In World of Warcraft Classic and “The Burning Crusade Classic”, WoW is not quite as polished as it is in the retail version of the game. This sometimes makes for funny effects or just really strong buffs that the developers probably never intended to be exploited like this.

A little chicken is now causing a stir – well, strictly speaking a machine.

Engineers can summon the “Gnome Battle Chicken” to create a small, mechanical companion that will assist them in battle for 90 seconds. Most excitingly, the mechanical chicken can give its owner and all party members the “Battlecrow” buff, which increases speed by 5%.

What makes the chicken so strong? The 5% speed buff stacks up to 5 times, giving the character a full 25% speed – for a whopping 4 minutes. While this is only possible if all 5 party members summon a chicken, it’s hardly a hindrance. Previously, it was a bit random if and when you got the buff – but now players have found a way to make the chicken scream almost instantly.

In most cases, the buff is enough to last an entire boss fight, making it drastically easier.

Several YouTubers show how to get the buff quite reliably, such as here:

What does Blizzard have to say about it? According to a forum post from Blizzard, they are aware that players specifically exploit the little chicken. One has already made some small changes, so the buff no longer remains beyond the logout. Previously, it was possible to stack the buff many dozens of times by simply logging out in between. Now this is no longer possible, so that the buff reaches its peak after a maximum of 5 stacks.

Blizzard is keeping an eye on this, but currently does not want to adjust anything further. This is also because this behavior is more difficult to generate, such as war drums, for which you only have to click a single button every 2 minutes.

Why is this even a problem? Basically, of course, you can argue whether using these mechanics is really a problem. After all, the bosses in Burning Crusade Classic aren’t particularly strong, and a coordinated team can easily defeat them without taking advantage of such mechanics. Besides, it was also possible in Burning Crusade.

However, one criticism that Blizzard wants to address is the visibility of the buff in the log files. This is because in the combat text and the evaluation of the boss fight, it is sometimes not apparent whether players have used such a buff or even how many batches of it. This makes it difficult to keep leaderboards and filter out such “exploits”. Here Blizzard wants to see if this can be displayed more clearly.

What do you guys think about such exploitation of game mechanics? Should it stay exactly the same because “that’s how it went back then” or should Blizzard intervene here because it’s now being used on a larger scale?