The Dracthyr in World of Warcraft have broken the loot system. A bug made them the luckiest characters in Azeroth.
The Evokers are currently the newest class in World of Warcraft, added to the game with Dragonflight. However, there was a major incident around their release that tested the game’s loot system. A story that may have been forgotten by some, but:
Evokers had bonus luck and could farm rare mounts like no other class.
Currently, WoW is celebrating its 20th anniversary – but only for a few more days:
Evokers had only one valid loot option
The underlying problem was how loot is distributed in World of Warcraft. With the world boss “Sha of Anger”, the underlying system is quite simple:
- When the boss is killed, the game internally rolls a 100-sided die.
- On a roll of 1-59, the character receives gold and nothing else occurs.
- On a roll of 60 to 100, the character is entitled to a piece of loot.
If a character would receive a piece of loot, then the game rolls again internally, this time on the loot list. The list has all available items weighted according to the character’s class. For example, a priest can only receive cloth items and staves, while a warrior can only snag plate items and two-handed swords.
On this loot list, the mount “Celestial Onyx Cloud Serpent” was also available for all classes, but with an extremely low chance, somewhere between 0.02% and 0.01%.
Basically a typical loot system for rare mounts.
But the Evokers broke this system. Because when the Sha of Anger was introduced (Mists of Pandaria), Evokers did not exist yet. If an Evoker now defeated the Sha of Anger and rolled a 60 or higher on the first internal roll (thus entitled to loot), the game faced a problem. Because there was no loot list for Evokers. There were no valid items that could be awarded to the Evoker.
No valid item, except for one: The Celestial Onyx Cloud Serpent.
Chaos in the forums – Blizzard reaches a compromise
It took just a few hours for the news to spread across various forums, guilds, and social media. Everyone who caught wind of it quickly created a Dracthyr Evoker and tried to defeat the Sha of Anger to have their drastically increased chance at the mount.
When the bug was noticed, the problem was already out of control. Thousands of accounts had created a Dracthyr and farmed the Sha of Anger to get the cloud serpent with extremely high probability.
But the situation was diffuse. After all, many thought: One shouldn’t exploit this bug. Because in the worst case, there could be a retroactive penalty for exploiting a clear game error. On the other hand, many thought: If I don’t get the mount now, I will never get it.
After a few hours, Blizzard stepped in and tried to find a solution that would satisfy everyone somewhat:
- Those who had already obtained their cloud serpents were allowed to keep them.
- The drop chance for all rare mounts from the world bosses of Pandaria was drastically increased.
This seemed to be a good compromise for most. Because the mounts – especially from the Sha of Anger – are now farmable. The probability of obtaining one is about 1%. That’s a multiple of the original value that the mount had before the change.
The story once again illustrates how complex MMORPGs are and how drastically the introduction of a new feature – such as a new class – can affect old content and beloved collectible items. Because even though bugs are annoying, it is nearly impossible to foresee all eventualities in advance. But perhaps that’s also quite nice, because that gives us stories like this that we can revisit over and over again.
5 other mounts from The War Within are much easier to farm.
