During TBC when the Zombie Invasion event hit, the one prior to release of WotLK. For about 8 hours (in the evening) if you swapped your ranged weapon when in zombie mode you reset ALL your health. We created a raid and made a huge zombie army of players and AI to raid the enemy cities. Even though there were cleansers who could 1 shot zombies, we massed so many zombies we could zerg him. We also used this tactic to get Black War Bear (kill all enemy leaders) achievement just after it released. Do note, city guards and leader were already upgraded to their WotLK level at this point. Our lvl 70 zombie army, with infinite health, just zerged the lvl 83 elite NPCs. This was hotfixed the same night.
One of the ones I did was with the Bug Trio. When they allowed them to be tamed initially in Wrath, they had no death animation. Which was absolutely insane, and I wanted to test the limits of it. So I rushed my hunter to 80, tamed a bug, and went into Ruby Sanctum to test the limits of this. I had the bug pull all the mobs up until the first boss, stationed it away from me, and just had it kill all the mobs. Which. Worked. Then, one final test was solo’ing the first boss at level (the split one), and it took a long time. The boss enraged and the bug just kept on trucking. I defeated the first boss. Quietly hearthed and never told anyone of this.
One of our hunts back in Vanilla "solo'd" Broodlord Lashlayer by pulling him to Vaelastrasz room and kitting him inbetween 1st and 2nd floor. That's how we got the first kill of the server... Not really proud, but nobody knew :p
I was proudly part of 2 exploit raids in my early wow days, both server first kills. -At 75%, Emeriss, one of the four dragons of nightmares, cast a shadow debuff that did 20% of a player's health every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. If you used an "ultra-flash shadow reflector", you could reflect that debuff to him, and kill him in seconds. -Initially, Azuregos did not give a debuff when you died. The debuff prevented you from attacking him for 10 minutes(?). A good old graveyard zerg got us the kill.
Or get the debuff on your hunter per, dismiss it. Get warlock summoned to Org bank and run the pet around town while a priest spam heals/bubbles the pet. Lots of deaths!
When you mentioned that hunter pet glitch with the blue bug, I remembered what was probably the best ever glitch in WoW. It wasn't widely known because it only occurred for a day or so in just a few servers and only inside Warsong Gulch if I remember correctly. If you unequipped any piece of gear, and then equipped it again, the item's stats would keep adding up and up on you every time you repeated that process. In effect, if you did that many times you would turn into an elite, immortal killing machine with the health of a raid boss and capable of one shotting anyone with any damaging ability. It only worked for PvP and, of course, people who exploited it got punished.
There was also an exploit in TBC, the Shade of Aran encounter in Karazhan. You basically just had everyone stay on the bridge outside the room, while a hunter misdirect pulls boss to your tank, or the tank can use a ranged attack/taunt to pull boss, the door closes during the encounter, and then he runs through the door where you fight him on the bridge and avoid the majority of his AoE damage.
Why am I seeing the Hakkar poison as an "exploit"? It was, in every essence, the MECHANIC of the fight. Hunters dragged a serpent into the raid, you got poisned, Hakkar hurt himself during the drain. *headscratch*
Oh man listening to number 2 brings me back to the good ol days of not requiring any healers on ultraxion when you had a bear tank because the 4 set literally made it possible for the bear to solo heal the raid with 0 issues.
To be fair to the dude who regrew the platforms in the Lich King fight, the saronite bombs were a regular part of his rotation. Preach does a video on it explaining it more in depth.
These are ones I did. Some of these are widely known though. 1) TBC: Permanent tranquility. Because tranquility was a channel BUFF (and that buff healed) that said "heals all targets around you by x amount" what you'd do is get in a duel with a raid member, have them either push/fear you into the instance. But RIGHT before they did it you hit tranquility. You time it right, you entered Sunwell with a permanent tranquility. You could also use all your other spells, just couldn't use Tranquility or it'd remove the buff. This one was posted all over the forums and they shortly removed it. Luckily, our guild got to use it to beat sunwell and gear a lot of characters. 2) TBC: Holy smite priest. Holy smite priests were the best of the best in terms of burst damage. However, they were so mana inefficient you couldn't do this in a raid. What could you do? Well, I forget the ability's name, but paladins had this seal that increased holy damage taken by 155. The thing? This buff stacked. All your prot and ret paladins could push their seals on it and buff holy damage taken by 155 x [number of paladins]. But... those paladins had only a fraction of their damage as holy. Enter the holy smite priest who could make short work of ANY boss with this raid set up in TBC, sunwell included. To the best of my knowledge, they never fixed that during TBC, they only removed the stacking seal in Wotlk. 3)TBC: Melee hunters. There was a trinket that's now updated as of Cataclysm: Hurricane. Anyhow, so the trick worked like this. 1) Get the hurricane trinket (said chance on MELEE hit to deal weapon x X% damage). 2) Get a druid staff (druid staffs at the time said like 300 weapon damage even when a similar IL equivalent spear or warrior weapon said 120) 3) Spam wingclip. Yep. Constant melee attacks with a two hander made that hurricane trinket proc like a truck and OFTEN. Like, I did this with a warrior and then made a summation with a paladin: The warrior would proc the trinket with an inferior weapon damage every 12-15 seconds. The melee hunter would proc it every 4-6 seconds. Add in pet damage and trap damage, I remember one pug SSC someone saying "Kick the noob melee hunter" "Dude, noob melee hunter's doing 3x everyone else's damage". 4)TBC: Hunter tanking. This isn't a great one, but it worked for a few things. Now, namely, think of the melee hunter build... hunters had talents in bm and surv to increase their health by iirc 35%, and a few armor and damage reduction talents. You could also get a lot of Defense rating on rings/neck/trinkets too. Now, this worked great for heroic dungeons as only paladins could AoE tank, and so could hunters (2x readiness and explosive trap). Now, I don't know why, but explosive trap held a lot of threat whenever the snare effect from the talent went off so I never had problems with threat on tanking, or doing the AoE tanking on the big giant dude who summons murlocs (I'd put an explosive on one end, and then once that popped to get the other side's aggro, I'd throw a new one near me for the other side of murlocs). Now, there's another thing to say about this... you get enough defense rating, for some reason you pop deterrance (25% dodge/parry)? Something went wrong with the calculations and instead of being high dodge and high parry chance, I guess cause it read as 100% immunity so instead you LITERALLY became just as immune as a paladin with bubble... and you could hold threat while doing that deterrance x 2 (readiness) so you had a long time of literal invulnerability. 4) Continued. Why this was great otherwise though... Hydross: The damage was considered magic, but you could DODGE it. Hunters had high dodge, and high health, so no armor? No problem! Hunter tanks took the damage the best and holding threat was NOT an issue. And of course, hunter invulnerability. Teron Gorefiend: The Shadow of death ability, if you got it on the melee hunter with enough defense rating, you popped readiness right before it expired and for some reason you wouldn't die, and teron wouldn't use the ability again, making the 'speed dps check' part of the fight absolete. Don't know why this didn't happen when pally bubble was used, the pally would be alive, but he'd still use it on other members, but on the hunter he just didn't use it again. 5) WOTLK: Eyes of the best tanking. Most people know this one already, but it could be advantageous. Certain fights where the boss can be dragged near the door to a room that'd close off. You get a turtle pet (the one from Black fathom deeps had a really high armor rating compared to other turtle pets before they homogenized them) and then use eyes of the beast. Then when the boss is pulled, you could use that pet to tank. It did decent damage, was immune to a lot of crowd control effects and had GREAT defense in turtle shell (could use crocolisk or gorilla for AoE damage if defensive wasn't the issue). The reason this worked so well? You could let the turtle die, then rez it with the hunter who's standing right outside the door, eyes of the beast that pet right back into the fight and tank again. The fights this worked on were very rare and it was complicated so a lot of people didn't want to bother when just using a real tank instead of the hunter was almost just as good with less work for the few fights it worked on. 6) WOTLK: Dreamstate druid. Most people know this one too, but the only reason I consider this an exploit is because of how damn effective it was at tank healing. You just do mostly balance tree for the healing touch + int to mana regen + int to spellpower and all you had to do was spam regrowth/healing touch on tank and the crits for living seed would keep any tank alive without effort. What this ALSO did was make the fight in ICC where you have to heal the one dragon up ridiculously fast (as the living seeds would be popped instantly to be reapplied with the next heal) even back during the time people were still having a hard time with her. It's not a gamebreaking thing like a lot of your list or the permanent tranquility one, but I felt like mentioning it.
locks could do something similar with voidwalkers; I recall tanking whatever the raid was with only 1 dragon (the first one of WOTLK, not the last one) because voidwalkers scaled ridiculously with your gear on release. I had an entire gearset of just +vitality stuff for that very reason.
The boxes outside of the final gate in Stratholme could be interacted with to make said gates dissappear. You were able to skip all bosses and go straight to Baron Rivendare, making farming the mount quite easy.
another infamous exploit at the time on ragnaros, was to use an item called "ornate spyglass", which made you immune to the knockback effect of the bosses abilities on melee range, reducing the FR requirements and healing requirements and increasing the damage dealt by all melee dps quite significantly
Having done the Dragon Soul one, your description is a bit incorrect, or, at least, harder way to do it. What you could simply do is to queue LFR Dragon Soul as a full premade group, having at least 1 person not saved to it. In that setup you could change the loot to Master Loot, then give the ML to the unsaved player, allowing him/her distribute the loot to anyone in the raid (even the people saved) That approach ended up banning only people that were the Master Looters and everyone but Master Looters kept the gear they obtained.
the Thok exploit was good too, only one I've ever found on my own. If you had the entire group (minus the one tank to aggro the cage add) stand under Thok when he went into the fixate part of the fight. He would just stand there. No eating, no movement. Was patched the next week after i found it.. and it took my guild two weeks to get to Thok.
You forgot one of the best, you were able to skip directly to the last boss of Karazhan in BC by shadowstepping / blinking through the backdoor, jumping up the dome in nightbane's area and jumping out of bounds. You could then run to the final boss's area, allowing you to do the final boss and chess event without fighting any other bosses.
I remember a few exploits when i was raiding .Archimonde Hill in the battle of mount hyjal, everyone except the tank stood on a hill at one corner of the map and the fight became a tank and spank. everyone stacking on a lamp for the panther boss in ZG, The corridor for the last fight in Karazhan where the tank just tanked the prince near the corridor and all the dps stood in the corridor avoiding all the infernals
there was an exploit in AQ40 where you could skip to C'Thun without changing the game files if you started mounting up under the platform and jumped right before you mounted
For #4, you were actually supposed to pull Son of Hakkar which was a wind serpent from below his platform, and have the raid stand on it while it died close to when Hakkar did blood funnel. The poison was AoE and lasted 1 minute, so when everyone got it, it would damage him instead of heal him. It was completely intended to be able to complete the encounter, although entirely possible to ignore it if you had a very strong raid.
I dont know how popular it was, but when ulduar first came out for a few weeks there was a bug on the second boss - Deconstructor. There were 4 trash piles around the room that would spawn adds that could heal the boss. but if you tanked him right on top of one of the trash piles, that pile would not spawn any adds, giving your ranged dps more than enough time to kill the adds coming from the other 3 piles. This helped my guild out a whole lot.
our guild went dk wing on the first week of naxx 25 in wrath. I used spellsteal on the boneshield on one of the mobs. this made my mage totally invulnerable, for an hour. with my talents set correctly, I was eventually able to stack up so much spell power that I soloed every boss in the wing, while the raid cried nerf. it wasn't widely reported, because blizz hotfixed it a week later.
TBC Archimonde. Stack the entire raid in a particular terrain niche that prevented the doomfire from reaching the raid, and the air burst from knocking you in the air. It eliminated ALL of the mechanics of the fight, and unlike most of these, it was on basically the hardest boss in the game while it was current content.
You forgot Garalon in Mop. The boss starts the fight with an ability that gives the person closest to the boss at the start a debuff that deals damage to the entire raid. It's based on area... BUT, if you get a character that's fast enough (we used an engineer with one of their abilities that boosted speed), you can get them far enough away (the area where we fought the first boss is where we got) that the debuff is rendered useless. Basically, with this, you can almost do the entire fight with one healer... which is good because Garalon had ALOT of HP.
There was also some mobs in Icecrown citadel, which you can mindcontroll for something like 160k dps (at the frost area). You had to kill all the mobs anyway, but this dudes was kinda handy even for the 1 min duration of mc.
There was a pet in the plaguelands that had a poison cloud and if you tamed it a certain way it would keep the damage cloud but it would be at max. I think a Chinese guild used it to kill a few heroic bosses in BWD. I tamed it and yeah it did a ton of damage but my raid leader wisely said "Yeah let's not risk it"
I was sure Archimond (?) at the world tree would have made this list. I believe it was a Chinese guild that first exploited this boss by running all the way around him to the edge of the hills and then everybody climbing up a tree thus avoiding all of the ground fire mechanics.
I think you're mistaken with #1, they actually edited the mpq files and deleted the section of the floor that was there (at least from what I recall hearing about it) and this is a common practice on mid-low pop private servers as a lot don't have an active anti-cheat that checks the world files and using a simple program like noggit will alow you to do what happened at AQ 40 but literally anywhere
This is half-correct. The stairs in AQ40 were .mpq files, but it was way harder too delete them, rather than simply set their model to "0" by changing models. I even talked with the one, who was the creator of the aforementioned glitch.
I remember the gigantic bug in pandaria, where I as a monk would soul swap out of the room and down the stairs with the puddle dropping debuff lol. was a nice way to get my fledgling raid group some gear.
Technically, it wasn't an exploit of game mechanics. If you use the game against itself, it should be considered a game exploit. People weren't meant to unleash the debuff, but they did. It resulted as being more of a trollish event instead of a break in game code, or anything that might actually help the players. They still fixed it as if it was bug. It's more like a bug than exploit.
It was an unintended use of game mechanics, but it wasn't to do anything beneficial for the players doing it, so IMO I wouldn't classify it as an "exploit." Rather, it was basically mass trolling.
There was a bug in wotlk at release on the heigan dance where there was a small square in the room about 2x2 taurens wide wherethe entire raid could stand and not move while being completely immune to the green geysers, It eventually got patched out in the pre-ulduar patch.
The Corrupted Blood Incident was such an amazing thing. If only we could get great things like that again in WoW. Or stuff like the opening of AQ. If only Blizzard still liked fun.
back in the day the priest type npcs in jintha alor in the hinterlands could be mind controlled by a priest. they could then be used to cast a buff on your entire raid that gave a buff that lasted 60 minutes and reduced damage taken by 95%. this was a very very extremelly unknown spell. this wasnt nerfed for almost a year. my guild used this for a lot of server firsts on US eonar server. i found this out because the npcs there used to be elite and while leveling a priest alt i would mind control the adds and throw them off the cliff. but one time i actually casted to buff on a party member and holy shit i immediatelly contacted my guild leader snd oow and behold. we kept this very quiet because we knew it would get exlloited very quickly. lets just say that moat fights were a joke. but summonings 30-40 members sucked ass. so we really only used it on our tanks and some melee.
How about during the Legion pre-launch, during the Azeroth invasion event. The phased area you went to for the Broken Shore initial attack scenario had a few buffs you could grab, notably a buff that gave you Holy damage on all of your attacks. You could get the buff on even level 1 toons. The holy damage was flat damage, not scaling, so say it did 100k holy damage. You could then take your low-level character into one of the invasions, where the demons spawning had health that scaled with player level. You were able to one-shot EVERY enemy, including the boss of each invasion, with this buff. I leveled 3 or 4 characters to 100 with this. Though, I didn't see anyone else do it, so I'm not sure how well-known this exploit was.
About halfway through mists of pandaria there was an easy to exploit glitch that required you to be a level 80-85 hunter. If you joined a battleground you would scale upwards to 89 like everyone else in this tier but if you left the instance while dead or lagged on exit there was a very solid chance that your pet would stay level 89 but would scale weirdly. It was fun to duel people in goldshire as a level 80 and watch my pet crit them for over 200k with kill command. You could power level a hunter through cata/mop by just chain one shotting everything with beast cleave and kill command. The glitch lasted until you died, your pet died, or your pet respawned (such as dismiss pet).
you forgot to add the last boss from kara. you used to be able to stand in the doorway when the fight started (there was no door at the time) and the infernals that spawnd in the fight didnt land anywhere near the raid allowing the raid to just nuke the boss and not worry about the infernals. this was quickly patched out with a door that closed on pull.
There was a branch on the lower part of the World Tree that had the same function; when the raid was thrown into the air you would bump your head on an upper branch only an inch above. Very few people ever died; only if you were unlucky feared down the branch or were a keyboard turner that died to every ledge boss.
The Tiger boss in ZG could be exploited by having the raid stack on the large tree trunk and a Huntard pulling the three adds then feigning death, making them despawn. Bloodlord in ZG could be exploited by a Huntard pulling the add and jumping on a ledge to make it perma-evade.
Guilds in BC used to stay on the outside of the library door in Kara and kill Shade of Aran with ranged, it took a few extra minutes but it was an iwin button.
In wotlk rework of Naxx there was a spot in the room you could stand in during heigan the unclean which allowed you to cheese the safety dance achivement.
You can get under the stairs in aq40 without needing to change the game files by jumping while mounting a big mount on the ledge around the corner. you then climb the next wall and drop through the floor at the right spot and end up in the tunnels after the twins.
Oh boy there's some things to say on this one: 9. Rag one seemed entirely intentional. The placement is far more loquacious than mobs from another area of an instance prior to another boss, *especially considering the FR buff helps with most of Molten Core in general.* Also, since you mentioned the Pollinate buff to exploit Hodir, I'm legitimately surprised you didn't go over the Valkyrion Aspirant Metanoia exploit, which pretty much broke every encounter until it was fixed (roughly 2 months after Wrath's release). The buff lasted longer and was capable of causing Mages to output insane damage. 4. Iirc poisoning the Blood Funnel thing was intended and was how the boss was supposed to be done (there's a reason those snakes near Hakkar respawned very fast). 3. Lol Nihilum on Lady Vashj. 2. Oh god I remember this crap. Big news back then - thankfully my guild didn't bother with this. 1. Wow this seems really failfish on Blizzard's part. Shouldn't there still be collision programmed in on the server side or something to prevent this? I guess that's just classic mid-2000s game design logic, I dunno. Also, a number of the popular exploits seem to be one-time things tbh (except Corrupted Blood, maybe). Thus that in itself can cause it to not meet the "most exploited" classification - no real need to justify not listing them further than that.
The use of poison at Hakkar's life drain wasn't an exploit but an intended feature of the encounter. Otherwise Hakkar would have healed himself so much that you could hardly kill him unless your team was significantly overgeared. Those Sons of Hakkar which emitted a poison cloud when they died had a very low respawn time and not without a reason.
You missed the DI (Vanila Divine Intervention for paladin) exploit on razorgore where if during the orb of dominance the raid started the fight naked, DI'ed razorgore and wiped to the kiting trash. The trash would de-spawn as the encounter was considered over but DIed targets are suspened in a non active stasis leaving razor gore able to be aggroed when the buff expired in 2 minutes. The raid would quickly rez with soul stones on 2 or 3 healers, re-equip their gear and eat + drink before the fight started. This essentially skipped all of the hard kiting mechanics and make razorgore a tank and spank. We did this on Backdraft on Dark Iron every week for months (maybe 6 or so) after we beat him the original way but our hunter left the guild after accepting a new job with conflicting time scheduling and we needed a way to work on nef without recruiting /training a new kiting hunter.
I used to have so much fun with the AQ40 stairs...changed the file so that when I placed a "campfire" the stairs would appear instead and I could walk up them. Everlasting wallwalking joy! Those days were a blast
There was a exploit I remember in Wrath where you could have a shaman knockback the adds off the platform and despawn them on the Orc Deathknight fight in Icecrown, I remember being there for a kill on that.
I liked the Sunwell arms warrior weapon swapping bug. +6% melee damage with a 2h weapon would stack with itself to infinite if you swapped from a 1h to a 2h over and over again with a macro. Arms warriors would be 1 shotting bosses. The bug only lasted a few hours before it was fixed.
I feel like you should have mentioned the Majordomo/Rag exploits. Originally Majordomo wouldn't drop loot, he acted as a sort of Phase 1 to Rag in an entirely separate encounter. Majordomo spawning wasnt bound to if your raid had killed Rag though, and he would always respawn if you just zoned out for 30 minutes and let the instance reset. Majordomo could also, always summon Rag, who would always drop loot. The first guilds that killed Rag got to kill him 5-6 times a night for weeks. Also In the same instance resets worked a little wonky and you could "cascade" instances during the reset night, there was a window on reset day where you could zone into another guilds instance and clear the bosses they didn't kill a second time in the same week and still reset to a fresh id. This meant that you could kill some of the bosses (generally the harder ones) twice a week in Molten Core for quite a while. Guilds would make arrangements to carry a few players from the worse guild offering up the ID for some of the loot they wouldnt have otherwise gotten.
Sorry for the necro response but just wanted to add that I believe my guild at the time (The Twelve Prophets) was the only guild actually banned for cascading, we would have alts log out each day in the raids so we'd just use the alts raid timer on the final day of its reset. We cleared Onyxia and Molten Core every day for weeks before Blizzard caught on. I wrote a more detailed story about this as a response to the video, just saw this now unfortunately.
I'll always remember playing on Black Dragonflight and a top raiding guild, Overrated, xfer'd here. They used the gamefile exploit and got the entire guild banned. This was when there was a global public chat as well so the amount of memes was honestly the most hilarious thing ever.
you guys dont know the famous bugged rogue in CN server? that guy's rogue turned bugged after a server patch. it turned invisible and untargetable. what happened was that he can solo a lot of raid boss if theres not much difficult team mechanic. that was in vanilla.
Did you ever hear about the SoO (MoP) bug with seigecrafter blackfuse? you use to be able to warlock portal over an impassable wall, and completely skip all of his trash, very handy.
I'm surprised i didn't see alvsrazor exploit, when shes flying in the air and the entire area was covered in attacks, climbing up a mountain on the side dodged all the moves without moving and dps her down in the air
Might also throw in, Mythic Hans & Franz was possible the most bugged fight in the games history on Mythic, IF you DPS'd them TOO HARD. I wish I had some archived video footage, but I think people can just google "Hans & Franz Mythic Glitch" and find some videos on it. It was really bad. xD
You missed one in karazhan 10-man where the Dragon netherspite spawns you used to be able to jump through and up to the prince. It would allow you to jump around and then virtually get on the outside of karazin Mount up and run up the road to a certain spot and then run to I think it was chess event and then go upstairs to Prince to get your tear helm
Got another good one. In TOC the Twin Val'kyr fight. As a warlock take the Dark buff and cast Hellfire till at max stacks. We had 5 locks in our raid, blood lusted at the start and pretty much blew them up.
I know this is the boss exploit video, but I'm surprised I havn't seen mention of the mage spellsteal exploit in super early Wrath. I found out about about 2ish hours after it was hotfixed but you spellsteal a mob in the Military wing that gave you a shield that absorbed 1.2mil damaage. You picked up the talent the gave you Spell Power for damage absorbed and would do damage around what you did in MoP. This way you can solo the entire Military Wing on Heroic
There was an exploit in zul gurub at the tiger-dude.... a hunter could actually kite the 2 adds from the fight from phase one out of the room without the boss reseting..... and you kept the boss in its room. Then you reset the boss and before the 2 adds have returned to the boss, you pull him, this time without the adds. They later fixed it, but that was the way how you could make phase 1 a cakewalk.
What was the exploit Nihilum used to kill Vashj before she was tuned properly? I've heard two versions: one where the entire raid used soulstones, another where they wiped at 20% then glitched her to 1 HP and then a priest rezzed using a soulstone and Shadow Word: Painned her to death.
huh, i thought the moving in the Hakkar fight was an intended mechanic. that's what we did at least. we also did the poison thing sometimes, if i recall correctly. ah, good times!
I remember the time in Wrath when a grey vendor weapon was bis for enhancement shaman (in naxx patch) because the weapons had an on hit effect and your flametongue and frostbite weapon enhancements procced from it. So you always had 2 proccs with every hit, which gave you way more dps than you normally did in naxx gear.
I don't know if it was an exploit or a bug but a hunter in mist of pandarias arcane shot I think it was did around 1mil dmg per shot so he casually soloed garrosh on heroic I think it was
How about the luffa trinket from vanilla that was used to remove Moroes's bleed debuff. Blizzard change it to not work above level 60 in patch 2.0.1. There were too many people opening tickets and asking for it back.
My fave exploit was Nax40 Patchwerk; and walking the boss over to a room in the cleared Spider Wing with 4 platforms and having 3-4 hunters kill him over 40~minutes
Didn't see the exploit that allowed a mage to solo Naxx in WotLK. there was a mob that the mage would spell steal a bubble from the mob, it was an invulnerability bubble based on spell damage taken. then they would have a couple spell casting mobs follow them. now the spell stolen bubble ALSO raised damage depending on spell damage absorbed... so you have this infinitely growing damage shield and massive damage buff making things like arcane missiles hit for a 100,000 or more each hit. there is a video on a mage doing it on youtube somewhere....
Chess Event in karazhan should count as a boss? Anyone remember the walljumping and glitching through the ground up to last boss and then stealthing to chess, soloing it? :D
The reason for Blizzard seeing the Void Reaver and Pollinate things as exploits is that going between instances with an hour buff is a lot less OP than MCing an add in another room
No dance exploit for Naxx? There's a stone where you can stand on it that does no damage so the whole raid can just stand there and ignore the entire mechanic.
+#FreeTheTitters you mean the fake lamp post exploit? There was a real exploit with the twins that involved banishing adds, but I didnt include it in favor of all the others ones I did
Doesn't count as an exploit because it was a complete myth; not only was it almost impossible to do, but even if you managed to do it, it didn't do anything. Basically it was a false rumor that people repeated either because they didn't know any better, or were intentionally trolling people.
the soulstone thing reminds me of when I'd go into BGs to get conjured food from a mage table and then just leave to do heroics lol. i have always been primarily a pvper which is probably where i even got the idea since i noticed cool mages would drop tables
original raid instances only required being on the same id so it was possible to place more than 40 people in a single instance as the raid (any of the ui really) could still be modified during combat. originally just used to swap trinkets in combat making engineering ridiculous it was exploited to down nefarian pre-nerf by overloading the zone with 100+ characters (raiders and their alts mostly) along with soulstone abuse on the main. after you died you could just log over to your alt and they wouldn't spawn back at the starting instance portal but in the same place you logged off at, the boss room and during the boss fight. became common for hunter mains who didnt make their class call correctly for whatever reason who then became useless for the duration of the fight
what about the alliance only lootship exploite in icc. tank jumped on the spike with jet pack and forced the ship boss in to non stop evade and kept him frozen in place
number 9 clearly isnt an exploit... guilds attempting naxx also did so with the world buffs from killing bosses beforehand??? Similar to sheeping/mc'ing/spellstealing a haste buff on the 3rd boss in MSV in Mop, clever use of game mechanics...
Oh wow, didn't know about that DS LFR exploit. I am totally familiar with all the other squirrely shit people did in lfr though, ugh. Tanks threatening others for their tokens, priests threatening to throw people off stuff unless you gave them gear, entire guilds needing on everything and then sharding it for spite, or handing it to their guild mates. So glad personal loot came out.
Bloodlord Mandokir was probably Vanilla's most exploited raid boss (together with that ledge use in onyxia). Because it was very easy to exploit and the boss was easily accessible. Having the raid use the staircase or the small ledge basically negated the most difficult mechanism of that fight. It was so much exploited that many raids were actually thinking that it was a legit strat and were using the ledge as their strat without questioning if it was an exploit or not. Any other example from vanilla was either patched or made more difficult due to changing the rule of the game, or simply was such a pain in the ass to execute that most guilds didn't bother (btw, there was also one or two exploit with razorgore that were exploited early). So since the progression through each raid and the gearing was so long in vanilla, most of those were only exploited by the earliest guilds, as by the time most raiding guilds were reaching it, it was already fixed. IOh and btw, IIRC at the beginning the max number of debuff was 8, not 16. Hence why priests ' mind vision was so effective at getting rid of vael's debuff. It was then changed to 16 in hurry specifically to make that exploit far more difficult and not worth it.
So, in Icecrown Citadel, doing pala's Divine Intervention on Saurfang's target before he gets affected by debuff was not abuse but legitimate strategy at the time of WOTLK?
Blizzard is sometimes inconsistent about what they call an "exploit" vs. what they call "creative use of game mechanics." See some entries on this list that Blizzard called the latter where very similar things were called exploits that they banned people for using.
Could you do a video about the evolution of the boomkin's balance spec? I played a boomie as my main when I started in wotlk but eventually stopped because they are CONSTANTLY BEING CHANGED!! I would love to see a little video talking about all that! ^_^
During TBC when the Zombie Invasion event hit, the one prior to release of WotLK. For about 8 hours (in the evening) if you swapped your ranged weapon when in zombie mode you reset ALL your health. We created a raid and made a huge zombie army of players and AI to raid the enemy cities. Even though there were cleansers who could 1 shot zombies, we massed so many zombies we could zerg him. We also used this tactic to get Black War Bear (kill all enemy leaders) achievement just after it released. Do note, city guards and leader were already upgraded to their WotLK level at this point. Our lvl 70 zombie army, with infinite health, just zerged the lvl 83 elite NPCs.
This was hotfixed the same night.
The poison hakkar "exploit" was an intended mechanic by blizzard. Poisoning him was the tactic that blizzard designed as the "correct" one.
There was another way to kill him?!
That is true it is not an exploit!!!
One of the ones I did was with the Bug Trio. When they allowed them to be tamed initially in Wrath, they had no death animation. Which was absolutely insane, and I wanted to test the limits of it.
So I rushed my hunter to 80, tamed a bug, and went into Ruby Sanctum to test the limits of this. I had the bug pull all the mobs up until the first boss, stationed it away from me, and just had it kill all the mobs. Which. Worked.
Then, one final test was solo’ing the first boss at level (the split one), and it took a long time. The boss enraged and the bug just kept on trucking. I defeated the first boss. Quietly hearthed and never told anyone of this.
One of our hunts back in Vanilla "solo'd" Broodlord Lashlayer by pulling him to Vaelastrasz room and kitting him inbetween 1st and 2nd floor. That's how we got the first kill of the server... Not really proud, but nobody knew :p
noice
I was proudly part of 2 exploit raids in my early wow days, both server first kills.
-At 75%, Emeriss, one of the four dragons of nightmares, cast a shadow debuff that did 20% of a player's health every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. If you used an "ultra-flash shadow reflector", you could reflect that debuff to him, and kill him in seconds.
-Initially, Azuregos did not give a debuff when you died. The debuff prevented you from attacking him for 10 minutes(?). A good old graveyard zerg got us the kill.
You're proud of sucking at WoW and having to cheat to do things other people did without cheating?
Or get the debuff on your hunter per, dismiss it. Get warlock summoned to Org bank and run the pet around town while a priest spam heals/bubbles the pet. Lots of deaths!
When you mentioned that hunter pet glitch with the blue bug, I remembered what was probably the best ever glitch in WoW. It wasn't widely known because it only occurred for a day or so in just a few servers and only inside Warsong Gulch if I remember correctly. If you unequipped any piece of gear, and then equipped it again, the item's stats would keep adding up and up on you every time you repeated that process. In effect, if you did that many times you would turn into an elite, immortal killing machine with the health of a raid boss and capable of one shotting anyone with any damaging ability.
It only worked for PvP and, of course, people who exploited it got punished.
There was also an exploit in TBC, the Shade of Aran encounter in Karazhan. You basically just had everyone stay on the bridge outside the room, while a hunter misdirect pulls boss to your tank, or the tank can use a ranged attack/taunt to pull boss, the door closes during the encounter, and then he runs through the door where you fight him on the bridge and avoid the majority of his AoE damage.
Why am I seeing the Hakkar poison as an "exploit"? It was, in every essence, the MECHANIC of the fight. Hunters dragged a serpent into the raid, you got poisned, Hakkar hurt himself during the drain. *headscratch*
Oh man listening to number 2 brings me back to the good ol days of not requiring any healers on ultraxion when you had a bear tank because the 4 set literally made it possible for the bear to solo heal the raid with 0 issues.
To be fair to the dude who regrew the platforms in the Lich King fight, the saronite bombs were a regular part of his rotation. Preach does a video on it explaining it more in depth.
These are ones I did. Some of these are widely known though.
1) TBC: Permanent tranquility. Because tranquility was a channel BUFF (and that buff healed) that said "heals all targets around you by x amount" what you'd do is get in a duel with a raid member, have them either push/fear you into the instance. But RIGHT before they did it you hit tranquility. You time it right, you entered Sunwell with a permanent tranquility. You could also use all your other spells, just couldn't use Tranquility or it'd remove the buff. This one was posted all over the forums and they shortly removed it. Luckily, our guild got to use it to beat sunwell and gear a lot of characters.
2) TBC: Holy smite priest. Holy smite priests were the best of the best in terms of burst damage. However, they were so mana inefficient you couldn't do this in a raid. What could you do? Well, I forget the ability's name, but paladins had this seal that increased holy damage taken by 155. The thing? This buff stacked. All your prot and ret paladins could push their seals on it and buff holy damage taken by 155 x [number of paladins]. But... those paladins had only a fraction of their damage as holy. Enter the holy smite priest who could make short work of ANY boss with this raid set up in TBC, sunwell included. To the best of my knowledge, they never fixed that during TBC, they only removed the stacking seal in Wotlk.
3)TBC: Melee hunters. There was a trinket that's now updated as of Cataclysm: Hurricane. Anyhow, so the trick worked like this. 1) Get the hurricane trinket (said chance on MELEE hit to deal weapon x X% damage).
2) Get a druid staff (druid staffs at the time said like 300 weapon damage even when a similar IL equivalent spear or warrior weapon said 120)
3) Spam wingclip. Yep. Constant melee attacks with a two hander made that hurricane trinket proc like a truck and OFTEN. Like, I did this with a warrior and then made a summation with a paladin: The warrior would proc the trinket with an inferior weapon damage every 12-15 seconds. The melee hunter would proc it every 4-6 seconds. Add in pet damage and trap damage, I remember one pug SSC someone saying "Kick the noob melee hunter" "Dude, noob melee hunter's doing 3x everyone else's damage".
4)TBC: Hunter tanking. This isn't a great one, but it worked for a few things. Now, namely, think of the melee hunter build... hunters had talents in bm and surv to increase their health by iirc 35%, and a few armor and damage reduction talents. You could also get a lot of Defense rating on rings/neck/trinkets too. Now, this worked great for heroic dungeons as only paladins could AoE tank, and so could hunters (2x readiness and explosive trap). Now, I don't know why, but explosive trap held a lot of threat whenever the snare effect from the talent went off so I never had problems with threat on tanking, or doing the AoE tanking on the big giant dude who summons murlocs (I'd put an explosive on one end, and then once that popped to get the other side's aggro, I'd throw a new one near me for the other side of murlocs). Now, there's another thing to say about this... you get enough defense rating, for some reason you pop deterrance (25% dodge/parry)? Something went wrong with the calculations and instead of being high dodge and high parry chance, I guess cause it read as 100% immunity so instead you LITERALLY became just as immune as a paladin with bubble... and you could hold threat while doing that deterrance x 2 (readiness) so you had a long time of literal invulnerability.
4) Continued. Why this was great otherwise though...
Hydross: The damage was considered magic, but you could DODGE it. Hunters had high dodge, and high health, so no armor? No problem! Hunter tanks took the damage the best and holding threat was NOT an issue. And of course, hunter invulnerability.
Teron Gorefiend: The Shadow of death ability, if you got it on the melee hunter with enough defense rating, you popped readiness right before it expired and for some reason you wouldn't die, and teron wouldn't use the ability again, making the 'speed dps check' part of the fight absolete. Don't know why this didn't happen when pally bubble was used, the pally would be alive, but he'd still use it on other members, but on the hunter he just didn't use it again.
5) WOTLK: Eyes of the best tanking. Most people know this one already, but it could be advantageous. Certain fights where the boss can be dragged near the door to a room that'd close off. You get a turtle pet (the one from Black fathom deeps had a really high armor rating compared to other turtle pets before they homogenized them) and then use eyes of the beast. Then when the boss is pulled, you could use that pet to tank. It did decent damage, was immune to a lot of crowd control effects and had GREAT defense in turtle shell (could use crocolisk or gorilla for AoE damage if defensive wasn't the issue). The reason this worked so well? You could let the turtle die, then rez it with the hunter who's standing right outside the door, eyes of the beast that pet right back into the fight and tank again. The fights this worked on were very rare and it was complicated so a lot of people didn't want to bother when just using a real tank instead of the hunter was almost just as good with less work for the few fights it worked on.
6) WOTLK: Dreamstate druid. Most people know this one too, but the only reason I consider this an exploit is because of how damn effective it was at tank healing. You just do mostly balance tree for the healing touch + int to mana regen + int to spellpower and all you had to do was spam regrowth/healing touch on tank and the crits for living seed would keep any tank alive without effort. What this ALSO did was make the fight in ICC where you have to heal the one dragon up ridiculously fast (as the living seeds would be popped instantly to be reapplied with the next heal) even back during the time people were still having a hard time with her. It's not a gamebreaking thing like a lot of your list or the permanent tranquility one, but I felt like mentioning it.
locks could do something similar with voidwalkers; I recall tanking whatever the raid was with only 1 dragon (the first one of WOTLK, not the last one) because voidwalkers scaled ridiculously with your gear on release. I had an entire gearset of just +vitality stuff for that very reason.
The boxes outside of the final gate in Stratholme could be interacted with to make said gates dissappear. You were able to skip all bosses and go straight to Baron Rivendare, making farming the mount quite easy.
another infamous exploit at the time on ragnaros, was to use an item called "ornate spyglass", which made you immune to the knockback effect of the bosses abilities on melee range, reducing the FR requirements and healing requirements and increasing the damage dealt by all melee dps quite significantly
Having done the Dragon Soul one, your description is a bit incorrect, or, at least, harder way to do it.
What you could simply do is to queue LFR Dragon Soul as a full premade group, having at least 1 person not saved to it. In that setup you could change the loot to Master Loot, then give the ML to the unsaved player, allowing him/her distribute the loot to anyone in the raid (even the people saved)
That approach ended up banning only people that were the Master Looters and everyone but Master Looters kept the gear they obtained.
the Thok exploit was good too, only one I've ever found on my own. If you had the entire group (minus the one tank to aggro the cage add) stand under Thok when he went into the fixate part of the fight. He would just stand there. No eating, no movement. Was patched the next week after i found it.. and it took my guild two weeks to get to Thok.
You forgot one of the best, you were able to skip directly to the last boss of Karazhan in BC by shadowstepping / blinking through the backdoor, jumping up the dome in nightbane's area and jumping out of bounds. You could then run to the final boss's area, allowing you to do the final boss and chess event without fighting any other bosses.
Not to mention the fact that you could, and still can, basically cheese all of Prince Malachazar's phase one mechanics by standing in specific spots.
I remember a few exploits when i was raiding .Archimonde Hill in the battle of mount hyjal, everyone except the tank stood on a hill at one corner of the map and the fight became a tank and spank. everyone stacking on a lamp for the panther boss in ZG, The corridor for the last fight in Karazhan where the tank just tanked the prince near the corridor and all the dps stood in the corridor avoiding all the infernals
there was an exploit in AQ40 where you could skip to C'Thun without changing the game files if you started mounting up under the platform and jumped right before you mounted
For #4, you were actually supposed to pull Son of Hakkar which was a wind serpent from below his platform, and have the raid stand on it while it died close to when Hakkar did blood funnel. The poison was AoE and lasted 1 minute, so when everyone got it, it would damage him instead of heal him. It was completely intended to be able to complete the encounter, although entirely possible to ignore it if you had a very strong raid.
I dont know how popular it was, but when ulduar first came out for a few weeks there was a bug on the second boss - Deconstructor. There were 4 trash piles around the room that would spawn adds that could heal the boss. but if you tanked him right on top of one of the trash piles, that pile would not spawn any adds, giving your ranged dps more than enough time to kill the adds coming from the other 3 piles. This helped my guild out a whole lot.
our guild went dk wing on the first week of naxx 25 in wrath. I used spellsteal on the boneshield on one of the mobs. this made my mage totally invulnerable, for an hour. with my talents set correctly, I was eventually able to stack up so much spell power that I soloed every boss in the wing, while the raid cried nerf. it wasn't widely reported, because blizz hotfixed it a week later.
You're a liar, this is a widely famous exploit.
TBC Archimonde. Stack the entire raid in a particular terrain niche that prevented the doomfire from reaching the raid, and the air burst from knocking you in the air. It eliminated ALL of the mechanics of the fight, and unlike most of these, it was on basically the hardest boss in the game while it was current content.
You forgot Garalon in Mop. The boss starts the fight with an ability that gives the person closest to the boss at the start a debuff that deals damage to the entire raid. It's based on area... BUT, if you get a character that's fast enough (we used an engineer with one of their abilities that boosted speed), you can get them far enough away (the area where we fought the first boss is where we got) that the debuff is rendered useless. Basically, with this, you can almost do the entire fight with one healer... which is good because Garalon had ALOT of HP.
The 2nd boss in the plague quarter in Naxxramas. Used to be able to stand in a corner and take no damage from the ''dance'' phase
Aww, no mention of the good old Bloodlord Mandokir stairwell exploit.
Make 10 most exploited battle pets in WoW.
+Doronsmovies by battle pets you mean pokemons right?
+Doronsmovies Number 1, Graves, number 2, Terroclaw, Number 3, Shell armor pets. thats it i think
+hirumaredx what about graves?
hirumaredx undead pets? valkyr?
clk
There was also some mobs in Icecrown citadel, which you can mindcontroll for something like 160k dps (at the frost area). You had to kill all the mobs anyway, but this dudes was kinda handy even for the 1 min duration of mc.
Anyone else notice that hirumaredx's Oozeling is named Suu?
There was a pet in the plaguelands that had a poison cloud and if you tamed it a certain way it would keep the damage cloud but it would be at max. I think a Chinese guild used it to kill a few heroic bosses in BWD. I tamed it and yeah it did a ton of damage but my raid leader wisely said "Yeah let's not risk it"
I was sure Archimond (?) at the world tree would have made this list. I believe it was a Chinese guild that first exploited this boss by running all the way around him to the edge of the hills and then everybody climbing up a tree thus avoiding all of the ground fire mechanics.
I think you're mistaken with #1, they actually edited the mpq files and deleted the section of the floor that was there (at least from what I recall hearing about it) and this is a common practice on mid-low pop private servers as a lot don't have an active anti-cheat that checks the world files and using a simple program like noggit will alow you to do what happened at AQ 40 but literally anywhere
This is half-correct. The stairs in AQ40 were .mpq files, but it was way harder too delete them, rather than simply set their model to "0" by changing models. I even talked with the one, who was the creator of the aforementioned glitch.
I remember the gigantic bug in pandaria, where I as a monk would soul swap out of the room and down the stairs with the puddle dropping debuff lol. was a nice way to get my fledgling raid group some gear.
Is the corrupted blood incident really considered an exploit? I always thought of it more as one of the greatest troll events of WoW's history.
It's not a exploit it was what you were suppose to do lol
Intended mechanic = get it on hunter pet, dismiss the pet, summon it back out in a city and watch people flee the bird flu for weeks.
Technically, it wasn't an exploit of game mechanics. If you use the game against itself, it should be considered a game exploit. People weren't meant to unleash the debuff, but they did. It resulted as being more of a trollish event instead of a break in game code, or anything that might actually help the players. They still fixed it as if it was bug. It's more like a bug than exploit.
@@TheAquaAuthor An exploit is when you use a bug intentionally to come up with a desired outcome. I would argue it was an exploit.
It was an unintended use of game mechanics, but it wasn't to do anything beneficial for the players doing it, so IMO I wouldn't classify it as an "exploit." Rather, it was basically mass trolling.
There was a bug in wotlk at release on the heigan dance where there was a small square in the room about 2x2 taurens wide wherethe entire raid could stand and not move while being completely immune to the green geysers, It eventually got patched out in the pre-ulduar patch.
The Corrupted Blood Incident was such an amazing thing. If only we could get great things like that again in WoW. Or stuff like the opening of AQ. If only Blizzard still liked fun.
Scott Robbins nope now its the age of grind
Yeah, cause the opening of AQ involved no grind...
Agreed
back in the day the priest type npcs in jintha alor in the hinterlands could be mind controlled by a priest. they could then be used to cast a buff on your entire raid that gave a buff that lasted 60 minutes and reduced damage taken by 95%. this was a very very extremelly unknown spell. this wasnt nerfed for almost a year. my guild used this for a lot of server firsts on US eonar server. i found this out because the npcs there used to be elite and while leveling a priest alt i would mind control the adds and throw them off the cliff. but one time i actually casted to buff on a party member and holy shit i immediatelly contacted my guild leader snd oow and behold. we kept this very quiet because we knew it would get exlloited very quickly. lets just say that moat fights were a joke. but summonings 30-40 members sucked ass. so we really only used it on our tanks and some melee.
Genious
:)
Dude you totally deserve all those subscribers! Keep up the hard work g
How about during the Legion pre-launch, during the Azeroth invasion event. The phased area you went to for the Broken Shore initial attack scenario had a few buffs you could grab, notably a buff that gave you Holy damage on all of your attacks. You could get the buff on even level 1 toons. The holy damage was flat damage, not scaling, so say it did 100k holy damage. You could then take your low-level character into one of the invasions, where the demons spawning had health that scaled with player level. You were able to one-shot EVERY enemy, including the boss of each invasion, with this buff. I leveled 3 or 4 characters to 100 with this. Though, I didn't see anyone else do it, so I'm not sure how well-known this exploit was.
On Heigan The Unclean fight there was a corner which let you ignore the slime rising from the floor and stand there spam dps/heals.
About halfway through mists of pandaria there was an easy to exploit glitch that required you to be a level 80-85 hunter. If you joined a battleground you would scale upwards to 89 like everyone else in this tier but if you left the instance while dead or lagged on exit there was a very solid chance that your pet would stay level 89 but would scale weirdly. It was fun to duel people in goldshire as a level 80 and watch my pet crit them for over 200k with kill command. You could power level a hunter through cata/mop by just chain one shotting everything with beast cleave and kill command. The glitch lasted until you died, your pet died, or your pet respawned (such as dismiss pet).
you forgot to add the last boss from kara. you used to be able to stand in the doorway when the fight started (there was no door at the time) and the infernals that spawnd in the fight didnt land anywhere near the raid allowing the raid to just nuke the boss and not worry about the infernals. this was quickly patched out with a door that closed on pull.
My guild used an exploit on Archimonde in Hyjal Summit, where we'd stack up on a cliff so his Doomfire ability couldn't path to us.
There was a branch on the lower part of the World Tree that had the same function; when the raid was thrown into the air you would bump your head on an upper branch only an inch above. Very few people ever died; only if you were unlucky feared down the branch or were a keyboard turner that died to every ledge boss.
The Tiger boss in ZG could be exploited by having the raid stack on the large tree trunk and a Huntard pulling the three adds then feigning death, making them despawn.
Bloodlord in ZG could be exploited by a Huntard pulling the add and jumping on a ledge to make it perma-evade.
Divine Interventioning razorgore not on this? lol
Guilds in BC used to stay on the outside of the library door in Kara and kill Shade of Aran with ranged, it took a few extra minutes but it was an iwin button.
Your sophisticated man/bluepost voice is underrated as hell. You should use it again sometime.
In wotlk rework of Naxx there was a spot in the room you could stand in during heigan the unclean which allowed you to cheese the safety dance achivement.
You can get under the stairs in aq40 without needing to change the game files by jumping while mounting a big mount on the ledge around the corner. you then climb the next wall and drop through the floor at the right spot and end up in the tunnels after the twins.
Oh boy there's some things to say on this one:
9. Rag one seemed entirely intentional. The placement is far more loquacious than mobs from another area of an instance prior to another boss, *especially considering the FR buff helps with most of Molten Core in general.*
Also, since you mentioned the Pollinate buff to exploit Hodir, I'm legitimately surprised you didn't go over the Valkyrion Aspirant Metanoia exploit, which pretty much broke every encounter until it was fixed (roughly 2 months after Wrath's release). The buff lasted longer and was capable of causing Mages to output insane damage.
4. Iirc poisoning the Blood Funnel thing was intended and was how the boss was supposed to be done (there's a reason those snakes near Hakkar respawned very fast).
3. Lol Nihilum on Lady Vashj.
2. Oh god I remember this crap. Big news back then - thankfully my guild didn't bother with this.
1. Wow this seems really failfish on Blizzard's part. Shouldn't there still be collision programmed in on the server side or something to prevent this? I guess that's just classic mid-2000s game design logic, I dunno.
Also, a number of the popular exploits seem to be one-time things tbh (except Corrupted Blood, maybe). Thus that in itself can cause it to not meet the "most exploited" classification - no real need to justify not listing them further than that.
Regarding 1: They did. Have you ever ran into an invisible wall? That's the same kind of file they used for the stairs.
The use of poison at Hakkar's life drain wasn't an exploit but an intended feature of the encounter. Otherwise Hakkar would have healed himself so much that you could hardly kill him unless your team was significantly overgeared. Those Sons of Hakkar which emitted a poison cloud when they died had a very low respawn time and not without a reason.
You missed the DI (Vanila Divine Intervention for paladin) exploit on razorgore where if during the orb of dominance the raid started the fight naked, DI'ed razorgore and wiped to the kiting trash. The trash would de-spawn as the encounter was considered over but DIed targets are suspened in a non active stasis leaving razor gore able to be aggroed when the buff expired in 2 minutes. The raid would quickly rez with soul stones on 2 or 3 healers, re-equip their gear and eat + drink before the fight started. This essentially skipped all of the hard kiting mechanics and make razorgore a tank and spank. We did this on Backdraft on Dark Iron every week for months (maybe 6 or so) after we beat him the original way but our hunter left the guild after accepting a new job with conflicting time scheduling and we needed a way to work on nef without recruiting /training a new kiting hunter.
I used to have so much fun with the AQ40 stairs...changed the file so that when I placed a "campfire" the stairs would appear instead and I could walk up them. Everlasting wallwalking joy! Those days were a blast
Totally forgot that Heigan exploit that everyone used to avoid the safety dance. I don't know anyone that didn't use that exploit.
your top 10 videos are the best man :)
There was a exploit I remember in Wrath where you could have a shaman knockback the adds off the platform and despawn them on the Orc Deathknight fight in Icecrown, I remember being there for a kill on that.
I liked the Sunwell arms warrior weapon swapping bug. +6% melee damage with a 2h weapon would stack with itself to infinite if you swapped from a 1h to a 2h over and over again with a macro. Arms warriors would be 1 shotting bosses. The bug only lasted a few hours before it was fixed.
I feel like you should have mentioned the Majordomo/Rag exploits. Originally Majordomo wouldn't drop loot, he acted as a sort of Phase 1 to Rag in an entirely separate encounter. Majordomo spawning wasnt bound to if your raid had killed Rag though, and he would always respawn if you just zoned out for 30 minutes and let the instance reset. Majordomo could also, always summon Rag, who would always drop loot. The first guilds that killed Rag got to kill him 5-6 times a night for weeks.
Also In the same instance resets worked a little wonky and you could "cascade" instances during the reset night, there was a window on reset day where you could zone into another guilds instance and clear the bosses they didn't kill a second time in the same week and still reset to a fresh id. This meant that you could kill some of the bosses (generally the harder ones) twice a week in Molten Core for quite a while. Guilds would make arrangements to carry a few players from the worse guild offering up the ID for some of the loot they wouldnt have otherwise gotten.
Sorry for the necro response but just wanted to add that I believe my guild at the time (The Twelve Prophets) was the only guild actually banned for cascading, we would have alts log out each day in the raids so we'd just use the alts raid timer on the final day of its reset. We cleared Onyxia and Molten Core every day for weeks before Blizzard caught on. I wrote a more detailed story about this as a response to the video, just saw this now unfortunately.
Funny how blizzard bans people when you don't beat the boss as intended and instead use something that is part of the game
I'll always remember playing on Black Dragonflight and a top raiding guild, Overrated, xfer'd here. They used the gamefile exploit and got the entire guild banned. This was when there was a global public chat as well so the amount of memes was honestly the most hilarious thing ever.
you guys dont know the famous bugged rogue in CN server? that guy's rogue turned bugged after a server patch. it turned invisible and untargetable. what happened was that he can solo a lot of raid boss if theres not much difficult team mechanic. that was in vanilla.
Did you ever hear about the SoO (MoP) bug with seigecrafter blackfuse? you use to be able to warlock portal over an impassable wall, and completely skip all of his trash, very handy.
I'm surprised i didn't see alvsrazor exploit, when shes flying in the air and the entire area was covered in attacks, climbing up a mountain on the side dodged all the moves without moving and dps her down in the air
Might also throw in, Mythic Hans & Franz was possible the most bugged fight in the games history on Mythic, IF you DPS'd them TOO HARD. I wish I had some archived video footage, but I think people can just google "Hans & Franz Mythic Glitch" and find some videos on it. It was really bad. xD
You missed one in karazhan 10-man where the Dragon netherspite spawns you used to be able to jump through and up to the prince. It would allow you to jump around and then virtually get on the outside of karazin Mount up and run up the road to a certain spot and then run to I think it was chess event and then go upstairs to Prince to get your tear helm
That last one sounds like straight hacking. turning folks into chickens.
I wanna hear more about the AQ40 stairs exploit that's so damn cool!!!
Got another good one. In TOC the Twin Val'kyr fight. As a warlock take the Dark buff and cast Hellfire till at max stacks. We had 5 locks in our raid, blood lusted at the start and pretty much blew them up.
0:37 "A Flathskthhthh" LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+Dutchdank420 lmao! Thought I was the only one who noticed
I know this is the boss exploit video, but I'm surprised I havn't seen mention of the mage spellsteal exploit in super early Wrath. I found out about about 2ish hours after it was hotfixed but you spellsteal a mob in the Military wing that gave you a shield that absorbed 1.2mil damaage. You picked up the talent the gave you Spell Power for damage absorbed and would do damage around what you did in MoP. This way you can solo the entire Military Wing on Heroic
There was an exploit in zul gurub at the tiger-dude....
a hunter could actually kite the 2 adds from the fight from phase one out of the room without the boss reseting..... and you kept the boss in its room.
Then you reset the boss and before the 2 adds have returned to the boss, you pull him, this time without the adds.
They later fixed it, but that was the way how you could make phase 1 a cakewalk.
skipped the obvious entries and didn't spend three minutes on the intro. Well done.
What was the exploit Nihilum used to kill Vashj before she was tuned properly? I've heard two versions: one where the entire raid used soulstones, another where they wiped at 20% then glitched her to 1 HP and then a priest rezzed using a soulstone and Shadow Word: Painned her to death.
The slime's name is Suu. Nice.
huh, i thought the moving in the Hakkar fight was an intended mechanic. that's what we did at least. we also did the poison thing sometimes, if i recall correctly. ah, good times!
There was a way to get your pet to have all of the deathwing fight buffs outside of the raid
I remember the time in Wrath when a grey vendor weapon was bis for enhancement shaman (in naxx patch) because the weapons had an on hit effect and your flametongue and frostbite weapon enhancements procced from it. So you always had 2 proccs with every hit, which gave you way more dps than you normally did in naxx gear.
I don't know if it was an exploit or a bug but a hunter in mist of pandarias arcane shot I think it was did around 1mil dmg per shot so he casually soloed garrosh on heroic I think it was
How about the luffa trinket from vanilla that was used to remove Moroes's bleed debuff. Blizzard change it to not work above level 60 in patch 2.0.1. There were too many people opening tickets and asking for it back.
I still had mine in my bank. Was sad when I couldn't use it a few weeks later, but not like Moroes was that hard.
Is this the place for a shoutout?
+Hellscream No there's no- wait,im too late.
+Hellscream I also subes to both hirumaredx and you.
+Hellscream Go back to your hentai.
Yes
Now go back to trying to become a SSJ3 just so you can do better DPS.
My fave exploit was Nax40 Patchwerk; and walking the boss over to a room in the cleared Spider Wing with 4 platforms and having 3-4 hunters kill him over 40~minutes
I love these vids. Making me all nostalgic over WOW! Oh how it made me feel back then.
Didn't see the exploit that allowed a mage to solo Naxx in WotLK. there was a mob that the mage would spell steal a bubble from the mob, it was an invulnerability bubble based on spell damage taken. then they would have a couple spell casting mobs follow them. now the spell stolen bubble ALSO raised damage depending on spell damage absorbed... so you have this infinitely growing damage shield and massive damage buff making things like arcane missiles hit for a 100,000 or more each hit. there is a video on a mage doing it on youtube somewhere....
Chess Event in karazhan should count as a boss? Anyone remember the walljumping and glitching through the ground up to last boss and then stealthing to chess, soloing it? :D
The reason for Blizzard seeing the Void Reaver and Pollinate things as exploits is that going between instances with an hour buff is a lot less OP than MCing an add in another room
Probably*
+Chris Channer It's also something which doesn't completely break the boss itself, but simply makes it easier. I think that's the main difference.
Werewolf211 that was also Sony Online's standard. An unreasonable outcome for an action
Like Dire Maul tribute :(.....
There should be an honorable mention for Razorgore's Divine Intervention one :)
No dance exploit for Naxx? There's a stone where you can stand on it that does no damage so the whole raid can just stand there and ignore the entire mechanic.
How about the lamp post exploit during the Eredar Twins fight in Sunwell Plateau? (Alythess & Sathrovarr)
That shit was epic Kappa
+#FreeTheTitters you mean the fake lamp post exploit? There was a real exploit with the twins that involved banishing adds, but I didnt include it in favor of all the others ones I did
hirumaredx I was talking about the fake one haha, but I wasn't aware of the one involving banishing adds.
Doesn't count as an exploit because it was a complete myth; not only was it almost impossible to do, but even if you managed to do it, it didn't do anything. Basically it was a false rumor that people repeated either because they didn't know any better, or were intentionally trolling people.
@@troodon1096 dude this is a 4 year old comment and I already acknowledged that I knew it was fake in the replies. There's really no need to reply
the soulstone thing reminds me of when I'd go into BGs to get conjured food from a mage table and then just leave to do heroics lol. i have always been primarily a pvper which is probably where i even got the idea since i noticed cool mages would drop tables
original raid instances only required being on the same id so it was possible to place more than 40 people in a single instance as the raid (any of the ui really) could still be modified during combat. originally just used to swap trinkets in combat making engineering ridiculous it was exploited to down nefarian pre-nerf by overloading the zone with 100+ characters (raiders and their alts mostly) along with soulstone abuse on the main. after you died you could just log over to your alt and they wouldn't spawn back at the starting instance portal but in the same place you logged off at, the boss room and during the boss fight.
became common for hunter mains who didnt make their class call correctly for whatever reason who then became useless for the duration of the fight
what about the alliance only lootship exploite in icc. tank jumped on the spike with jet pack and forced the ship boss in to non stop evade and kept him frozen in place
number 9 clearly isnt an exploit... guilds attempting naxx also did so with the world buffs from killing bosses beforehand??? Similar to sheeping/mc'ing/spellstealing a haste buff on the 3rd boss in MSV in Mop, clever use of game mechanics...
Oh wow, didn't know about that DS LFR exploit. I am totally familiar with all the other squirrely shit people did in lfr though, ugh. Tanks threatening others for their tokens, priests threatening to throw people off stuff unless you gave them gear, entire guilds needing on everything and then sharding it for spite, or handing it to their guild mates. So glad personal loot came out.
Socrethar ? Helya ? Il'gynoth ? So many exploited bosses in this game Could do a top 100 tbh
Bloodlord Mandokir was probably Vanilla's most exploited raid boss (together with that ledge use in onyxia). Because it was very easy to exploit and the boss was easily accessible. Having the raid use the staircase or the small ledge basically negated the most difficult mechanism of that fight. It was so much exploited that many raids were actually thinking that it was a legit strat and were using the ledge as their strat without questioning if it was an exploit or not. Any other example from vanilla was either patched or made more difficult due to changing the rule of the game, or simply was such a pain in the ass to execute that most guilds didn't bother (btw, there was also one or two exploit with razorgore that were exploited early). So since the progression through each raid and the gearing was so long in vanilla, most of those were only exploited by the earliest guilds, as by the time most raiding guilds were reaching it, it was already fixed. IOh and btw, IIRC at the beginning the max number of debuff was 8, not 16. Hence why priests ' mind vision was so effective at getting rid of vael's debuff. It was then changed to 16 in hurry specifically to make that exploit far more difficult and not worth it.
I believe if you can do anything the program allows without changing the program it's fair. I always considered the Yog +0 thing as real world first.
Good list. Some I didn't know. What about DI'ing Razorgore?
So, in Icecrown Citadel, doing pala's Divine Intervention on Saurfang's target before he gets affected by debuff was not abuse but legitimate strategy at the time of WOTLK?
Blizzard is sometimes inconsistent about what they call an "exploit" vs. what they call "creative use of game mechanics." See some entries on this list that Blizzard called the latter where very similar things were called exploits that they banned people for using.
Could you do a video about the evolution of the boomkin's balance spec? I played a boomie as my main when I started in wotlk but eventually stopped because they are CONSTANTLY BEING CHANGED!! I would love to see a little video talking about all that! ^_^
You named the disgusting slime "Suu". Well played hirumaredx. Very well played.
Monster Musume
No mention of the elegon exploit or the bug of the third boss G w/e