the developers’ time?
In WoW, old content often changes – that’s how the most popular raid became the least popular dungeon.
