Have you guys seen the Drums of Battle change?

We’ve followed this discussion carefully, and we have a couple of thoughts that could stand to be clarified.

Looking Back

Drums of Battle were a meaningful part of the raiding experience in 2008. Sunwell Plateau was tuned with the improved Drums in place, and guilds tested the 2.4 PTR using them, and then all of the first Kil’jaeden kills in 2008 used them. Changes to how Drums work in this later phase of Burning Crusade Classic would make Sunwell Plateau harder or easier than it was in 2008. That would compel us to do raid tuning, which goes against our goal of establishing as much authenticity as possible. Yes, we’re planning on a progressive tuning model for the raids, but we want that to approximate how the original Burning Crusade played out.

The importance of professions in The Burning Crusade is part of the fabric of The Burning Crusade. While today the focus is on Leatherworking, we know that many casters will feel the need to pursue Tailoring, and PvP-focused warriors will feel that Blacksmithing is vital, and so forth. The changes made in the original Patch 2.3 were aimed specifically at bolstering the value of Leatherworking relative to those other professions.

Looking Ahead

In The Burning Crusade Classic, we want to provide an authentic experience. This means that while we are making some targeted changes where we think they’re appropriate to preserve the spirit and intent of The Burning Crusade’s original game design, we haven’t been planning to cause the value of Leatherworking to go way down over the course of the expansion.

The separation of Drums into two eras of items gives us a basis on which we can make tweaks as we navigate toward release. Players in 2007 felt that the early versions of the Drums were not really worth using. They had a cast time and a very small radius. Our intent in restoring that older version of the Drums for the first three phases of Burning Crusade Classic content is to approximate the evolution of professions through the early patches of original Burning Crusade.

Even though we’re only three days into the beta test, we’re looking forward to raid testing and endgame testing where we try out this pre-2.3 version of Drums. If they end up still feeling mandatory in a way that makes the early phases play out very differently than the original game, we’ll re-evaluate our design.

We’re also tweaking the Sunwell version. For example, the early design of the Drums in the beta today doesn’t include a change that we’ve put in to remove the additional resource costs on the Greater Drums. I think you’ll see that in next week’s new build of the beta.

We’re open to making further alterations, especially where a tweak still isn’t bringing the game to the authentic feel we’re going for. As always, we appreciate your constructive feedback on this issue and everything else.

Leatherworking drums have been a hot topic since we first started working on Burning Crusade, since they would make Leatherworking feel mandatory.

In the first few patches of original Burning Crusade, the drums had a cast time and smaller radius, which limited their effective use. Leatherworking was an unattractive profession at the time, so the drums were improved in patch 2.3. That led to the fond memories we all have of drum rotations as one of the added layers of teamwork in later Burning Crusade encounters.

Right now in the Burning Crusade Beta, all Leatherworking drums now have an Uncommon and Rare (i.e., “Greater”) version. Our current thinking is that the greater versions will be acquired via recipe drops from Zul’Aman.

While it’s true that we’re generally planning to implement items (and spells and maps and everything else) in their patch 2.4.3 state, this one stood out as something we should make an exception for. By default, we don’t want to change the behavior of items from patch to patch, so we think the right thing to do is to introduce the greater drums as a new item, so that the behavior of the original items doesn’t have to change.