In case you guys don't know, I'm a long-time World of Warcraft player,
and when the movie came out, recently I got to talking and telling stories,
And then the guys were like, "Hey, you should make a Top-10 about this!" and I was like, "Okay!"
So hey! I'm Chad, for Screw Attack's Top 10 WoW Trolls!
Number 10
Let me paint you a picture:
It's 2005-ish, and you go to login to WoW and play the character that you put countless hours into
and suddenly, you can't login!
It says your password is incorrect, but you're sure it's right!
So you head to the website and reset the password, only to login and find your character staring back at you...
...completely naked.
That is the terror of being hacked.
Back in the day before authenticators, you were constantly worried that you pick up a keylogging virus in a mod,
and then log in to find all of your gear destroyed and your gold gone.
If that happened to you, you'd have to submit a ticket and wait about a week
until a game master could review the problem and restore your loot,
usually causing you to miss out on raids and your addiction.
Also, some bastard could sell your hard earned gold for real money on the internet.
But man, stuff like that was insane.
Also like the time our priest officer convinced all of our priests to download a mod that he had just installed...
...that had a key logger so all of our priests got hacked. That was fun.
Thanks Zach.
Number 9
Each class in World of Warcraft provides their own unique benefits in certain situations.
For example, Mages have an ability that would allow them to create portals to major cities.
However, Uncle Ben was right and with great power comes great responsibility and plenty of opportunities for abuse.
Thus we have the mage portal troll.
So if someone in your raid needed to grab something in their bank,
usually a kind mage would open up a portal and help them out.
Well, some mages - like my wife - would think it was funny to stack all their portals on top of each other,
and since some cities are nowhere near where you want to go, you cross your fingers and hope to God that you end up in Orgrimmar and not Thunderbluff.
This is especially bad when they place the portal to Bumfuck nowhere on top of a warlock summoning portal,
and send half your damn guild out of the raid!
Number 8
In original WoW, it meant a lot when you got an Epic-quality item.
Keep in mind, back then, it took 40 people organizing and learning new strategies to take down bosses to get loot.
So let's just say having one destroyed in front of you hurts a lot.
Enter Screwattack's Sam Mitchell.
I once watched him take a very important mage helmet,
only to destroy it in front of a random mage who they brought along.
In Sam's defense, the dude did get feared into Onyxia's whelp caves and caused their whole raid to be killed,
But still, that guy must have cried IRL.
Number 7
The Warlock class had the unique ability to summon players to them.
They'd target a player, cast a summoning portal and then once two other players clicked on it,
a message would appear, asking the targeted player if he would like to be summoned to the warlock's location.
Really handy for getting people to dungeon and raids, however...
the portal would appear a few inches in front of the warlock,
which led to a slew of warlocks - like my friend Chance
- setting their summoning portal just off the edge of a cliff,
causing the summoned player to fall to their death.
Nearly every raid, there was always some poor bastard that plummeted to his death, thanks to a bored Warlock.
Number 6
When a world is created full of interesting characters and unique abilities,
naturally, it was only a matter of time before someone started exploiting them.
Protection-spec'd Paladins had an ability called Reckoning
It would give them a 100% chance to gain an extra attack after they suffered a critical strike.
Essentially, you would build up these extra attacks and could release them all at once.
Sounds pretty cool right?
Well, a paladin and a couple rogues had an idea.
They travelled out to the location of a world raid boss named Kazzak.
The rogues began dueling the paladin over and over allowing him to gain stacks upon stacks of Reckoning.
Then after a few hours, the paladin ran in and unleashed his Reckoning bomb on the boss Kazzak -
who is designed to be taken down by 40 players - killing him in seconds.
Blizzard rolled out a hot fix within 24 hours,
that limited the stacks of Reckoning to like 4 or 5.
Number 5
Let me tell you about a troll that every old-school WoW player experienced in one way or another: the Pet Bomb.
In Molten Core, a boss called Baron Geddon had an ability that would place a bomb on a random player,
which, after a few seconds, would cause them to explode in a massive area dealing tons of damage.
The idea was that players who were affected would run away from the group, explode, be healed and return to the fight.
However, every now and then the boss would place the bomb on the pet of a hunter or a Warlock.
And thus we got Pet Bombs,
Because Hunters or Warlocks would be having fun in the raid and oh! Lo and behold they got a bomb on their Target.
They would just quickly dismiss their pet,
then they would laugh as they would Hearth to a major city, and then they would unleash their pet,
for it to explode the bomb all over everyone, killing them all.
Every now and then someone would survive, but essentially how it would go down is:
you'd be in the auction house, and you'd see someone - just a pet appear, and he'd be glowing red,
and somebody would yell "PET BOMB!" and everyone would try and run before we all got massacred.
It happen all the time until Blizzard finally was like,
"Yeah, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't let him cast that on pets."
Number 4
Remember that world boss that got one-shot by the paladin?
Well, there's been a few issues surrounding him, one of which is legend.
See, Kazzak had an interesting mechanic.
Basically, if you didn't kill him in a certain amount of time, he would enter an enraged mode,
where he would spam shoot everyone around him with high-damaging Shadowbolts.
On top of that, he would gain a significant amount of health back for each person killed,
making it nearly impossible to bring him down once enraged.
Well, one person got the bright idea to shoot him and then slowly lead him across the world to the Alliance major city of Stormwind.
And since he was constantly healing, the entire Alliance couldn't bring him down!
It was complete chaos.
Blizzard had to reset the server and then add in code that would cause him to reset if brought too far away from his spawn point.
Number 3
All right, so after the whole Kazzak-Stormwind thing, you'd think that Blizzard wouldn't possibly make the same mistake twice, right?
Well, you'd be wrong.
In the first expansion, the Burning Crusade, Blizzard decided to update Kazzak as a new expansion boss.
Not wanting to have Kazzak's old loot disappear, they decided to create a placeholder boss called Highlord Kruul.
Guess what? They didn't put him in the same space,
'cause they're like, "Well that would just be kind of weird, it would basically be like we're doing the same thing."
So I know...
Why don't we have him just wander the world?
Well, guess what? He had the same type of abilities as Kazzak which means...
...now this thing's wandering the world!
and people brought him, within like, the first couple hours to like, every Major City!
I logged in and then suddenly I see this guy coming running in and I just go,
"You've got to be fucking kidding me! They didn't put some limit on this?!"
And sure enough,
he comes running in like a humongous fucking badass
and just starts blasting Shadowbolts out to everybody and they had to reset the servers!
Eventually Blizzard was like, "You know, what fuck it! This is why you can't have nice things!"
And they just took him from the game!
Which means all that old loot you could never get anymore because players just exploited it,
but honestly, really? You're gonna have him wander the world?
That one's on you, Blizzard.
Number 2
So we all know the Internet is a terrible place right?
Let's be honest, with complete anonymity, there's plenty of people that are up for doing anything for a laugh,
regardless of how... insensitive it may be.
Well, one of the most legendary instances of this came in the form... of the funeral raid.
In 2006, a mage on the Illidan server had a stroke in real life and passed away.
So her friends and guild mates posted on the WoW forums that they would be hosting a memorial service in Winterspring,
and that both Horde and Alliance were welcome to come and pay their respects.
They'd even logged into the girls mage and many came out to the service.
Naturally the temptation was too great, and a guild called SerenityNow
rolled in and turned the funeral into a war zone.
They even started things off by Assassinating the girl's character!
The video spread like wildfire and the amount of rage that was thrown onto the forums was unprecedented,
causing this terrible act to go down in WoW history.
To make matters worse, the organisers were recording the service to send to the late Mage's family!
It's...
...Number 1!
Remember how earlier on this list I told you that hunter and warlock pets could get debuffs from bosses?
Well, the Pet Bomb has nothing on the Corrupted Blood incident.
Essentially, Blizzard released a new raid called Zul'gurub,
and the final boss would inflict attacking players or pets with a debuff called Corrupted Blood
that would cause players to take serious damage over time and it would also spread to nearby players.
This ability was fairly easy to manage in raid, however...
once players found out they could dismiss an affected pet and bring it to a major city...
All hell broke loose!
The plague spread everywhere!
Players. NPCs. Nothing was safe!
I logged in on the day this was going down.
My character loads up. I take two steps...
and the floor is skeletons!
Of Orgrimmar-
I mean everything, as far as the eye can see, is the corpses of players.
And I'm like, "What the hell's going on?!"
I look in trade chat, everyone's like,
"THE WORLD IS ENDING! THE PLAGUE IS UPON US!!!"
I'm like, "What the fuck?" and then I just see people start bleeding everywhere,
I'm like, "Ah shit!" It gets on me, then I die.
I go look for the NPCS;
They're all dead.
Then I find out that like, a rebel group is like, held up outside of the major city,
like Mass Cleansing as many people as they can,
while another group of assholes is trying to just come in and spread it!
This shit. Went. Crazy!
It was like two or three days of just insanity!
It affected everyone playing at the time!
We were talking in the forums; everyone was just like, this is insane!
How one little ability from a boss, turned into just a worldwide plague?
In fact, scientists actually now use that as a study as to like, how society would react if a plague was actually introduced.
Fucking crazy.