World of Warcraft: 3.0.3's Largest Nerf

You might be wondering- what's the big deal about a broom?

Well, for those of us who have been playing World of Warcraft for the last half a month, there was an event called Hallow's End that integrated candy, tricks, and loot into 15 days of festive fun, traveling, and boss-slaying. One of the unsung champions of this event was none other than the Magic Broom.

What this little guy did was nix the usual 3-second cast time to mount. There were major implications due to this in multiple areas- you saw every PVPer sporting this guy since you could pop on a 100% speed mount immediately upon leaving combat. Advantages are even better for Rogues and the Night Elf class, who sport Vanish and Shadowmeld to immediately leave combat. I presume it's a similar situation for Hunters with Feign Death.

In PVE, suddenly grinding low-level quests and monsters weren't as big of a hassle. Usually monsters are spaced 20-30 yards apart, and the run time wasted during a typical quest could be upwards of 5 minutes. Assuming it takes 15 minutes to do a quest with some traveling, that's 33% of your time spent running monster to monster! This cut that downtime to 1 minute or less, and it was suddenly fun to chain-quest again.

I think Blizzard realizes the benefits this item brought, but its effect in PVP probably made it overpowered. I don't see anything wrong with having no cast time on mounts- it makes for a twitchier game- and I'd gladly take it back. It's a drag that the game feels it needs to waste time just to waste time by re-implementing the cast time to mount. I say be done with it and make every mount casting time-free.

Your customers who like spending their time playing, not casting and standing still, will thank you.

(In other news, I hope Blizzard finally fixed the achievement "A Simple Re-Quest". I'd like to enter a Battleground again without having to worry about it wiping the number!)