WoW Classic can even have an impact on Battle for Azeroth. At least for Hunters, that’s good news.
When World of Warcraft Classic was announced, many players were concerned that the classic version could be altered to be more like the current WoW. However, that does not seem to be the case, but rather the opposite. Game Director Ion Hazzikostas recently explained in an interview how Classic could even help bring back a popular ability for Hunters in “Battle for Azeroth”: Eyes of the Beast.
What were Eyes of the Beast? Eyes of the Beast was an ability that could be channeled for a long time. During this time, the Hunter could not move themselves but instead control their companion directly. This was a popular practice in some dungeon groups to pull enemies, but role-players also loved being able to command their beast directly. Overall, many Hunters felt a stronger connection with their pet when they could control it directly.
Why was the ability removed? With Patch 4.0, which was meant to usher in the age of Cataclysm, several abilities from various classes were removed. The idea was to remove more “useless” abilities that were not used in combat anyway – Eyes of the Beast definitely fell into that category.
In the current beta of WoW: Classic, there are funny incidents: Players report bugs that are actually features.
Classic could bring salvation: With the release of Classic, Blizzard had to re-develop the code for Eyes of the Beast. Hazzikostas indicated in an interview that this could also be reintroduced in the live version of WoW. He stated:
“We removed the Hunter ability ‘Eyes of the Beast’ and as a result of several code adjustments, it was virtually impossible to restore the ability in modern WoW – it would have been a massive amount of work. Now, to create Classic, we had to do most of that work.
There are still some bugs to fix, but thanks to the work we’ve done on ‘Eyes of the Beast’ to realize it, there’s no reason we shouldn’t also give Hunters that ability back in Battle for Azeroth.”
A confirmation is certainly not that yet, but just bringing up the possibility sounds optimistic.
Players were outraged back then: However, Blizzard did not anticipate the amount of negative feedback that this decision would generate. Many Hunters were angry and demanded the ability be restored. For many, it was one of the core features of the Hunters and even if it had no great use in combat, it was still a cool spell that defined the Hunters.
Code was irretrievably lost: Blizzard, however, stated back then that Eyes of the Beast could not simply be restored. The code for it was lost with the restructuring of some internal game structures – irretrievably. Although they wanted to take the feedback to heart, the ability could not be restored for that reason.
Would you be happy about the return of Eyes of the Beast? Or is it good that the ability is no longer present in the current WoW?
