wow Changes to Consumables in Unrated Battlegrounds With Season 3

[Staff 1,195]

Blizzard have announced they will be allowing consumables (such as War Mode consumables and engineering bombs) in unrated battleground and Brawls (but not Blitz), with some changes to the items themselves.

Consumables (Source)

We’ve seen feedback like this, expressing interest in the ability to bring consumable items into unrated PvP environments to spice up the flow of combat. Over the years, we put tight restrictions on these to minimize disruption. We felt this was especially important during a time when the solo battleground player did not have alternative forms of content if the chaotic and sandboxy nature of unrated battlegrounds became too overwhelming.

Now, with a variety of game modes to pick from and a much narrower gap in power disparity between players, we want to take an opportunity to review this philosophy. In a hotfix going out tomorrow with the start of Season 3, we will adjust a variety of Dragonflight consumables to enable their use in Unrated Battlegrounds. We will also make a handful of adjustments to War Mode consumables to make them more practical for players to acquire in bulk. Some items will also receive some moderate tuning adjustments (outlined below) to ensure that they are impactful, but not disruptive. The most significant change to note is that the War Mode items in the below list have had their cooldowns standardized to 5 minutes, shared with other typical combat consumables. Engineering bombs remain on their own separate 5 minute cooldown.

With this hotfix, all of the following items will be enabled for unrated battlegrounds and battleground brawls, excluding Battleground Blitz. Please note that some tooltips may include zone restrictions that are no longer applicable after this change and will be corrected in a future patch.

Engineering Bombs
The chance for bomb malfunctions is now standardized to 5% for all players while in a battleground, regardless of other factors.

• Grease Grenade
• Primal Deconstruction Charge
• Polarity Bomb
• Gravitational Displacer
• Sticky Warp Grenade
• and their EZ-Thro counterparts

War Mode Consumables

• Curious Primordial Fungus
• Pest Fogger
• Wild Dragon Fruit
• Wild Truffle
  • Duration reduced to 12 seconds (was 20 seconds).
• Energized Temporal Spores
• Gritty Stone Potion
  • Speed penalty reduced to 15% (was 30%).
• Warbanner of Ire
  • Now on the Battle Standard cooldown of 10 minutes.
  • Bonus primary stat reduced to 5% (was 10%).
• Prismatic Snail Mucus
  • Critical strike chance bonus reduced to 30% (was 50%).
• Soothing Emerald Tea
  • Now on the Healing Potion cooldown of 5 minutes.
  • Immediate health increased to 25% (was 20%). Health over time increased to 40% (was 15%).
• Volatile Crimson Embers
  • Damage bonus increased to 30% (was 25%).
  • Damage taken over time reduced to 1% every 3 seconds (was 3% every 3 seconds).
  • Duration increased to 24 seconds (was 15 seconds).

Additionally, we will adjust the War Mode consumables to no longer be Unique and no longer have charges. Instead, these will be stackable items all the way up to 200. We will also reduce their cost from 100 Bloody Tokens down to 50 for a stack of 5, and Seltherex will now also offer these items for 500 Honor for a stack of 5.

For players who may already have a few of these items when this conversion takes place, you should retain the same remaining number of uses left even if your stack size does not visually reflect this.

Finally, we’d like to encourage everyone to share feedback on all of this. We’ll be monitoring it closely when making further decisions about how to approach this sort of gameplay.