WoW Classic Changes to Black Lotus Spawns & WSG
Furious • Published May 28, 2020
One of the ongoing issues with World of Warcraft Classic has been the complaints about spawn rates with the higher population on realms. Black Lotus is an herb gathered from high level zones including Winterspring, Eastern Plaguelands, Silithus, and the Burning Steppes.
While even in Vanilla they were rare, they are now almost impossible to get in any type of large quantity without buying them on the auction house. These flowers are used for quite a few flasks and alchemy recipes, causing frustration among players at the high cost due to them being farmed constantly.
Blizzard has now made changes to account for the increased populations that should leave the flowers still rare, but more inline with the original intent from Vanilla.
Additionally they are implementing changes in the Warsong Gulch battleground. Players have taken to finding exploitative areas where the opposite faction is not able to reach them in order to return their flag. In this case the changes Blizzard is making is a little more… interesting.
They talked about the possibility of using invisible gates but from what they said that doesn’t work for all scenarios. Accordingly if you go into one of those areas, you’ll just die instead.
Hopefully that will correct the behavior issues we’ve been seeing in the PvP battleground, but you can always count on players to show ingenuity when finding exploits.
References
Via hotfixes, we’re working on several quality-of-life improvements that should go live in the next few days.
Black Lotus scarcity has been consistently among the top issues we’ve seen player feedback about, so we’ve decided to update how we handle Black Lotus spawns. Since the launch of WoW Classic, the game has used the spawn times and locations from original World of Warcraft, but population and social factors have led to Black Lotus being much more scarce than it was in original WoW. While these issues affect all mining and herb nodes to some degree, Black Lotus is especially affected because it has the special property of only having one spawn up at a time in each of the zones it spawns in.
In original WoW, designers planned Black Lotus around a technical limitation – only 10 spawn locations per node type could be active at the same time in the same zone. We no longer have that limitation, but it gives us a design intention that we can work with: Black Lotus was supposed to spawn in the widest variety of locations, while there could only be one up at a time in each zone. As always, our goal is to minimize differences from original World of Warcraft, and we feel this is a case where we can follow that design intention in a way that is warranted by modern conditions as well as beneficial to players.
We’re going to increase the spawn rate of Black Lotus, and we’re going to add many additional possible spawn locations in each of the Black Lotus zones. With a different hotfix, we’re working on making it so that a player cannot see a Black Lotus on-screen or on their minimap if they’re dead, unless they have 300 Herbalism.
For Warsong Gulch, we’ve identified a number of locations in the battleground where clever players have found ways to get to a place they were never intended to go. These exploits are decidedly unfair, so we’re putting a stop to them. In most cases, the way we prevent such things is to place an invisible gate that blocks the unintended path. However, that’s sometimes impossible, so we make the out-of-bounds location fatal.
We’re also working on a hotfix that should put a stop to one small annoyance – now, if a player is actively engaged with the mailbox or bank, they will be considered “busy” if someone else tries to initiate a trade with them.
We’ll have all of these changes noted for you in the next Hotfixes Update that follows them going live.
Thank you!