Blizzard plans to hotfix Black Lotus spawns in World of Warcraft Classic

The Black Lotus is the rarest herb and one of the most sought-after crafting reagents in World of Warcraft Classic. And today, Blizzard announced that it intends to make some slight changes to the way that it spawns in the open world. 

In the original iteration of WoW, the Black Lotus had about 10 spawn locations in just a few of the world’s highest level zones. Despite having just a few spots that it could be found, the herb had a high level of rarity to it because only one could spawn in a zone at a time. After one was picked, it would take between 45 to 90 minutes for the next one to pop up.

This wasn’t too much of an issue for WoW in the original version of the game. But with the increased population in Classic relative to vanilla and the amount of knowledge the player base has at its disposal, farming Black Lotuses started to get out of hand. 

Since there was such a limited supply of the herb available no matter how efficiently it was farmed, the price of Black Lotuses has steadily risen to extremely high levels. It’s now to the point that many people have started doing things like using multiple accounts to camp out at spawn points or even farm on low-population servers and transfer to larger ones.

In addition, some people have been reported to use bots to try to farm Black Lotuses and sell them to people for real life money on unsanctioned websites. 

With this situation getting out of hand, Blizzard said today that it intends to shorten the time between Black Lotus spawns. It also plans to add more potential spawn locations to increase supply while reducing the potential for Black Lotus “mafias” to control the market.

“In original WoW, designers planned Black Lotus around a technical limitation,” WoW community manager Kaivax said. “We no longer have that limitation, but it gives us a design intention that we can work with: Black Lotus was supposed to spawn in the widest variety of locations, while there could only be one up at a time in each zone. As always, our goal is to minimize differences from original World of Warcraft, and we feel this is a case where we can follow that design intention in a way that is warranted by modern conditions as well as beneficial to players.”

The decision by Blizzard marks one of the few times that the developer has strayed away from the original way that WoW worked. During Classic’s development, one of the biggest talking points about the game was whether Blizzard was going to make any changes to the way the game originally was. 

Considering how strongly Classic fans felt about there being “#NoChanges,” Blizzard tried to keep things as close to vanilla as possible. But as the game has slowly developed with numerous patches mimicking the release of vanilla, it’s become more evident that the “Vanilla Experience” isn’t quite as feasible as some might have thought considering the game’s massive current player base.