A World of Warcraft Classic player recently chronicled an experience they had when they witnessed the town of Booty Bay completely lose its entire population of players within a span of just a few seconds—all thanks to the cyclic, min-max-focused nature of WoW’s world buffs.
In a post on the WoW Classic subreddit earlier today, a player named Onelifetime took a series of screenshots showing a completely packed Booty Bay, only for it to empty out just a few seconds after the Spirit of Zandalar world buff got applied to everyone hanging out in the pirate port city.
The Spirit of Zandalar world buff is obtained after someone hands in the Heart of Hakkar, which is obtained after a player kills Hakkar in Zul’Gurub. When a player completes that quest, everyone in the Cape of Stranglehtorn receives a buff that increases their movement speed by 10 percent and all stats by 15 percent for two hours—a must-have for players wanting to step foot into Classic WoW’s raids, especially on Hardcore mode.
In Onelifetime’s post, you can clearly see hundreds of people packed into Booty Bay waiting for the world buff to be deployed. During that time, you can also see Mages advertising sales for portals in an effort to capitalize on people going on their world tour of world buffs.
World buffs require you to be in the right place at the right time, and almost always, players will use portals to get from city to city collecting these buffs when they spawn in hopes that they don’t miss them. In this instance, Booty Bay goes from overpopulated to dead-empty in a matter of seconds, and Onelifetime illustrated that phenomenon perfectly.
All of the players who once populated Booty Bay immediately ported out of there in an effort to get to either Stormwind or Orgrimmar, presumably in pursuit of the Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer world buff. In Onelifetime’s screenshots, it’s almost poetic how nearly every empty space that was occupied by a person gets filled by a portal shortly after they leave.
World buffs are a controversial feature of Classic WoW as many players insist that they encourage stale gameplay. Certain subsections of Classic WoW raiders will log in to get their world buffs, which only last for two hours of in-game time, and log out immediately after grabbing them in hopes of saving their useful duration until raid night. Although this style of gameplay is a bit tedious and annoying at times, it doesn’t feel all too bad considering you’ll want every possible advantage you can get when playing on Hardcore difficulty. If logging out of your character to preserve a buff is what it’s going to take to keep your character alive, then more power to you.
Published: Oct 6, 2023 02:00 pm