The small mechanical chickens in Burning Crusade Classic are the big stars. They are better than any battle frenzy and any war drum.
In World of Warcraft Classic and “The Burning Crusade Classic”, WoW is not quite as polished as in the retail version of the game. This sometimes leads to funny effects or just really strong buffs, which the developers probably never intended to be exploited in this way.
A little chicken is now causing excitement – well, strictly speaking, a machine.
The “Gnome Battle Chicken” can be summoned by engineers, creating a small mechanical companion that assists them in battle for 90 seconds. Particularly exciting: The mechanical chicken can give its owner and all party members the “Battle Squawker” buff, which increases speed by 5%.
What makes the chicken so powerful? The speed buff of 5% is stackable up to 5 times, giving the character a total of 25% speed – for a whopping 4 minutes. This is only possible if all 5 party members summon a chicken, but that poses little obstacle. Previously, it was a bit dependent on chance whether and when you received the buff – but players have now found a method to have the chicken basically squawk immediately.
The buff usually lasts long enough to endure a whole boss fight, making it significantly easier.
Several YouTubers show how to reliably obtain the buff, like here:
What does Blizzard say about it? According to a forum post from Blizzard, they are aware that players are strategically exploiting the little chicken. They have already made some minor changes, so the buff no longer persists beyond logout. Previously, it was possible to stack the buff many dozens of times by simply logging out in between. This is no longer possible, so the buff reaches its peak after a maximum of 5 stacks.
Blizzard is keeping an eye on it, but currently does not want to make further adjustments. This is also because this behavior is more difficult to generate than, for example, with war drums, for which you only need to click a single button every 2 minutes.
Why is this even a problem? Basically, one can certainly argue about whether using this mechanic is really a problem. After all, the bosses in Burning Crusade Classic are not particularly strong, and a coordinated team can easily defeat them without exploiting such mechanics. Moreover, it was also possible in Burning Crusade.
One criticism that Blizzard wants to address is the visibility of the buff in the log files. Because in the combat text and the evaluation of the boss fight, it is sometimes not clear whether players used such a buff or how many stacks they had. This makes it difficult to maintain leaderboards and filter out such “exploits”. Blizzard wants to see if this can be displayed more clearly.
What do you think about such an exploitation of game mechanics? Should it stay that way because it “was like that back then” or should Blizzard intervene because it is now being used on a larger scale?
