Raid Buff Cooldown Resets and Terrain Exploits in Ulduar

[chaud]

Raid Buff Cooldown Resets and Terrain Exploits in Ulduar

Greetings,

We’ve just pushed a hotfix out ahead of today’s Ulduar raid launch that will prevent a few potential methods groups could use to reset raid cooldowns such as Heroism and Bloodlust repeatedly while clearing trash mobs in the raid. We don’t usually post about exploits as we don’t want to shine a light on them, but in this situation we wanted to make it very clear what our stance is on this behavior, and make it clear that we do consider this to be an exploit and not merely a “creative use of game mechanics”.

The exploit in question involved having a single raid member (such as a Hunter with Feign Death) engage a raid boss alone while the other 24 raid members are clearing trash. The solo member would then drop combat after a certain amount of time to reset the raid cooldowns of the other 24 members of the raid.

The intent of the change to allow certain cooldowns to reset after a boss encounter was to make the experience of wiping and restarting a difficult encounter less painful and prevent raid groups from needing to wait around for many minutes for critical raid-wide abilities like Heroism and Bloodlust. This change was not intended to be used to have 24 members of your raid gain permanent heroism/bloodlust, while one raid member serves exclusively as a “dedicated buff reset person”.

Additionally, we also consider methods that bypass or go outside of terrain to skip large portions of the raid to be an exploit as well. Skips are a part of classic and can be a fun and exciting show of skill in speedrunning, but anything that takes players far outside of the playable space within a raid is something we consider to be a bridge too far, and also moves outside of the realm of creative use of game mechanics and into exploit territory as well.

We are watching this raid closely and will take action against raid groups found to be using methods like these, including potentially issuing suspensions and stripping realm first Death’s Demise titles, if needed. We acknowledge that this is a more heavy handed approach than we’ve taken previously, and we don’t take these actions lightly, but we felt it was important to point this out and make our stance on these issues very clear before the raid releases later today.

We are very much looking forward to seeing everyone get to experience Ulduar with us today at 3 p.m. PST and hope that you enjoy the raid! Thank you!

[SinR]

Well that's certainly interesting.

[Zeek Daniels]

terrain skips aside why do they care about resetting hero for trash pulls. My guild used to do this on the trash going toward the first boss in the ashara legion raid. We used it alot when people were late and were trying to farm some BoE's. We would jsut have permeant hero. I see nothing wrong with this. All it does is save time and it doesnt exploit anything. The trash isnt a part of the core raid. Its just flavor to fill in the gaps between bosses.

Bad move blizz. Waste of time and money.

[Relapses]

I remember doing this in OG Ulduar. Ulduar's trash is plentiful and (mostly) annoying, I never saw the harm in it. Not a huge deal, interesting to see Blizzard clarifying their stance on this 14 years later. /shrug

[Laqweeta]

I remember doing this in OG Ulduar. Ulduar's trash is plentiful and (mostly) annoying, I never saw the harm in it. Not a huge deal, interesting to see Blizzard clarifying their stance on this 14 years later. /shrug

Same here. My guild and I did this as much as we could lmao. A buddy of mine did get a suspension for it though.

[Very Tired]

So if I'm reading this right, they are just doing a trick to have full uptime on hero/lust to kill trash slightly quicker? Why is that such a big deal demanding a special blue post about it? Doesn't even seem like it should be ban worthy.

[Unlimited Power]

Ahh yes, can't wait for all the usual "fun detected" posts from all the people who will jump at any opportunity to criticize Blizzard at every opportunity regardless how inconsequential the change.

[Dolg]

Next patch just hand out loot, maybe ppl will be happy then.

[Nerph-]

Interesting this warranted a blue post when it seems to me that it's a non-issue, for both ends.

Trash will take slightly longer to clear, okay... but at the end of the day would it be the end of the world if people cleared it slightly quicker? /shrug

I understand that it's obviously not how Blizzard intended it to be done, and they've made that clear and people should follow it... but it's not exactly game breaking either, especially in a re-release of a 14 year old raid.

[Dinousek]

All the butthurt cheaters in this thread rationalizing and downplaying the exploit and their use of it. I drink deeply from this vessel of tears.

[Gorsameth]

Presumably people playing Classic enjoy the race, there is a lot of competition between guilds so while to you it might seem like "oh it just makes trash a little less tedious", in terms of the race it would make it mandatory for everyone participating to do this constantly because else you can't hope to compete.
They obviously don't want that, so it makes sense to come out and publicly ban it.

Stop acting like everything is just to destroy 'fun'. Maybe sometimes it is, maybe sometimes its about removing legit exploits. Learn to read the difference.

[tomten]

Presumably people playing Classic enjoy the race, there is a lot of competition between guilds so while to you it might seem like "oh it just makes trash a little less tedious", in terms of the race it would make it mandatory for everyone participating to do this constantly because else you can't hope to compete.
They obviously don't want that, so it makes sense to come out and publicly ban it.

Stop acting like everything is just to destroy 'fun'. Maybe sometimes it is, maybe sometimes its about removing legit exploits. Learn to read the difference.

What race exactly? Its a 1.5 decade old raid? Who gives a shit?

[Gorsameth]

What race exactly? Its a 1.5 decade old raid? Who gives a shit?

Its ok for you not to give a shit, but others do. Don't yuck someone else's yum.

[Kikazz]

terrain skips aside why do they care about resetting hero for trash pulls. My guild used to do this on the trash going toward the first boss in the ashara legion raid. We used it alot when people were late and were trying to farm some BoE's. We would jsut have permeant hero. I see nothing wrong with this. All it does is save time and it doesnt exploit anything. The trash isnt a part of the core raid. Its just flavor to fill in the gaps between bosses.

Bad move blizz. Waste of time and money.

The resetting of Bloodlust is a new Thing to WOTLK, it wasnt around in Original.

in legion it was already a well used and easy strat.

they are doing these changes to make it fair,

as there are some pretty nasty skips in the raid, like going straight to veax by cheating the door, effectively cutting out 3/4 of the raid, and getting realm first before its actually meant to be obtainable.

and the bloodlust removes the difficulty of half if not most of the trash.

[ryjkur]

Wait, how is this bloodlust reset different from retail? Its widely used strat and even Echo and Limit used that in HC splits. Is it bannable?

[Foolicious]

Wait, how is this bloodlust reset different from retail? Its widely used strat and even Echo and Limit used that in HC splits. Is it bannable?

The main difference is that on retail you have to interact with the boss to loose your debuff while in classic you do not. Only the boss needs to reset and the debuff is cleared from the whole raid.

Its also not original to classic for the debuff to reset. Blizzard gave the #nochances crowd a qol update which they started to abuse. Its only fair they step in.

[ONCHEhap]

I remember doing this in OG Ulduar. Ulduar's trash is plentiful and (mostly) annoying, I never saw the harm in it. Not a huge deal, interesting to see Blizzard clarifying their stance on this 14 years later. /shrug

it's quite impressive that you did this in OG Ulduar when that feature was added several years after wotlk

[Drusin]

Hmm I wonder why players would do something like that? Oh maybe it's because killing trash is fucking trash gameplay

[Mic_128]

What race exactly? Its a 1.5 decade old raid? Who gives a shit?

Running is a millenia old race and people still give a shit.

[bloodmoth13]

terrain skips aside why do they care about resetting hero for trash pulls. My guild used to do this on the trash going toward the first boss in the ashara legion raid. We used it alot when people were late and were trying to farm some BoE's. We would jsut have permeant hero. I see nothing wrong with this. All it does is save time and it doesnt exploit anything. The trash isnt a part of the core raid. Its just flavor to fill in the gaps between bosses.

Bad move blizz. Waste of time and money.

Time is an intended obstacle, encounters aren't designed with permanent BL in mind and being the reset bitch is bad gameplay regardless of if you find it fun.
Anything that screws with the integrity of gameplay and obstacles should be fixed.