World of Warcraft

WoW Classic: Frost aura at Sapphiron every second - bug or feature?

December 10, 2022

Almost a week ago, interested players were allowed to test the two final bosses from Naxxramas for the first time on the WoW Classic public test server: Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad. Thanks to the included buffs (more damage, more healing, more life and 200 frost resistance), the two meanies were sent to the dust by various raids quite quickly. Nevertheless, the fights showed that you shouldn't underestimate the undead dragon in particular.

The fact that many players fell to their knees in the fight against Sapphiron despite 200 and more frost resistance and lots of health points was mainly due to the constantly ticking frost aura, which nibbles away at the health of all raid participants every second. In fact, many testers thought this was a bug, as they had in mind that Sapphiron's Frost Aura should only deal damage every two seconds instead of every second. Tickets were created and the answer from Blizzard came quickly: the aura behaves the same as on the reference client of patch 1.12. Ergo: no bug.

However, due to player feedback, the designers have taken another look at the whole thing and have now commented on it in an extensive forum post. In the following, we have summarized the most important findings for you.

• After investigation, the Frost Aura will now be adjusted so that it will "only" deal damage every two seconds on the live servers.
• The developers looked at videos from the vanilla era and found that the aura mostly caused damage every two seconds, but occasionally every second.
• A re-examination on the reference client revealed a similar picture: most of the time the aura ticked every two seconds, but sometimes every second.
• During the research, the developers also came across a hotfix for patch 3.0.8, with which the aura was fixed at two seconds and where the responsible parties spoke of an incorrect tooltip, which has now been corrected.
• The final solution was finally in the original code from back then. Actually, the developers of Vanilla (which a dev from the original team then confirmed) wanted the Aura to inflict damage every second. However, the structure of the original script and a bug made sure that the ticks interfered with each other and thus shifted by one second in most cases => the aura ticked almost continuously only every two seconds.
• Since the players of that time had to struggle with a two-second aura in most cases, Blizzard will also adjust the frost aura of Sapphiron in Classic to two seconds.

Especially the healers will surely be happy about this, right?

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