Blizzard removes controversial mechanic from upcoming WoW: Dragonflight raid boss

The next World of Warcraft: Dragonflight raid was going to make a throwback to a mechanic from Classic WoW, but Blizzard has walked back its decision to implement it into the game. 

The penultimate boss of the game’s next raid, Aberrus, is the Echo of Neltharion, the father of the dragon Nefarian, who players fought all the way back in 2005 when Blackwing Lair was current content. In his Blackwing Lair encounter, Nefarian was infamous for a “class call” mechanic that caused a specific debuff or problem based on one of the raid’s random present classes, such as locking all Druids into Cat Form or breaking Hunters’ ranged weapons. 

In Aberrus, the Echo of Neltharion was set to have a similar mechanic that would have caused even more uncontrolled chaos based on which classes guilds brought to the fight. But players became skeptical of the mechanic’s reappearance since it was believed that it would cause imbalanced class-stacking during the encounter. 

When the encounter was tested on the WoW PTR several weeks ago, certain groups did stack classes to gain information about the fight, while also making an effort to determine which classes’ debuffs were the easiest to deal with. This testing period evidently gave Blizzard enough of a sample size to make the decision to remove the mechanic ahead of the raid’s release next month. 

Echo of Neltharion’s class call mechanic would have given certain classes a debuff that caused them to deal damage to all creatures and players around them, assisting them in the fight with increased power, but at a cost. Now, Neltharion will target certain “players” with Corruption as opposed to certain “classes.”

WoW Dragonflight Patch 10.1 will release on the live servers on May 2, with Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible going live one week later on May 9.