Blizzard's Stance on Clever Use of Mechanics for Classic?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Considering how well documented a lot of Vanilla exploits or more importantly Clever Use of Game Mechanics are… I was wondering what is or what should be Blizzard’s stance on it?

A good example how as a priest, if you mind controlled a mob, but then were mind controlled yourself, that mob which you mind controlled will be permanently mind controlled until you zone out (aka. permanent mind control of high level mobs/elites/guards to wreak havoc on players).

or how on world bosses, such as lethon you can avoid his sleep clouds, if you stand on structures, or how healers when they go OOM on world bosses, can simply run out of range, mana back up, and run back in with full mana.

Will this be something that’s hands off for blizzard, as it was apart of the authentic vanilla experience? or something which they will or think that they should bring the ban hammer down on?

Exploits which give a player an unfair advantage (i.e. the various item dupes, loot exploits, insta-kill exploits), I understand should definitely be a bannable offense, however how about the “fun” or mostly “innocent clever use of game mechanics”, regardless if not intended, such as those two I mentioned and so much more…

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Yeah, let’s face facts. We’re not going to see the advantageous ones come back. Nor, to be perfectly honest, should they.

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There is actually an official answer to this. They’ve removed most things that were actual exploits. But they’ve left some things for flavor and fun. No I do not have a list of what they took out and what they left in.

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what is an exploit though? there is no clear definition other than blizzard determining whats “intended” and what is not

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They said it themselves at Blizzcon a couple years ago: “Bring the player, not the class”. They’ll need to go back on those word before implementing class specific mechanics like that again.

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You know spellsteal doesn’t exist in Classic, right?

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Are you talking about actual vanilla or pirate servers? Huge difference.

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Also how about well documented raid boss tactics?

Such as on third phase Onyxia, which you could wall-jump or simply run up at a certain spots on the walls, which yno fire would erupt and the raid takes far less damage.

Or in Molten Core, how about offenses which got guilds banned during vanilla but over the years in Warcraft became the norm? a great example in Molten Core how you can skip every single pack of trash by wall-walking directly to Gehennas… this got guilds during vanilla banned, however since vanilla, trash skipping has become accepted and is normal practice for most raids to skip any and all trash possible…

or how you can mind control the scarshield spellbinders in blackrock spire to gain 75 fire resistance on the entire raid for one hour and take the buff it into molten core.

or how you can tank magmadar from within a wall, avoid all mechanics and just melee him to death.

or in BWL, how an alliance paladin can cast divine intervention on the MC’d razorgore, everyone dies, priest is soulsharded, all the adds despawn, priest rezzes everyone up and proceed to kill razorgore.

or how if a tank got burning adrenaline from the vaelastrasz, priests and whoever else can spam mind vision or whatever spell on the tank to bump it off their debuff slots so they don’t die/explode (and most importantly, lose all the threat they have on the boss).

or kiting and fighting broodlord in vaelastrasz’s room, where the ranged would proceed to attack him from the upper floor, and when the boss woudl aggro to them, the boss would slowly make their way up stairs, which then players just simply jump down off the ledge, laugh, continue attacking the boss, and when the boss made it back downstairs… rinse and repeat…

using stratholme holy water on the nefarian encounter to nuke the adds.

and so many other clever well-documented strategies and clever ways to defeat virtually every raid boss in vanilla…

Dungeons bosses too, such as the final vancleef fight in deadmines, where you can have a ranged dps stand on a cannon, attack the boss’ adds to pull threat off the tank, and those adds will evade as they can’t path to ontop of the cannon… thus leaving the rest of your party to focus on and kill vancleef without any adds to worry about.

All of these are considered unintended, however are imo, clever use of game mechanics or whatever… so wonder if these would be considered bannable offenses if guilds or pugs utilized these tactics to get boss kills or to trivialize certain aspects (i.e. adds) or negate deadly mechanics or breeze through phases of a fight…

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I think some things like loot duplication is clearly an unintended exploit, but the middle ground can honestly be a bit hard to say. The mage trick is just using Spell Steal as intended on an ability that existed before Spell Steal(spell steal came in BC). The priest trick is obviously a bug, since Mind Control isn’t supposed to be permanent.

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good points. i dont think anyone has been banned for using spell steal, stuff like that might cause blizzard to make some changes though

exploiting bugs is definitely a tricky thing to moderate. blizzard probably has to look at if it was premeditated or was it something that just happened and the player ran with it

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I mean, your examples answer themselves. FR buff and Holy Water are using game mechanics as clearly intended. Wall jumping is exploiting a bug. Tanking in a wall is exploiting a bug. It’s really not hard to notice the difference. The first examples are using RPG mechanics within the game. The latter are exploiting weakness in the code to take advantage of it.

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I want to see WSG, here’s some videos. Yeah they are TBC but still.


The videos don’t show a lot of jumps/climbs that I’ve personally seen players get kicked from games for doing, and even suspended.

But still. The jumps add another level of skill to pvp. It’s not just boring gear beats lesser gear.

A lot of Rankers from private servers are against the jumps/climbs. But that’s ONLY because they have developed gang strategies to overpower lesser coordinated players. They don’t want to DEAL with players who actually can use terrain to gain any advantage in WSG.

I think a lot of the devs are listening to these players thinking CHANGES are best for the game. But these CHANGES are motivated by self-interest and not the development of the game.

Should Vanilla jumps/climbs be reviewed one by one to see if some are gross imbalances and exploits? Yes, just as they were in Vanilla and throughout TBC and even into Wrath. But getting rid of them all to cater to one group is wrong.