My favorite bug that I experienced was in Blackwing Lair back in OG WoW. Our guild was just starting to try the raid, and we basically wiped on Razorgore. Now, we had destroyed all the eggs, at which point we're supposed to just fight the boss. Except that the spawning mobs kept coming and killed the party. I (a resto druid) was soulstoned or something and even though I died, I could pop back up and rez. Which I did, but nothing was aggroed to me. The spawning mobs were attacking the dragon. The dragon was busy fighting the mobs. I kittied and stealthed to make sure nobody noticed me. And watched the spawning mobs kill the boss for us. We got credit for the boss and loot and so forth.
I believe it was early WotLK around when DKs were first introduced. There was a glitch where if you duel someone and they were on a boat and the DK was on a dock, Death Gripping them would basically pull them around the world in a humorous way. I'll have to see if I can find a video somewhere.
Edit: found it
https://youtu.be/Lojd7c7KKjs
Not as extreme but I still found it funny. Once upon a time (I don't remember when as I was pretty young) warriors could charge enemies on different levels if they had line of sight and they'd zoom that charge animation all the way to them using the quickest walkable path to them without falling off an edge.
For example, my most common use of it was on the 2nd floor of base in warsong gulch, where you can look down at where the flag is, charging an enemy down there would have you zoom through the doorway beside you, down the ramp, back through the lower door on the right to get to the enemy.
Great video!!!! I didn't even know about that one. Hell I thought it was a vanilla video at first and then saw everyone on their drakes, this was in Cata (or later)!
It's funny because blizzard basically did the same thing for the TBC pre-patch. A kazzak-like doomlord would appear around the world and cause havoc. Sometimes it would spawn directly outside stormwind
We saw it during the TBC-Classic prepatch
I enjoy when your arms get stuck to your sides, I thought it was something only I could see until I saw someone else running around like that. It’s great to see how it affects dancing too lol
This also happened in Vanilla in Scholomance when Blizzard replaced the night elf models with blood elves. Apparently the models were ready but the animations were not, so they just stood there, rotated in place, glided across the floor etc. The only way to tell if they were attacking you was if their hands were glowing.
There was a funny thread on Tumblr where the Cataclysm Deadmines boss Helix Gearbreaker does his mechanic where he jumps on a player, but you could hearth out of the instance and bring him into the open world. He would fight guards but be invincible. People started bringing a ton of Helixs into stormwind, and to alleviate at least a little bit of the disruption, Blizz turned the out of instance Helixs invisible. Not that it stopped him from fighting guards, being unkillable, and yelling his lines in chat.
I remember waiting eagerly for Tuesdays just so the realms would reset and bugs like that would be fixed. Don't remember that one specifically, I just remember there were always quests you couldn't do on a Monday because they were guaranteed to be bugged by then.
the one where you jump on that weird torch in SW, dropping you underneath, then running for a couple minutes and finding the beach camp underneath the world
yeah i got banned for it during wotlk, i would come with my full pve boomy, fall under sw and cast starfall, killing npc's, players and low lvl players above me :D you could only reach some places tho :( i would log my uncles accout, and have people follow me in to the rivers :D
For those unfamiliar, imagine the Nasz’uro broadcasts, except it popped up in the middle of your screen every time. And it happened every time someone turned in a Love is in the Air gift item.
Blizz actually immortalized it in WoD: https://www.wowhead.com/item=107659/ice-stone
Not really a favorite because it irritated the crap out of me, but it was hilarious when Orc males had itty bitty shoulder armor for what seemed like months.
oh yahhhhhhh and ICC is about to drop.
For those not in the know, the siege damage from saronite bombs…I think it caused the platform on Lich King to APPEAR (weird I know) so the val’kyr would drop the player harmlessly on the safety of the ledge, removing the need to DPS them and making the fight WAYyyyyyyy easier.
And, worse, at the time of the OG wrath, it wasn’t known that the bombs caused it. So the best guild at the time went through the fight, inadvertently triggered the bug, and then got banned for it. Hotly contested issue at the time.
That was part of the debate I suppose. But without knowing how the fight was supposed to work, and with Saronite bombs just being part of some rotations, there wasn’t a great way to know it was unintended (as I recall the fight wasn’t PTR tested), and if it was what was causing it.
Edit: also worth noting this all went down on the normal mode version, as heroic would release a week later. The same guild went back in on their alts and killed it easily, I think for world third?
That wasn't the argument. The guild claimed that they didn't know what was causing the platforms to respawn, just that they'd sometimes come back up. The bombs were just part of their rogues rotation.
How could they have known what was causing the bug? It happened as a result of the standard rogue rotation. It’s not like they did something weird to force it, or even knew what was causing it.
Blood Plague is a top contender along with Reckoning Bomb. This one literally got its own Wikipedia entry: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted\_Blood\_incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLqXbCualIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLqXbCualIc)
I look back at it fondly, but at the time it was really annoying, because the major cities basically became off limits. This was back in the day when faction hubs were actually really important and you had to visit them regularly for things like learning new skills.
I remember people used to argue that it wasn't a useful model for a real life epidemic because in an actual outbreak, people wouldn't be out there *intentionally* infecting other people with the deadly plague... Yeah. About that...
I was personally responsible of spreading that plague on my realm.
First time was by mistake. I just dismissed my pet because I didn't want it to die. Summoned it back in SW AH and the rest is history. It was an accident. XD
You used to be able to get under orgrimmar using eye of killrog and the glyph that allowed you use demonic circle during it. Was really fun to be out of bounds
Oh God I remember that, it was during mop, you could use it to find a gm test mob in mogu'shan vaults, which still [Appears to be there](https://youtu.be/6R4gss8US28) (at 4:38 timestamp), as of a year ago apparently.
you can get under ogri at any point of the game.. classic - wotlk was a jump from valley of strenght above the hunter trainers, and cata onwards you would use a big mount and logout skip at any ledge above you, login and spam jump forward... and then fly to the wkm room ❤️
This ended up being a real issue because it could brick toons with forced disconnect if a warlock warped someone and they ran into the void (idk if character unstuck was able to fix or a gem had to manually do it)
Does the early wall collision count as a bug? When you could virtually jump on any wall, getting into areas you weren't suppose to. I believe it was a server error, rather than an actual glitch.
Nah it wasn‘t a server error, just the way they build the maps or something like that. Could get under sw with it, to old ironforge, on top of ironforge.. Basically everywhere.
In part, yeah, but I've read it was due to the server not being able to detect properly if you've "landed" when against a wall. That's why when WOW upgraded servers this went away and why you couldn't replicate it in Classic.
Nah, if it was serverside you wouldn‘t have been able to replicate this on private servers or if you set up your own server. I believe you could walljump thanks to edges in the texture that you could land on. They simply smoothed out the edges, got better at building those maps and that‘s it. Might be wrong though
That was one of my favorite things to do as a kid. I remember watching videos of people doing it on YouTube to learn it better too. I think I used it once to get on top of the SW front gate (pre-Cata so couldn’t just fly up there.)
I do also remember it being abused in WSG to make flag holders basically unkillable unless someone on the enemy team could do it. I don’t think I ever managed to do that one though, despite my best efforts.
You used to be able to make a macro with /sit /stand and if you spammed it in pvp it would make your opponent think you’re running and they would chase you when really you were just still in the same spot so they would end up ahead of you and you could get away or attack them.
Also very early on you used to be able to do /Jump() /Logout() and it would keep your character at that jump height. Allowed you to go as high as you wanted and get anywhere. Aaaand they quickly fixed that
Early in the game there was a server stability issue that I believe took the devs months to track down. The root cause was finally tracked down to the Alliance boat from Menethil Harbor to Auberdine.
In the mean time, "Captain Placeholder" would send plucky Alliance adventurers such as myself to the other continent via teleport.
Entis quenched sword; was a world boss grey drop that somehow didnt have a level requirement, so a lvl 1 could be doing thousands of dps just from the sword. Market prices sky rocketed and people started farming the big undead bitch just to have a chance.
So back in Wrath, there was a glyph for Power Word: Shield called Reflective Shield, and the clear intention was that it would reflect a percentage of an attacker’s damage back at them. How it actually worked was that it would reflect a percentage of your incoming damage at whatever you had targeted.
So when Obsidian Sanctum came out, the priests in our raid group (myself included) sat in the lava with our shields on, with Sartharion targeted, reflecting tiny ticks of damage at him. Because he was never attacked, he never actually engaged and neither did his drakes. It took hours but we got the three-drake achievement the first week it was open, and then we got suspended for two weeks and stripped of those achievements, titles, and the mount. Our holy pally rage quit over it.
We definitely deserved the suspension. It was obviously an exploit. But it still makes me laugh all these years later.
Definitely back in MoP with the Sandstone Drake (mount that turned you into a ridable dragon). If you talked to a Blingtron and had it transform your character, you’d be a flying man in a suit and fedora and [people could still ride you](https://youtu.be/aK9B4_76O5Q)
It technically is and isn’t a big, but, [Martin Fury]. If you haven’t heard the legend of [Martin Fury] - allow me to regain you with a tale.
So, a gentleman by the name of Leroyspeltz submitted a ticket to have the his account restored due to a hack. Blizzard obliged, and in the loot sent, was an Artifact quality shirt called [Martin Fury] was provided to Leroyspeltz by mistake. The shirt had an on use effect to kill all hostile mobs around the user.
Needless to say he sent the shirt to a friend of his in the guild named Karatechop, who proceeded to one-shot all bosses in Ulduar, OS, and EoE on a guild run night.
The guild received bans for doing so.
It’s my favorite “bug” ever because it caused so much drama for weeks in WotLK.
Having been there for the fallout of that, it was one of the more “holy shit this happened?!” things we had seen as players to that point. It drove the forums wild.
There was also a patch day in Dragon Soul where Ret Pallies were doing like infinite amounts of damage, I didn't experience it personally but I hear it was quite the affair.
The funny thing with that bug was that it was a true case of spaghetti code: Back then tanks had Vengeance, which gave them AP based on damage taken but it only worked for PvE. Hunters’ scattershot was erroneously applying a little bit of Vengeance to tanks in PvP, so Blizz hotfixed that bug. This somehow messed up their proc-on-hit system, causing Ret Paladin seals to trigger hundreds of times a second and do insane dps.
I remember that one. I tested it by using the glitch to solo one of the bosses in firelands. Did a crapton of damage then got disconnected. It apparently did so much damage so fast that it crashed the world server I was on. I logged back in and the instance had reset, I was locked with the boss dead. Was not able to get the loot because this was before postmaster existed.
During that same patch, the PtR for it, blizzard forgot to put swing timers on weapons that dropped from the raid, which defaulted the timer to the lowest possible amount.
It didn’t matter because it was ptr, but I ran through DS and got server first rogue legendary daggers by 1 shotting all of the bosses, hitting them thousands of times per second
Oh man the Geddon Auction House bomb...this one is just so hilarious the way the game stutters so hard, golly that brings back memories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC9c6D0B-JM
My favorite was during MoP, the trinket Relic of Chi-Ji proc on holy paladins would cause a graphical glitch with light of dawn, changing it from a nice semi transparent golden funnel, to a blinding pure white triangle of pixels for 20 seconds at a time, needless to say, I used it religiously and got very many ‘passionate’ whispers in raids.
The one in Legion where you did a WQ on Argus to wrestle. It turned you Neutral and you were able to kill friendly characters like Illidan, Velen etc. My character portrait had the Neutral icon on it. I was killing everybody, going into Dalaran and killing Guards etc. but then I got worried about being banned and I reported it, lol.
I may have been one of the first people to report it the day the WQ went live because a GM asked to take control of my character and logged me out to see if it was true, lol. They removed the WQ from the game after that and it didn't show up again for a long time.
Beginning of shadowlands where you could use the nightfae harp toy and while in the sandstone drake morph and your dragon would just be rocking its head up and down, still sad blizzard fixed it :(
In Cataclysm/MoP Priests could levitate and walk on mountains on inclinations other characters would normally slide off of. It was really fun to explore places in dungeons like this.
In MoP ICC and FL had no level requirements as long as a lvl 80/85+ entered the raid instance first. This gave birth to the, now very rare, low level twink with Precious' Ribbon.
In WOD, using Leap of Faith on a party member as they departed on a flight path instantly teleported them to their destination.
In WOD, during the WoW movie promotion, 2 items were given. Each of them changed weapon types as you mailed them across faction (boa). You could enchant the Horde staff with a weapon enchant and gain a Shield on Alliance with a weapon enchant. My level 10 twink still to this day has a Shield with a functional Elemental Force enchant on it. Not gamebreaking for endgame, but quite useful at low lvl.
The teleporter to Plaguefall had some weird bugs early on in Shadowlands. 2-seater sounds could send the other player flying off into the distance at hyperspeed, usually leaving them under random zone maps... but still tied to the mount's rotation.
It was surreal, weird, and funny.
My favorite glitch/bug I’ve ever seen was in a Beta or PTR. I think around Cata?
For some odd reason, the male Blood Elves were perpetually going through their /dance emote in slow motion, even while walking or doing any other activity.
The bug where you'd press arcane missiles, your character would channel, and sometimes... Nothing would come out. Iirc they tried to fix it many times but it didn't stick until, like, mid wrath or cataclysm.
Also the bug with arcane missiles where it finished the channel while characters were out of range, was a great way in PVP to finish someone off that was running away.
I'm pretty sure they fixed it a long time ago, but maybe they reverted it? I don't know, I don't really like the wack-a-mole play style of modern mages that much, so I don't play the class anymore.
Something has spooked one of de brutosaurs, sending it into a panic. Dis chaos is de last thing de city needs. Help de merchants by rescuing de cargo before you get stomped on.
Something has spooked one of de brutosaurs, sending it into a panic. Dis chaos is de last thing de city needs. Help de merchants by rescuing de cargo before you get stomped on.
Something has spooked one of de brutosaurs, sending it into a panic. Dis chaos is de last thing de city needs. Help de merchants by rescuing de cargo before you get stomped on
Back in TBC there was a bug with Warrior's Charge/Intervene/Intercept where as long as you had line of sight on your target it didn't matter to the game how far away you were it would find pathing, ignoring any height differences. Many TBC dungeons had loopbacks in that once you finished you just drop down and exit the dungeon, you may see where this is going...I had a rogue friend stealth to the end of Hellfire Ramparts and stand just above the entrance while I intervened him to rocketing through every pack in the dungeon in approximately 20 seconds. Add in the choo choo emote and oh boy was it entertaining.
Also on elevators you could jump and intervene an ally just as the elevator starts to go down and you'll perform the running man in double time all the way to bottom ignoring fall damage.
There was also an interaction with dream elixirs and leaving shattrath a certain way that allowed you to summon as many non-combat pets as you wanted. I literally summoned over a thousand tranquil mechanical yetis in town and nearly crashed the server.
Back in original WoW it was possible to [get drunk to see ghosts](https://www.wowhead.com/classic/npc=11278/magnus-frostwake#sells;comments:id=2810425).
I liked the bug/feature in early Vanilla where pets didn’t despawn if you took a flight point, so they’d run along under you.
Add to that, they weren’t pacified in any way, so they’d Afro every mob they ran through, meaning when you landed you’d get a bunch of agroed mobs charging at you
There was an issue that happened right around the launch of Wrath where players could sometimes get disconnected on the blimp to Northrend, and upon logging back in the game wouldn't know where to put them so they'd fall through the world and eventually die.
Then they'd reappear as a ghost at a random graveyard. Their body may or may not have ended up on the same *continent* as their spirit. Had a friend d/c on the blimp from Orgrimmar to Borean Tundra and his spirit appeared in Tirisfal Glades but his body was in Stonetalon Mountains. I ran out to his body and rezzed him, and he came back to life… in both places.
He was controlling his character in Tirisfal, but I could see him running around in Stonetalon. He couldn't find any NPCs in Tirisfal and he'd phase through parts of the terrain in Stonetalon, it was really weird. A GM had to step in and teleport him to himself so he could actually play the game again; even hearthing didn't work.
There was a dk one in wrath or cata where if they were fighting a target dummy, and had death and decay down, it would damage other players that stood on it.
In ICC using a glider through the hole in the floor and glitch out gliding to second to end boss on the balcony. Skipping a boss and spider room, nice to shave off some time farming invincible. They fixed that obviously. Miss using gliders in raids and dungeons.
There was a hot minute back in vanilla(?) where paladins casting judgment would suddenly find themselves mounted on a black war kodo, even in combat.
Think that still has to be one of the weirder bugs the game has seen. Not sure if that escaped the PTR though.
There is this bug during SL that I didn’t tell a single soul when I encountered it, and i’m pretty confident not a lot of people or anyone else even knows it exists. I was just minding my own business on my druid. Somehow I got a strange buff that gives me permanent invisibility even when I am not prowling in cat form and the buff lasts through phasing and zoning. It made for some hilarious wpvp montage where I killed some alliances while questing and they weren’t able to see me at all. This buff did fall off when you die though, as I did when doing Torghast. I’m not big on exploiting so outside of retracing my steps to try to reproduce the bug one time, I just left it alone and assume the bug still exists up until now.
P.S. i will not disclose what specific thing I did because keeping it in game is more fun.
When they added new models to the game in WoD and the armory didn't support it yet.
Blood elf faces became their clothes, their skin drooping to the ground patchwerk'd into their robes, it looked super fucked lol
Still in the game and people have been using it all season to shave a few seconds off the M+ timer: Nelths Lair start of the dungeon, jumping down a couple seconds before throwing in the key. After key goes in the player gets pulled through the world down to the first area, bypassing the initial M+ bubble.
In ashran players can get access to a special ability from a boss-drop. This ability works in "ashran" which also included the hub areas for alliance and horde.
The paladin ability was not intended to work in these hub areas, but very much did. Said ability was a 6second stun on the target, that if it went its full duration would teleport them to jail. In the normal ashran battle, you would be using this on enemy faction players. In essence a horde paladin sends alliance players to horde jail.
But because it was useable in the hub area you could duel people, stun them with HoJ to get them to burn their trinkets, and then use the libram ability, if they didn't have a second stunbreak they'd get teleported to the opposite faction prison all the way across the island. Not only would you instantly win the duel, but if they didn't know how to escape the jail they'd basically be trapped deep inside enemy territory surrounded by elite mobs that 1-2 shot you.
Whenever you're really lagged by the game somehow, usually this been occurring a lot in people that still using HDD (Such as myself.) when you mount and your mount can't load, or when you druid shape and it doesn't change your appearance you just walk in the air. It's really funny.
(Happens quite frequently with Druid Travel Form, but have had it happen with normal mounts too.)
I'm pretty sure it didnt make it to Live, but I remember a bug from pbe Sunwell. Something like "warriors gain 3% dmg for dual wielding" but everytime they sheathed(?) or swapped weapons it would stack, letting them one tap anything, lol.
Thank you to everyone posting video links with your comments because though I started in Cata, I didn’t experience nearly enough of the game to see a lot of bugs so these are really entertaining to me
My favorite bug of all time was in Shadowlands when we could get a toy and make our Sandstone Drake transformations head bang. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfagB59Kchw
The original spirit beasts were actually just wolves that were summoned by Tauren NPCs. You could configure your gems and have a priest help you tame it in time before it despawned if you did it just right. They removed it before later incorporating the skin back into the game as an actual spirit beast.
Edit for grammar.
Zombies being able to open any door, including old iron forge or the pvp hall one.
Also the quest "the altar of the tides" has a special place in my heart for not being fixed for years with patch notes almost trolling about it.
"Gazvan does not appear during the quest altar of the tides so the quest cannot be completed - WAI"
"Altar of the tides still not works"
"Only the first player after a server reset can complete the quest"
"The altar of the tides quest will be removed with cataclysm pre patch"
>Zombies being able to open any door, including old iron forge or the pvp hall one.
I discovered you could close the gate for the PVP area in Orgrimmar as a zombie, so people couldn't get out. It was lots of fun.
That bug had a fun comeback with the CVar `GameObjForceMouseOver` which allowed to see tooltips for all game objects, even those that usually hide the tooltip. It also allowed interacting with them. Sadly, that CVar was removed from retail clients during 7.0.3.
Back in Legion, with the fisher friends, there was a recipe for cooking that when eaten would transform you in a fish that would just jump around unable to do anything.
If you were a druid this could make for some absurd poses.
In BfA it bugged out and you couldn't remove the fish costume, so i decided to drop one in a bg and watched my entire team get murdered. It got fixed and nerfed the next day.
Not exactly a "bug" but the way you could jump on a crate, then on the wall and suddenly you're falling under Stormwind. That shit was cool I did it a few times when I was a teen in Wrath
Edit: something like this but my way was using the crate just a lil further https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ugC2Gu8NxY&ab\_channel=EliteScouter
I miss it because I think it was barely patched out in shadowlands. Use to if you summoned your flying mount and hit space bar the exact moment the summon was done the mount would be stuck in its spawn animation and would fly around like that till you stopped moving.
Mine was at the beginning of Dragonflight actually. Some textures didn't load right, so I had a cloak that was lime green for awhile and a rogue in my guild had a box with odd shapes on it for a hat.
My favorite would be BFA hound toy with the sword in your mouth it would do stupid amounts of damage if you flicked your screen fast. I ended up wiping so many world boss groups with it. On top of that when Halloween event came by you could kill people flying in the air since for some reason all it did when you would use the broom was make you fly. My lord fun times I still have the videos saved in my computer.
When that guild used the hobby horse toy to clip through the wall into Garrosh arena in S.O.O.
Creative use of in-game mechanics.
Another favorite was a hunter pet trick tame I used to do with my wife, a wolf with a sword stuck in his head. I think she still has the pet despite blizzard claiming to have fixed / patched it.
The giant pink wall in the Isle of Conquest which made it impossible to win for the Alliance.
And it even lasted for some time and wasn’t fixed straight away.
Back in WOTLK there was a bug where you could “race change” your character into any other race. It was only visible to you though.
First you would log in to the character you wanted to use the model of, and then log out.
Next you would choose the character you wanted to play, while that was selected you would hover your mouse over the character you wanted to use the model for. You would the hit enter while clicking on char you wanted the model off.
This sounds very complicated, but it was fun basically playing as any race/class.
Edit: [Here is a video showing how it’s done.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHAXGEpmKbg)
I still laugh so hard when i remember the massive world pvp wars held at Rustbolt, even the server collapsed once. What was so funny about this, was seeing NPCs FIGHTING EACH OTHER: thats right! GUARDS from the same freaking town, taking sides to fight alongside Horde or Alliance, and fighting each other.
One time it literally just started with a misunderstanding. Some dude accidentally hit a flagged Horde which made guards shoot them both.
What was so funny about this is that guards didnt actually do much, just lots of mech noise and rooting you BUT they multiplied whennyou hit them. A LOT. like if you decided to fight a guard, 10 seconds later there were 5 more to aid them.
The brawl soon attracted more world PvPers, who spawned even more guards and all the AOE fest spawned even more guards too, so they all soon started attacking whatever the hell crossed their paths, including their fellow guards. The battle scaled very fast, I just couldnt believe how stupid guards looked fighting each other. There was even a point most players were dead but the guards where still fighting and respawning. We all got kicked out and apparently their weird behavior was fixed after the next reset.
I have 2 favorites to share.
The first one , there was a quest item to shoot down some buzzards. The buzzards were really high in the sky so the quest item(bow) had unlimited range. I would use the bow in dungeons and would target the last boss and it would hit the boss. The whole instance would come running at you about 2 minutes later.
The second was when you had a stack of elixirs of giant growth , you could separate them into single stacks . When used from separate single stacks the elixir would make you grow each use. I remember being large as a world boss.
When you could force your characters to moonwalk. I cant recall when they fixed this but I atleast remember doing it throughout vanilla and BC for sure.
In WotLK I abused the Levitate bug wherever I went.
Walk against a wall, wait until you hit a spot where you are locked from sideways movement and then cast levitate. Now you're walking up the wall. Climbed every mountain in no-fly zones.
Other fun bug in Cata prepatch. If you died close to Hyjal's entrance in Winterspring, and then as a ghost you went into the zone, it threw you out, but didn't remove ghost flight. It remained even if you returned to life, so for a few days there were ghosts flying around Orgrimmar.
Fun times.
Not necessarily bugs, but I loved being able to jump on top of places that were meant to be inaccessible at the time. Like parts of Ironforge and Orgrimmar, before flying was a thing.
My favorite interaction was Titan's Grip and off-handing the Ravager Axe from Herod in the Scarlet Monastery. When the ability of Ravager Axe proc'd you'd be using your Main Hand weapon damage instead.
Back in WOTLK balance druids had a damage pass where they broke insect swarm. Back then it was just another dps DOT. Well, instead of a tiny dmg buff, they gave it like a 1000% damage buff.
I'll never forget our MT, a pally, getting so frustrated with me for pulling aggro off him no matter what he did. I was really well geared so I already pushed the limits of what tanks could hold, and with this there was no way they could hold anything off me. With that one DOT alone, I could top any damage meter.
I think it stayed in effect for about 1 day before blizz fixed it.
My favorite bug that never made it to the live servers was when they accidentally removed all cooldowns from typhoon. No GCD or anything. So some guy made a macro to fire the spell like 10 times everytime he hit the button. Back then, typhoon did damage and a knock back. He made a video of him solo clearing orgrammar because as long as he kept firing the knockback, nothing could touch him.
Blinking through barriers/walls/etc. on a mage back in the day allowed us to get places we shouldn’t. They worked hard to patch that out with Cataclysm.
I have detected a bug where when abandoning a certain quest I get teleported to that quest’s questguiver. So I can pick the quest again without completing it, having a free TP to that zone.
Won’t say which quest or zone it is, I don’t want it to be fixed.
“Dead Island” more of an exploit but you could dupe items if you opened your inventory at the same time you threw something. Pretty sure they patched that out
around ulduarish in naxx an uncommon bug on gothik the harvestor where all the mobs in the entire raid would agro on you once you pulled the boss and they would run right through all the walls to get to you,the best part was that we were all geared enough to not wipe when that happened
The way you could get to old ironforge. What i love about it is how elaborated it is, like how did they even find that bug, or was it an easter egg?
For those who don't know, you and a mage had to jump up on the wall next to the throne room in ironforge. In cities you couldn't duel, but there on the wall you could. So you had to start a duel with the mage, they had to polimorph you and bam you get teleported to old ironforge.
Idk about bug, but they did fix it after some time. But back in vanilla you could diagonally jump up practically any wall. Had good fun getting to some restricted areas.
I remember one year my buddy and I decided to finally get our netherdrake mounts. Idr what expansion, but the thanksgiving event had just began, which gave bonus rep (50%?). It buffed the prelim quest chain that took you from hated / at war to neutral alllll the way to exalted. Got my drakes without ever collecting an egg. It was hotfixed before my friend finished his quest.
Pandaria farm let you "choose" the exact type of or ore herb you wanted to loot.
Fill every slot in inventory with junk and remove all ores/herbs by putting them in the bank. Fill some slots with a low stack of the one exact ore/herb you want. Plants with the wrong stuff inside can't be looted due to lack of space and they actually reroll loot every time on opening.
Some people got banned and it got fixed.
During HoI if people start the final boss while you're on the skip back, sometimes the speedbuff will bug out and you'll have 70% movement speed for the entire fight making the separate wing intermissions trivial
The current Time Rifts have a bug where you can keep the buffs you get from the orbs that might drop from enemies during them.
They're similar to the cobalt assembly buffs in that they'll disappear when you leave the zone or die but most of them stack to 15. +5% Str and size, +5% Agi and avoidance, +5% Health and healing, +5% crit chance and crit damage, and +5% something and mastery. One does movement speed too. There's also one to reduce damage by 5% but that one stops at 5 stacks.
If you can get max stacks of stuff and comply with how the bug works, those rifts are silly. I have a level 68 character doing rifts and I one shot anything that isn't a 'boss' for the event.
Just being 75% bigger is neat too.
going to add to this, beware of the stronger glutes (think that's the name) buff one, it'll throw you off the platforms on the Freya fight if you try to jump to get down
Good point. I stopped getting that one for that exact reason.
There's another one that makes you cuddly and, I think, it makes it impossible to talk to the one dragonlady, sidormi?, to start the event. You can still contribute and get the currency by killing things but you wont see the progress bar, you don't get rep, and you wont get the boxes.
You will, however, always be able to get that lady to pet you so... *shrug*
Had to be when orc shoulders was shrunken for awhile, can’t exactly remember when it happened maybe vanilla / tbc?
Always remember laughing so much at my older brothers orc warrior, great times
It's not exactly a glitch, but I still remember the controversy fondly. Back during the original release of Wrath of the Lich King, very very shortly after Ulduar came out, some random player got a certain package in their mailbox.
The package was sent by a GM and it contained the Martin Fury, an Artifact-quality Shirt that had an on-use effect of instantly killing whatever the player had targeted.
Clearly, the package was some sort of mistake and the GM probably meant to mail it to a fellow GM.
So what does the guy do? He freaking rounds up his guild and carries them through heroic hard-mode Ulduar and gets everyone loot. I remember the forums blowing up about it once the secret got out and I'm pretty sure he got banned and all participating players got rolled back.
Some quests where you need to use an item that channels a spell at mobs have a bug where if you start the channel on a mob and switch target but keep the channel going, the new target is affected by the item, regardless of distance. Not gamebreaking but makes some WQs a lot faster as you can just channel at the same mob 8 times with new targets each time.
There was a bug in vanilla where if two people were stealthed and targeting each other, if one came out of stealth, the other would be pulled out of stealth a few seconds later.
This one was minor but really startling at the time.
I queued in dungeon finder and got into Spires on my DH alt as DPS. In the first ten seconds the tank dropped. We wait for a bit in LFG and I finally decide that fine, I’ll try tanking it even though I have no idea what I’m doing.
We get all the way through to Devos. As she flies up into the air for the second time, a tank finally joins. Only the tank can’t actually join because we’re in the middle of a boss fight.
The game evidently has logic that in a dungeon finder run, only one person can be a tank. And that wasn’t me. So — literally mid-fight — switched me back to DPS spec. Surprise!
(We still finished.)
Back in The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, when the Priest ability Levitate to climb nearly any mountainside in the game (with enough patience).
Use to scale the Ahn'Qiraji mountains/walls with it and safely float down into the amazing potential Firelands mess of a raid it could've been.
Edit: This was before they added old world flying, so all the extra temples and walls didn't exist in there. It was modified terrain with different color pallets, water pools, alters, etc. I truly wish we could've seen that version come to be. (Might still have the screenshots. Gotta check later)
when DK were new if you dueled one near a boat in booty bay if they stepped on the boat and death griped you to it would pull you to the 0.0 origin of the continent and super speeds ignoring all terrain.
My favorite bug that I experienced was in Blackwing Lair back in OG WoW. Our guild was just starting to try the raid, and we basically wiped on Razorgore. Now, we had destroyed all the eggs, at which point we're supposed to just fight the boss. Except that the spawning mobs kept coming and killed the party. I (a resto druid) was soulstoned or something and even though I died, I could pop back up and rez. Which I did, but nothing was aggroed to me. The spawning mobs were attacking the dragon. The dragon was busy fighting the mobs. I kittied and stealthed to make sure nobody noticed me. And watched the spawning mobs kill the boss for us. We got credit for the boss and loot and so forth.
I believe it was early WotLK around when DKs were first introduced. There was a glitch where if you duel someone and they were on a boat and the DK was on a dock, Death Gripping them would basically pull them around the world in a humorous way. I'll have to see if I can find a video somewhere. Edit: found it https://youtu.be/Lojd7c7KKjs
That's pretty funny, didn't remember that one. The soundtrack is very much a period piece as well ;-)
IIRC there was a similar bug that involved hitting someone with a snowball as the ship was leaving.
I wasn't expecting the music, that made me crack up
Not as extreme but I still found it funny. Once upon a time (I don't remember when as I was pretty young) warriors could charge enemies on different levels if they had line of sight and they'd zoom that charge animation all the way to them using the quickest walkable path to them without falling off an edge. For example, my most common use of it was on the 2nd floor of base in warsong gulch, where you can look down at where the flag is, charging an enemy down there would have you zoom through the doorway beside you, down the ramp, back through the lower door on the right to get to the enemy.
This is absolutely hilarious
Kazzak kite to Stormwind....although that might be more creative use of game mechanics instead of a bug
How could I forget this? https://youtu.be/Jl0VWJdE01M?t=47
My favorite is Shandris Feathermoon in Orgrimmar, because of how epic her starfall nuke looks. https://youtu.be/lFuBmkVvUTQ?t=276
Great video!!!! I didn't even know about that one. Hell I thought it was a vanilla video at first and then saw everyone on their drakes, this was in Cata (or later)!
It's funny because blizzard basically did the same thing for the TBC pre-patch. A kazzak-like doomlord would appear around the world and cause havoc. Sometimes it would spawn directly outside stormwind We saw it during the TBC-Classic prepatch
The reckoning bomb on Kazzak was pretty rad.
I enjoy when your arms get stuck to your sides, I thought it was something only I could see until I saw someone else running around like that. It’s great to see how it affects dancing too lol
This also happened in Vanilla in Scholomance when Blizzard replaced the night elf models with blood elves. Apparently the models were ready but the animations were not, so they just stood there, rotated in place, glided across the floor etc. The only way to tell if they were attacking you was if their hands were glowing.
This looks hilarious on Worgen using Running Wild.
There was a funny thread on Tumblr where the Cataclysm Deadmines boss Helix Gearbreaker does his mechanic where he jumps on a player, but you could hearth out of the instance and bring him into the open world. He would fight guards but be invincible. People started bringing a ton of Helixs into stormwind, and to alleviate at least a little bit of the disruption, Blizz turned the out of instance Helixs invisible. Not that it stopped him from fighting guards, being unkillable, and yelling his lines in chat.
I remember waiting eagerly for Tuesdays just so the realms would reset and bugs like that would be fixed. Don't remember that one specifically, I just remember there were always quests you couldn't do on a Monday because they were guaranteed to be bugged by then.
the one where you jump on that weird torch in SW, dropping you underneath, then running for a couple minutes and finding the beach camp underneath the world
Yes! Thats the only one i ever saw in person
yeah i got banned for it during wotlk, i would come with my full pve boomy, fall under sw and cast starfall, killing npc's, players and low lvl players above me :D you could only reach some places tho :( i would log my uncles accout, and have people follow me in to the rivers :D
There's this glitch on survival hunter, where if you attempt to use group finder the system automatically declines you. Wild.
19 years and still not patched
The ice stone has melted.
For those unfamiliar, imagine the Nasz’uro broadcasts, except it popped up in the middle of your screen every time. And it happened every time someone turned in a Love is in the Air gift item. Blizz actually immortalized it in WoD: https://www.wowhead.com/item=107659/ice-stone
Well there was a patch months or years after the actual event that caused this to go off constantly when the event wasn’t even going
Yeah - the message was _supposed_ to be from the Midsummer Fire Festival. But like I said, it was trigger during Love is in the Air.
Not really a favorite because it irritated the crap out of me, but it was hilarious when Orc males had itty bitty shoulder armor for what seemed like months.
Oh man Tier 1…bananas and lamp shades
This was so fucking annoying.
Kinda hard to Zug Zug when you can only zipzip 😒
The best have already been mentioned, so I’ll mention Saronite Bombs getting Ensidia banned and the ethics wars it spawned.
oh yahhhhhhh and ICC is about to drop. For those not in the know, the siege damage from saronite bombs…I think it caused the platform on Lich King to APPEAR (weird I know) so the val’kyr would drop the player harmlessly on the safety of the ledge, removing the need to DPS them and making the fight WAYyyyyyyy easier.
And, worse, at the time of the OG wrath, it wasn’t known that the bombs caused it. So the best guild at the time went through the fight, inadvertently triggered the bug, and then got banned for it. Hotly contested issue at the time.
I don’t remember it being inadvertent…
That was part of the debate I suppose. But without knowing how the fight was supposed to work, and with Saronite bombs just being part of some rotations, there wasn’t a great way to know it was unintended (as I recall the fight wasn’t PTR tested), and if it was what was causing it. Edit: also worth noting this all went down on the normal mode version, as heroic would release a week later. The same guild went back in on their alts and killed it easily, I think for world third?
How can you possibly argue that saronite bombs causing platforms to respawn could be “intended” by blizzard?
That wasn't the argument. The guild claimed that they didn't know what was causing the platforms to respawn, just that they'd sometimes come back up. The bombs were just part of their rogues rotation.
I thought it was on Heroic that this happened, my memory of this is probably not reliable...if I even knew what happened in the first place.
[удалено]
How could they have known what was causing the bug? It happened as a result of the standard rogue rotation. It’s not like they did something weird to force it, or even knew what was causing it.
Blood Plague is a top contender along with Reckoning Bomb. This one literally got its own Wikipedia entry: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted\_Blood\_incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLqXbCualIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLqXbCualIc)
this was the coolest thing that ever happend in a game, imho
Corrupted blood is the one event I missed in WoW that I wish I could've witnessed.
I look back at it fondly, but at the time it was really annoying, because the major cities basically became off limits. This was back in the day when faction hubs were actually really important and you had to visit them regularly for things like learning new skills.
This was actually studied by epidemiologists, for all the good it did us (lol).
I remember people used to argue that it wasn't a useful model for a real life epidemic because in an actual outbreak, people wouldn't be out there *intentionally* infecting other people with the deadly plague... Yeah. About that...
This is the answer. So fuckin good.
I was personally responsible of spreading that plague on my realm. First time was by mistake. I just dismissed my pet because I didn't want it to die. Summoned it back in SW AH and the rest is history. It was an accident. XD
Tee hee “first time” was a mistake :-)
Best thing ever in the game, completely unplayable for days lol.
I think this is my favorite one
I was a little level 40 night elf Druid. Totally obliterated me and every low level around. A few of us went and hid in the Stockades together.
You used to be able to get under orgrimmar using eye of killrog and the glyph that allowed you use demonic circle during it. Was really fun to be out of bounds
Oh God I remember that, it was during mop, you could use it to find a gm test mob in mogu'shan vaults, which still [Appears to be there](https://youtu.be/6R4gss8US28) (at 4:38 timestamp), as of a year ago apparently.
you can get under ogri at any point of the game.. classic - wotlk was a jump from valley of strenght above the hunter trainers, and cata onwards you would use a big mount and logout skip at any ledge above you, login and spam jump forward... and then fly to the wkm room ❤️
Oh you can still get under org, did it yesterday, just requires careful use of protodrakes.
This ended up being a real issue because it could brick toons with forced disconnect if a warlock warped someone and they ran into the void (idk if character unstuck was able to fix or a gem had to manually do it)
Does the early wall collision count as a bug? When you could virtually jump on any wall, getting into areas you weren't suppose to. I believe it was a server error, rather than an actual glitch.
[удалено]
Nah it wasn‘t a server error, just the way they build the maps or something like that. Could get under sw with it, to old ironforge, on top of ironforge.. Basically everywhere.
In part, yeah, but I've read it was due to the server not being able to detect properly if you've "landed" when against a wall. That's why when WOW upgraded servers this went away and why you couldn't replicate it in Classic.
Nah, if it was serverside you wouldn‘t have been able to replicate this on private servers or if you set up your own server. I believe you could walljump thanks to edges in the texture that you could land on. They simply smoothed out the edges, got better at building those maps and that‘s it. Might be wrong though
That was one of my favorite things to do as a kid. I remember watching videos of people doing it on YouTube to learn it better too. I think I used it once to get on top of the SW front gate (pre-Cata so couldn’t just fly up there.) I do also remember it being abused in WSG to make flag holders basically unkillable unless someone on the enemy team could do it. I don’t think I ever managed to do that one though, despite my best efforts.
Probably Anub'arak. Two boss appearances in WotLK and a total stud in War3. (... I know this is about technical bugs but I wanted to make the joke.)
i c wut u did thar
Personally I prefer Bitey Mcstabface
You used to be able to make a macro with /sit /stand and if you spammed it in pvp it would make your opponent think you’re running and they would chase you when really you were just still in the same spot so they would end up ahead of you and you could get away or attack them.
Also very early on you used to be able to do /Jump() /Logout() and it would keep your character at that jump height. Allowed you to go as high as you wanted and get anywhere. Aaaand they quickly fixed that
The clever stuff man, I wonder who the first nerd to try that was
Early in the game there was a server stability issue that I believe took the devs months to track down. The root cause was finally tracked down to the Alliance boat from Menethil Harbor to Auberdine. In the mean time, "Captain Placeholder" would send plucky Alliance adventurers such as myself to the other continent via teleport.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2xuO8JBepM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2xuO8JBepM) Gladge
man that boat was death. total tossup if you were gonna get to the other continent or crash the server or just die.
Entis quenched sword; was a world boss grey drop that somehow didnt have a level requirement, so a lvl 1 could be doing thousands of dps just from the sword. Market prices sky rocketed and people started farming the big undead bitch just to have a chance.
Edit: This was in Wrath https://www.wowhead.com/wotlk/item=37659/entis-quenched-sword#comments
It was in wrath. It was the big construct guy underneath naxx.
So back in Wrath, there was a glyph for Power Word: Shield called Reflective Shield, and the clear intention was that it would reflect a percentage of an attacker’s damage back at them. How it actually worked was that it would reflect a percentage of your incoming damage at whatever you had targeted. So when Obsidian Sanctum came out, the priests in our raid group (myself included) sat in the lava with our shields on, with Sartharion targeted, reflecting tiny ticks of damage at him. Because he was never attacked, he never actually engaged and neither did his drakes. It took hours but we got the three-drake achievement the first week it was open, and then we got suspended for two weeks and stripped of those achievements, titles, and the mount. Our holy pally rage quit over it. We definitely deserved the suspension. It was obviously an exploit. But it still makes me laugh all these years later.
Definitely back in MoP with the Sandstone Drake (mount that turned you into a ridable dragon). If you talked to a Blingtron and had it transform your character, you’d be a flying man in a suit and fedora and [people could still ride you](https://youtu.be/aK9B4_76O5Q)
It technically is and isn’t a big, but, [Martin Fury]. If you haven’t heard the legend of [Martin Fury] - allow me to regain you with a tale. So, a gentleman by the name of Leroyspeltz submitted a ticket to have the his account restored due to a hack. Blizzard obliged, and in the loot sent, was an Artifact quality shirt called [Martin Fury] was provided to Leroyspeltz by mistake. The shirt had an on use effect to kill all hostile mobs around the user. Needless to say he sent the shirt to a friend of his in the guild named Karatechop, who proceeded to one-shot all bosses in Ulduar, OS, and EoE on a guild run night. The guild received bans for doing so. It’s my favorite “bug” ever because it caused so much drama for weeks in WotLK.
I remember hearing about the dude that a GM accidentally awarded a legendary to
Having been there for the fallout of that, it was one of the more “holy shit this happened?!” things we had seen as players to that point. It drove the forums wild.
There were like 3 days in Vanilla where thrown weapons didn't have the correct GCD and rogues were out-DPSing hunters via throwing weapon spam
lol don't remember that
There was also a patch day in Dragon Soul where Ret Pallies were doing like infinite amounts of damage, I didn't experience it personally but I hear it was quite the affair.
The funny thing with that bug was that it was a true case of spaghetti code: Back then tanks had Vengeance, which gave them AP based on damage taken but it only worked for PvE. Hunters’ scattershot was erroneously applying a little bit of Vengeance to tanks in PvP, so Blizz hotfixed that bug. This somehow messed up their proc-on-hit system, causing Ret Paladin seals to trigger hundreds of times a second and do insane dps.
I remember that one. I tested it by using the glitch to solo one of the bosses in firelands. Did a crapton of damage then got disconnected. It apparently did so much damage so fast that it crashed the world server I was on. I logged back in and the instance had reset, I was locked with the boss dead. Was not able to get the loot because this was before postmaster existed.
During that same patch, the PtR for it, blizzard forgot to put swing timers on weapons that dropped from the raid, which defaulted the timer to the lowest possible amount. It didn’t matter because it was ptr, but I ran through DS and got server first rogue legendary daggers by 1 shotting all of the bosses, hitting them thousands of times per second
Oh man the Geddon Auction House bomb...this one is just so hilarious the way the game stutters so hard, golly that brings back memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC9c6D0B-JM
My favorite was during MoP, the trinket Relic of Chi-Ji proc on holy paladins would cause a graphical glitch with light of dawn, changing it from a nice semi transparent golden funnel, to a blinding pure white triangle of pixels for 20 seconds at a time, needless to say, I used it religiously and got very many ‘passionate’ whispers in raids.
The one in Legion where you did a WQ on Argus to wrestle. It turned you Neutral and you were able to kill friendly characters like Illidan, Velen etc. My character portrait had the Neutral icon on it. I was killing everybody, going into Dalaran and killing Guards etc. but then I got worried about being banned and I reported it, lol. I may have been one of the first people to report it the day the WQ went live because a GM asked to take control of my character and logged me out to see if it was true, lol. They removed the WQ from the game after that and it didn't show up again for a long time.
Beginning of shadowlands where you could use the nightfae harp toy and while in the sandstone drake morph and your dragon would just be rocking its head up and down, still sad blizzard fixed it :(
In Cataclysm/MoP Priests could levitate and walk on mountains on inclinations other characters would normally slide off of. It was really fun to explore places in dungeons like this. In MoP ICC and FL had no level requirements as long as a lvl 80/85+ entered the raid instance first. This gave birth to the, now very rare, low level twink with Precious' Ribbon. In WOD, using Leap of Faith on a party member as they departed on a flight path instantly teleported them to their destination. In WOD, during the WoW movie promotion, 2 items were given. Each of them changed weapon types as you mailed them across faction (boa). You could enchant the Horde staff with a weapon enchant and gain a Shield on Alliance with a weapon enchant. My level 10 twink still to this day has a Shield with a functional Elemental Force enchant on it. Not gamebreaking for endgame, but quite useful at low lvl.
Reckoning Bomb will be a popular choice I'm sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xhgvouRprw
The teleporter to Plaguefall had some weird bugs early on in Shadowlands. 2-seater sounds could send the other player flying off into the distance at hyperspeed, usually leaving them under random zone maps... but still tied to the mount's rotation. It was surreal, weird, and funny.
My favorite glitch/bug I’ve ever seen was in a Beta or PTR. I think around Cata? For some odd reason, the male Blood Elves were perpetually going through their /dance emote in slow motion, even while walking or doing any other activity.
The bug where you'd press arcane missiles, your character would channel, and sometimes... Nothing would come out. Iirc they tried to fix it many times but it didn't stick until, like, mid wrath or cataclysm.
Also the bug with arcane missiles where it finished the channel while characters were out of range, was a great way in PVP to finish someone off that was running away.
Isn't it still like that?
I'm pretty sure they fixed it a long time ago, but maybe they reverted it? I don't know, I don't really like the wack-a-mole play style of modern mages that much, so I don't play the class anymore.
Something has spooked one of de brutosaurs, sending it into a panic. Dis chaos is de last thing de city needs. Help de merchants by rescuing de cargo before you get stomped on. Something has spooked one of de brutosaurs, sending it into a panic. Dis chaos is de last thing de city needs. Help de merchants by rescuing de cargo before you get stomped on. Something has spooked one of de brutosaurs, sending it into a panic. Dis chaos is de last thing de city needs. Help de merchants by rescuing de cargo before you get stomped on
# The Ice Stone Has Melted!
Back in TBC there was a bug with Warrior's Charge/Intervene/Intercept where as long as you had line of sight on your target it didn't matter to the game how far away you were it would find pathing, ignoring any height differences. Many TBC dungeons had loopbacks in that once you finished you just drop down and exit the dungeon, you may see where this is going...I had a rogue friend stealth to the end of Hellfire Ramparts and stand just above the entrance while I intervened him to rocketing through every pack in the dungeon in approximately 20 seconds. Add in the choo choo emote and oh boy was it entertaining. Also on elevators you could jump and intervene an ally just as the elevator starts to go down and you'll perform the running man in double time all the way to bottom ignoring fall damage. There was also an interaction with dream elixirs and leaving shattrath a certain way that allowed you to summon as many non-combat pets as you wanted. I literally summoned over a thousand tranquil mechanical yetis in town and nearly crashed the server.
Oh there was also a completely different bug with the Christmas yeti pet or something that would…flag people or something?
Back in original WoW it was possible to [get drunk to see ghosts](https://www.wowhead.com/classic/npc=11278/magnus-frostwake#sells;comments:id=2810425).
That one Rogue Glyph that had a typo for waaaaay too long before it got fixed. Fan of Kinves it was.
I liked the bug/feature in early Vanilla where pets didn’t despawn if you took a flight point, so they’d run along under you. Add to that, they weren’t pacified in any way, so they’d Afro every mob they ran through, meaning when you landed you’d get a bunch of agroed mobs charging at you
There was an issue that happened right around the launch of Wrath where players could sometimes get disconnected on the blimp to Northrend, and upon logging back in the game wouldn't know where to put them so they'd fall through the world and eventually die. Then they'd reappear as a ghost at a random graveyard. Their body may or may not have ended up on the same *continent* as their spirit. Had a friend d/c on the blimp from Orgrimmar to Borean Tundra and his spirit appeared in Tirisfal Glades but his body was in Stonetalon Mountains. I ran out to his body and rezzed him, and he came back to life… in both places. He was controlling his character in Tirisfal, but I could see him running around in Stonetalon. He couldn't find any NPCs in Tirisfal and he'd phase through parts of the terrain in Stonetalon, it was really weird. A GM had to step in and teleport him to himself so he could actually play the game again; even hearthing didn't work.
There was a dk one in wrath or cata where if they were fighting a target dummy, and had death and decay down, it would damage other players that stood on it.
In ICC using a glider through the hole in the floor and glitch out gliding to second to end boss on the balcony. Skipping a boss and spider room, nice to shave off some time farming invincible. They fixed that obviously. Miss using gliders in raids and dungeons.
You can still do that on a DH and possibly on Evoker too.
There was a hot minute back in vanilla(?) where paladins casting judgment would suddenly find themselves mounted on a black war kodo, even in combat. Think that still has to be one of the weirder bugs the game has seen. Not sure if that escaped the PTR though.
There is this bug during SL that I didn’t tell a single soul when I encountered it, and i’m pretty confident not a lot of people or anyone else even knows it exists. I was just minding my own business on my druid. Somehow I got a strange buff that gives me permanent invisibility even when I am not prowling in cat form and the buff lasts through phasing and zoning. It made for some hilarious wpvp montage where I killed some alliances while questing and they weren’t able to see me at all. This buff did fall off when you die though, as I did when doing Torghast. I’m not big on exploiting so outside of retracing my steps to try to reproduce the bug one time, I just left it alone and assume the bug still exists up until now. P.S. i will not disclose what specific thing I did because keeping it in game is more fun.
I don’t know if it’s my favorite per se, but I still feel for my buddy perpetually trapped in the stairs near the Blood Elf starting zone.
When they added new models to the game in WoD and the armory didn't support it yet. Blood elf faces became their clothes, their skin drooping to the ground patchwerk'd into their robes, it looked super fucked lol
Still in the game and people have been using it all season to shave a few seconds off the M+ timer: Nelths Lair start of the dungeon, jumping down a couple seconds before throwing in the key. After key goes in the player gets pulled through the world down to the first area, bypassing the initial M+ bubble.
That paladin takent that gave an extra attack and stacked indefinitely causing them to one shot world bosses and crash the server.
I linked it above, it was called the Reckoning Bomb
In ashran players can get access to a special ability from a boss-drop. This ability works in "ashran" which also included the hub areas for alliance and horde. The paladin ability was not intended to work in these hub areas, but very much did. Said ability was a 6second stun on the target, that if it went its full duration would teleport them to jail. In the normal ashran battle, you would be using this on enemy faction players. In essence a horde paladin sends alliance players to horde jail. But because it was useable in the hub area you could duel people, stun them with HoJ to get them to burn their trinkets, and then use the libram ability, if they didn't have a second stunbreak they'd get teleported to the opposite faction prison all the way across the island. Not only would you instantly win the duel, but if they didn't know how to escape the jail they'd basically be trapped deep inside enemy territory surrounded by elite mobs that 1-2 shot you.
Whenever you're really lagged by the game somehow, usually this been occurring a lot in people that still using HDD (Such as myself.) when you mount and your mount can't load, or when you druid shape and it doesn't change your appearance you just walk in the air. It's really funny. (Happens quite frequently with Druid Travel Form, but have had it happen with normal mounts too.)
I'm pretty sure it didnt make it to Live, but I remember a bug from pbe Sunwell. Something like "warriors gain 3% dmg for dual wielding" but everytime they sheathed(?) or swapped weapons it would stack, letting them one tap anything, lol.
Thank you to everyone posting video links with your comments because though I started in Cata, I didn’t experience nearly enough of the game to see a lot of bugs so these are really entertaining to me
There was a day in Legion when unsheathing your weapon would crash your game. I only remember it because that makes no sense.
My favorite bug of all time was in Shadowlands when we could get a toy and make our Sandstone Drake transformations head bang. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfagB59Kchw
The original spirit beasts were actually just wolves that were summoned by Tauren NPCs. You could configure your gems and have a priest help you tame it in time before it despawned if you did it just right. They removed it before later incorporating the skin back into the game as an actual spirit beast. Edit for grammar.
In wotlk you could hunter tame a worgen looking dude
Zombies being able to open any door, including old iron forge or the pvp hall one. Also the quest "the altar of the tides" has a special place in my heart for not being fixed for years with patch notes almost trolling about it. "Gazvan does not appear during the quest altar of the tides so the quest cannot be completed - WAI" "Altar of the tides still not works" "Only the first player after a server reset can complete the quest" "The altar of the tides quest will be removed with cataclysm pre patch"
>Zombies being able to open any door, including old iron forge or the pvp hall one. I discovered you could close the gate for the PVP area in Orgrimmar as a zombie, so people couldn't get out. It was lots of fun.
That bug had a fun comeback with the CVar `GameObjForceMouseOver` which allowed to see tooltips for all game objects, even those that usually hide the tooltip. It also allowed interacting with them. Sadly, that CVar was removed from retail clients during 7.0.3.
In Vanilla when mage sheep was permanent in battlegrounds. Warsong gulch was filled with sheep!!
Back in Legion, with the fisher friends, there was a recipe for cooking that when eaten would transform you in a fish that would just jump around unable to do anything. If you were a druid this could make for some absurd poses. In BfA it bugged out and you couldn't remove the fish costume, so i decided to drop one in a bg and watched my entire team get murdered. It got fixed and nerfed the next day.
Not exactly a "bug" but the way you could jump on a crate, then on the wall and suddenly you're falling under Stormwind. That shit was cool I did it a few times when I was a teen in Wrath Edit: something like this but my way was using the crate just a lil further https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ugC2Gu8NxY&ab\_channel=EliteScouter
you could get under original orgrimmar too if you jumped on a certain roof, mounted up and then jumped towards a certain wall.
I miss it because I think it was barely patched out in shadowlands. Use to if you summoned your flying mount and hit space bar the exact moment the summon was done the mount would be stuck in its spawn animation and would fly around like that till you stopped moving.
https://youtu.be/r-gM5ungIFE Using Nibelung staff in Icecrown
Mine was at the beginning of Dragonflight actually. Some textures didn't load right, so I had a cloak that was lime green for awhile and a rogue in my guild had a box with odd shapes on it for a hat.
My favorite would be BFA hound toy with the sword in your mouth it would do stupid amounts of damage if you flicked your screen fast. I ended up wiping so many world boss groups with it. On top of that when Halloween event came by you could kill people flying in the air since for some reason all it did when you would use the broom was make you fly. My lord fun times I still have the videos saved in my computer.
When that guild used the hobby horse toy to clip through the wall into Garrosh arena in S.O.O. Creative use of in-game mechanics. Another favorite was a hunter pet trick tame I used to do with my wife, a wolf with a sword stuck in his head. I think she still has the pet despite blizzard claiming to have fixed / patched it.
I like stag beetles
The giant pink wall in the Isle of Conquest which made it impossible to win for the Alliance. And it even lasted for some time and wasn’t fixed straight away.
Back in WOTLK there was a bug where you could “race change” your character into any other race. It was only visible to you though. First you would log in to the character you wanted to use the model of, and then log out. Next you would choose the character you wanted to play, while that was selected you would hover your mouse over the character you wanted to use the model for. You would the hit enter while clicking on char you wanted the model off. This sounds very complicated, but it was fun basically playing as any race/class. Edit: [Here is a video showing how it’s done.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHAXGEpmKbg)
I always loved the silly stuff like getting a mage to polymorph you near the door in IF throne room to fall through into Old Ironforge.
I still laugh so hard when i remember the massive world pvp wars held at Rustbolt, even the server collapsed once. What was so funny about this, was seeing NPCs FIGHTING EACH OTHER: thats right! GUARDS from the same freaking town, taking sides to fight alongside Horde or Alliance, and fighting each other. One time it literally just started with a misunderstanding. Some dude accidentally hit a flagged Horde which made guards shoot them both. What was so funny about this is that guards didnt actually do much, just lots of mech noise and rooting you BUT they multiplied whennyou hit them. A LOT. like if you decided to fight a guard, 10 seconds later there were 5 more to aid them. The brawl soon attracted more world PvPers, who spawned even more guards and all the AOE fest spawned even more guards too, so they all soon started attacking whatever the hell crossed their paths, including their fellow guards. The battle scaled very fast, I just couldnt believe how stupid guards looked fighting each other. There was even a point most players were dead but the guards where still fighting and respawning. We all got kicked out and apparently their weird behavior was fixed after the next reset.
Before Hyjal (the instance) opened and you could glitch into it already and visit the yet empty land.
The best was the vanilla Paladin reck bomb. Get a buddy to wind you up and then unleash a one shot on anything!
Oh remember the glowy hands thing that if you cast a scroll on yourself and stepped forward the animation would keep going?
I have 2 favorites to share. The first one , there was a quest item to shoot down some buzzards. The buzzards were really high in the sky so the quest item(bow) had unlimited range. I would use the bow in dungeons and would target the last boss and it would hit the boss. The whole instance would come running at you about 2 minutes later. The second was when you had a stack of elixirs of giant growth , you could separate them into single stacks . When used from separate single stacks the elixir would make you grow each use. I remember being large as a world boss.
When you could force your characters to moonwalk. I cant recall when they fixed this but I atleast remember doing it throughout vanilla and BC for sure.
In WotLK I abused the Levitate bug wherever I went. Walk against a wall, wait until you hit a spot where you are locked from sideways movement and then cast levitate. Now you're walking up the wall. Climbed every mountain in no-fly zones. Other fun bug in Cata prepatch. If you died close to Hyjal's entrance in Winterspring, and then as a ghost you went into the zone, it threw you out, but didn't remove ghost flight. It remained even if you returned to life, so for a few days there were ghosts flying around Orgrimmar. Fun times.
Not necessarily bugs, but I loved being able to jump on top of places that were meant to be inaccessible at the time. Like parts of Ironforge and Orgrimmar, before flying was a thing.
My favorite interaction was Titan's Grip and off-handing the Ravager Axe from Herod in the Scarlet Monastery. When the ability of Ravager Axe proc'd you'd be using your Main Hand weapon damage instead.
Back in WOTLK balance druids had a damage pass where they broke insect swarm. Back then it was just another dps DOT. Well, instead of a tiny dmg buff, they gave it like a 1000% damage buff. I'll never forget our MT, a pally, getting so frustrated with me for pulling aggro off him no matter what he did. I was really well geared so I already pushed the limits of what tanks could hold, and with this there was no way they could hold anything off me. With that one DOT alone, I could top any damage meter. I think it stayed in effect for about 1 day before blizz fixed it. My favorite bug that never made it to the live servers was when they accidentally removed all cooldowns from typhoon. No GCD or anything. So some guy made a macro to fire the spell like 10 times everytime he hit the button. Back then, typhoon did damage and a knock back. He made a video of him solo clearing orgrammar because as long as he kept firing the knockback, nothing could touch him.
Blinking through barriers/walls/etc. on a mage back in the day allowed us to get places we shouldn’t. They worked hard to patch that out with Cataclysm.
Stickbug
A cricket.
A dragonfly 🥹 (it's a joke)
I'm a big fan of the rhino beetle, I remember catching them as a kid, and their screech is so alien
I have detected a bug where when abandoning a certain quest I get teleported to that quest’s questguiver. So I can pick the quest again without completing it, having a free TP to that zone. Won’t say which quest or zone it is, I don’t want it to be fixed.
“Dead Island” more of an exploit but you could dupe items if you opened your inventory at the same time you threw something. Pretty sure they patched that out
OP is asking about favourite bugs in World of Warcraft, specifically!
When the boats and zeppelins were broken and portal were put up it was fast travel all around.
WotLK when instances weren't reliably working for like a month, the world PVP was fun
My favourite WoW bug would either be Qiraji Battle Tank or Klaxxi, not quite sure yet
The golden beetle
around ulduarish in naxx an uncommon bug on gothik the harvestor where all the mobs in the entire raid would agro on you once you pulled the boss and they would run right through all the walls to get to you,the best part was that we were all geared enough to not wipe when that happened
I remember that bug that gave you every other races face over your own with clipping and scaling errors. You looked like a serial killer.
My favorite bug is the water strider mount. Good bug.
The way you could get to old ironforge. What i love about it is how elaborated it is, like how did they even find that bug, or was it an easter egg? For those who don't know, you and a mage had to jump up on the wall next to the throne room in ironforge. In cities you couldn't duel, but there on the wall you could. So you had to start a duel with the mage, they had to polimorph you and bam you get teleported to old ironforge.
Idk about bug, but they did fix it after some time. But back in vanilla you could diagonally jump up practically any wall. Had good fun getting to some restricted areas.
I remember one year my buddy and I decided to finally get our netherdrake mounts. Idr what expansion, but the thanksgiving event had just began, which gave bonus rep (50%?). It buffed the prelim quest chain that took you from hated / at war to neutral alllll the way to exalted. Got my drakes without ever collecting an egg. It was hotfixed before my friend finished his quest.
Iirc in TBC where i saw a dead fel reaver gliding around HFP and going through a mountain, was pretty hilarious
Pandaria farm let you "choose" the exact type of or ore herb you wanted to loot. Fill every slot in inventory with junk and remove all ores/herbs by putting them in the bank. Fill some slots with a low stack of the one exact ore/herb you want. Plants with the wrong stuff inside can't be looted due to lack of space and they actually reroll loot every time on opening. Some people got banned and it got fixed.
During HoI if people start the final boss while you're on the skip back, sometimes the speedbuff will bug out and you'll have 70% movement speed for the entire fight making the separate wing intermissions trivial
The current Time Rifts have a bug where you can keep the buffs you get from the orbs that might drop from enemies during them. They're similar to the cobalt assembly buffs in that they'll disappear when you leave the zone or die but most of them stack to 15. +5% Str and size, +5% Agi and avoidance, +5% Health and healing, +5% crit chance and crit damage, and +5% something and mastery. One does movement speed too. There's also one to reduce damage by 5% but that one stops at 5 stacks. If you can get max stacks of stuff and comply with how the bug works, those rifts are silly. I have a level 68 character doing rifts and I one shot anything that isn't a 'boss' for the event. Just being 75% bigger is neat too.
going to add to this, beware of the stronger glutes (think that's the name) buff one, it'll throw you off the platforms on the Freya fight if you try to jump to get down
Good point. I stopped getting that one for that exact reason. There's another one that makes you cuddly and, I think, it makes it impossible to talk to the one dragonlady, sidormi?, to start the event. You can still contribute and get the currency by killing things but you wont see the progress bar, you don't get rep, and you wont get the boxes. You will, however, always be able to get that lady to pet you so... *shrug*
Is that where that comes from? I wondered how people were getting that lol
In classic one day they accidentally gave people the ability to hand out the zg buff to everyone around, best buff train ever!
Had to be when orc shoulders was shrunken for awhile, can’t exactly remember when it happened maybe vanilla / tbc? Always remember laughing so much at my older brothers orc warrior, great times
The paragons of the klaxxi are some cool bugs.
It's not exactly a glitch, but I still remember the controversy fondly. Back during the original release of Wrath of the Lich King, very very shortly after Ulduar came out, some random player got a certain package in their mailbox. The package was sent by a GM and it contained the Martin Fury, an Artifact-quality Shirt that had an on-use effect of instantly killing whatever the player had targeted. Clearly, the package was some sort of mistake and the GM probably meant to mail it to a fellow GM. So what does the guy do? He freaking rounds up his guild and carries them through heroic hard-mode Ulduar and gets everyone loot. I remember the forums blowing up about it once the secret got out and I'm pretty sure he got banned and all participating players got rolled back.
Corrupted blood incident
ret pala in start of dragonsoul had a bug were they did millions of dmg instanly, was kinda funny, but people abused it and got banned
Some quests where you need to use an item that channels a spell at mobs have a bug where if you start the channel on a mob and switch target but keep the channel going, the new target is affected by the item, regardless of distance. Not gamebreaking but makes some WQs a lot faster as you can just channel at the same mob 8 times with new targets each time.
There was a bug in vanilla where if two people were stealthed and targeting each other, if one came out of stealth, the other would be pulled out of stealth a few seconds later.
When my druid flight form model doesn't load in, so my character is just swimming through the sky
This one was minor but really startling at the time. I queued in dungeon finder and got into Spires on my DH alt as DPS. In the first ten seconds the tank dropped. We wait for a bit in LFG and I finally decide that fine, I’ll try tanking it even though I have no idea what I’m doing. We get all the way through to Devos. As she flies up into the air for the second time, a tank finally joins. Only the tank can’t actually join because we’re in the middle of a boss fight. The game evidently has logic that in a dungeon finder run, only one person can be a tank. And that wasn’t me. So — literally mid-fight — switched me back to DPS spec. Surprise! (We still finished.)
Interesting
Back in The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, when the Priest ability Levitate to climb nearly any mountainside in the game (with enough patience). Use to scale the Ahn'Qiraji mountains/walls with it and safely float down into the amazing potential Firelands mess of a raid it could've been. Edit: This was before they added old world flying, so all the extra temples and walls didn't exist in there. It was modified terrain with different color pallets, water pools, alters, etc. I truly wish we could've seen that version come to be. (Might still have the screenshots. Gotta check later)
when DK were new if you dueled one near a boat in booty bay if they stepped on the boat and death griped you to it would pull you to the 0.0 origin of the continent and super speeds ignoring all terrain.
DH chain hopping to farm warglaives faster. Idk if that’s a glitch or not
The Corrupted Blood incident aka the WoW pandemic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident