Blizzard today continued to expand its implementation of “#SomeChanges” for the upcoming World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic by again editing the way leatherworking drums will work.
In a post on its forums, Blizzard announced that it’s adding a two-minute Tinnitus debuff to players who benefit from leatherworking drums.
During the original expansion in the mid-2000s, leatherworking drums were extremely powerful, and on many private servers, the meta that developed required every player to have the profession.
Every raid was incentivized to have every player be a leatherworker and use the powerful item on a rotation for the entirety of each fight.
Coming into TBC Classic, Blizzard said that it’d look into changing drums so that everyone didn’t feel the need to roll leatherworking.
“Ultimately, the ‘some changes’ philosophy is a method for identifying problems where specific design choices made in 2007 don’t completely match the design intent of 2007,” Blizzard said. “Having identified a clear issue of that type with drums, we naturally look for changes that were made at the time to address the problem. Tinnitus is exactly such a fix.”
Last month, Blizzard confirmed a couple of changes that would make them slightly less valuable to raids early on in the expansion. But after the release of Zul’Aman, the devs intended to release the more powerful updated version that players know the item to be.
To many, that “change” appeared to be an inadequate response to the larger problem. More than likely, most hardcore players were going to feel like leatherworking was still a necessary evil.
While the Tinnitus debuff is a part of WoW history, it wasn’t added to the game until Patch 3.0 when Wrath of the Lich King was released, making it a significant change to TBC Classic.
The debuff makes it so that raids will still want leatherworkers. But instead of being forced to exclusively bring leatherworkers, 25-man raids will only need five, one for each group.
This change to TBC Classic will likely be welcomed by the game’s player base. To this point, it’s been one of the more popularly discussed alternatives to the way leatherworking drums worked in original TBC.
