3. The Blood Plague of Zul’Gurub
Okay, let’s be honest. You probably know this story. But no list of curious bugs can be complete without the incident in Zul’Gurub, the legendary plague that later even served science.
In Classic, there was the raid “Zul’Gurub” with the then quite challenging boss “Hakkar”. Hakkar had many nasty abilities, but one of them was particularly mean. The so-called “Blood Plague” was a debuff that was applied to random players. The plague caused damage every few seconds and infected nearby players as well. If the damage was deadly, the infected character exploded and infected nearby allies.
Today a typical “Isolate the infected players” mechanic, back then a relatively new thing.
The good thing: If you left the raid, the debuff was removed from all player characters, so the plague remained only in the raid.
The bad thing: Companions like hunter pets were exempt from this rule.
It came as it had to: Some hunters brought their still-infected animals into the open world, and from then on, the plague began to spread. Orgrimmar and Stormwind were completely wiped out within minutes. The plague spread not only to players and their companions but also to all kinds of NPCs.
Even today, screenshots from that time are circulating. Everywhere in the game world, corpses stacked in hundreds, and at times, the entire ground was covered.
Normal gameplay was nearly impossible, and those who could hid somewhere in the open world – far away from large gatherings.
However, one good thing came from the incident. Because the data from the spread of the plague was used by scientists and served as a basis for researching the behavior of groups of people in the event of a pandemic. What sounded silly back then became quite important – because during the Corona pandemic, researchers were able to incorporate this data.
4. The overpowered paladin talent
That paladins are often overpowered has not only been impressively proven by Rextroy multiple times, but also by paladins long before him – even during the Classic era. Back then, the class was only available to the Alliance, and that was probably for the best. Because paladins had a talent with which they could beat bosses solo.
We are talking about “Reckoning”. The talent ensured that the paladin could perform additional automatic attacks. Each time the paladin received a critical hit, he would accumulate a stack of it.
The twist: As long as the paladin didn’t strike himself, more and more of these stacks would build up infinitely.
The guild “PiaS” from the realm Azgalor noticed this. They informed a game master and explained that they would try to defeat a world boss with it.
The paladin started a duel with another player and let himself be critically hit repeatedly while simultaneously being healed.
After accumulating hundreds of stacks of “Reckoning,” he then tried to kill the world boss Lord Kazzak – and defeated him with a single attack that was duplicated many hundreds of times.
Blizzard subsequently fixed the error so that only a maximum of 5 stacks could be accumulated. While this still allowed for a pretty powerful attack, defeating large bosses became impossible.
5. Stackable druids
Druids are probably the most versatile class in World of Warcraft, and with Mists of Pandaria this was reinforced. Here druids received a glyph that allowed them to carry fellow players on their backs in their travel form as a stag. Druids thus acted as “mounts” themselves and could carry other players through Azeroth.
However, a few druids posed the interesting question: What happens when a druid in stag form rides another druid in stag form?
The answer: The stags stack. By the way, this didn’t only work for two, but also for three, four, and many more.
Especially funny: If the “bottom” stag had the sandstone dragon transformation, the whole stag stack could happily fly through the world and cause some astonished faces.
This obvious bug was fixed quite quickly. However, Blizzard found the bug so funny that they later created a toy that reminds of this very incident: “Stackable Stag”.
The toy can still be used today to create a whole tower of stags, eternally reminding players of what druids could do for a short time.
Do you know the stories of the 5 saddest NPCs in WoW?
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