The INSANE Lengths Players Went To For A Few More DPS | Classic WoW 

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There was a horde only buff from an NPC in a cage in camp Taurajo. One of the buffs you could get was a 25% armor buff that lasted 10 minutes. We would have summon teams set up there to summon our Patchwerk tanks. Many other guilds did this as well. There was also a 5 minute speed buff that gave 29% movement speed, which we used 1 time for our Gluth kiter (not worth the effort for the duration).

As a healer, snowball spamming for Judgement of Wisdom procs was a super sweaty interaction. I remember Joardee even joking on a SWP stream that "Gigantique Bags" were required gear for their healers so they could carry the maximum number of snowballs.

There is that buff in Blackfathom deep which wasn't that exciting but it gave you +15 more frost damage if you wanna get the most out of those frostbolts. Also it is technically a debuff so if you log off for tues/weds reset with all your buffs that one gets cleared!

What I'm gathering is the World Buff collection was actually the hardest raid encounter in Vanilla, required a lot of coordination and teamwork and perfect timing, and if you died (or got dispelled) then better luck tomorrow. Ouch. I'm so glad that meta ended.

The length that druids and shamans had to do just to be “meta” for raids/pvp at the time was wild

The trollsblood butt chug was a little bit more intensive. You had to drink the potion out of form, so it was something that you needed to hit between powershifts. You had to cancel it between .4 and 1.00 seconds after entering form - any less and you miss an entire shred, any more and you miss a GCD window. But, that wasn't entirely it, either. Believe it or not there was actually a step too far for even the most dedicated feral main... The theoretical ideal pummeler enchant was Crusader, which you needed to swing out of form to fish for procs with. Good news - you were out of form every 4 seconds, bad news is with its haste buff up, it still has a 1.33 swing timer. Thankfully, we have WCB and its 15% attack speed able to drop that down to... 1.25 seconds. But, good news, there's also two Dire Maul librams that give you 1% more attack speed each, giving you a net swing timer of 1.24 seconds, or the ability to fish for a melee swing if you timed your powershift exactly within the batch window, every time. That means that you had to cast Shred, have the server confirm you were still in form to cast it (.25 second batch), cancel form, drink a trollsblood potion, wait for .74 more seconds to confirm your white swing, shift back into cat (.25 second batch window to confirm) leaving you (up to) a clean .40 to .76 seconds worth of time to fit in your trollsblood cancel, get your bonus energy tick for your double shred. (The batch timer worked both ways to your advantage here, comping you .25 seconds before you were ever out of form to start your white swing timer and .25 seconds after you shifted to complete it for a total of a half-second of leeway which made something that would have otherwise never worked become plausible.) I said that it was theoretically possible because it kind of was - its not uncommon for people to perfect rhythm games, and honestly 1/4 second windows are pretty generous comparatively. What made it ridiculous was the RNG of your crits or clearcasting procs, because now you are spending extra time in cat trying to cheese an extra ability in somewhere or you are trying to fit in a bite at an inopportune time due to a feast or famine of combo points. Not to mention that this is an online game, any slight fluctuation in ping or servers being destabilized by the volume of players or just your ISP acting wonky could dynamically affect your rotation timings on any given pull making it borderline impossible for anyone not living next door to the wow servers. At the end of the day, crusader was just one more buff to justify an open slot for that you couldn't keep reliably active in the best of times due to your relatively few weapon swings. On a disposable weapon that you might burn 2 of on a single boss pull. On a class where there was so little competition on, just having full world buffs and using plain pummelers properly defaulted you to a 99-parse. But hey, at least you were the class that actually got the biggest benefit out of the batch window, so that's something.

As a classic min maxer you spend insane tons of gold/time and effort to get buffs, consumables etc.. only to press 1 button in a 2 mechanic boss fight XD

You missed out Arcane Might (Mind Control buff from Stratholme's living side granting more spell damage than elixirs), Blessing of the Blackfathom and the fabled Blasted Lands consumables. Other notable ones were also the resistance buffs you could obtain through Mind Controlling specific mobs (Arcane resist from WPL; Fire resist from UBRS) and the Camp Taurajo buffs for the Horde.

I broke the world record onyxia kill speed by scouring my server for every hunter with 8/8 T2. The bonus had an egregiously low proc rate, but a massive 425ap to all hunters in the raid. And you could have multiple stacks up at a time.

A little addition to battle chicken: At first when people rediscovered the trinket, you could proc it while out of raid, and log out for the 20 min cd of your chicken, log back in after 20 mins and proc it again. Now you'd have 2 buffs, as it stacked indefinitely. This meant that you had melee with upwards of **15** squawk buffs for Hydross. I'm pretty sure the bluepost you mentioned was the initial change that squawk now starts ticking down while offline

I would like to mention the buff you could get from mind controlling a mob in the entrance off UBRS to gain massive buff to Fire Resistance for an hour. Huge for MC and BWL. I remember my guild having priests enter UBRS and giving our tanks the buff at least and some chads also wanted this. Not a DPS gain, but having that extra Fire Res helped a lot for those pesky drakes in BWL. Also the buff from Silithus, from handing in the Silithyst Geyser or whatever it was called. It gave you a 5% dmg buff for 30mins. Might have been banned from logs at some point, was mostly used for speedruns, if at all.

Hello WilliE, for someone not maining a feral druid, your segment on them was pretty good. I just want to comment on ferals switching to other helmets at the end of tbc. For a regular helmet to outclass the wolfshead, the headslot would need to scale disproportionally good in comparision to the other slots, since the wolfshead helm is also scaling with your gear. A geared feral is converting the 20 energy to more damage than a lesser geared feral. The real reason of wolfsheadless becoming an alternative was because of the T6 two set bonus. Without the +20 energy from wolfshead helm you couldnt fit 2x shred into your typical powershift cycle anymore, but with the reduced cost of mangle you could instead go for 1x shred + 1x mangle. Both playstyles were competetive and had their advantages and disadvantages.

the warchiefs blessing quest was the last one I needed for level 60, and I had no idea about this buff so I just ran and turned it in. The amount of angry whispers I got

The battle chicken was so much fun to use, I remember using it in dungeons and it was always so hype when it activated. Jumper cables were also clutch when they worked

Chugging the mana flask would increase your mana by 2000. And seeing the flask did not have a cooldown you could remove the buff, chugg it again for additional 2000 mana. A free mana pot without a cooldown. A very expensive one at that. It was used quite commonly in speed runs.

You can make a whole video about feral druids alone. It's absolutely insane. Now in wrath we have bear-, flower- and idol weaving. I'm glad they fixed the energy tick bug back in tbc classic. I think would've gone insane

There were some other interesting mind control gains to be had. Fire Resistance for an hour from the casters inside Blackrock Spire. Spell power for 30 minutes I think from a caster mob past arena in BRD. Outside of mind control there was the "debuff" from Blackfathom Depths to slightly improve caster stats and frost spell power. Also, our tank used to get summoned to Camp Taurajo in the Barrens before Sapphiron during progression to get the Razorhide from Blood Shards. It was a 10 minute thorn style buff that also increased armor by 25%. We had an enhance shaman that found a way to guarantee a WF proc on his next swing and would "bank" them for boss encounters (this usually resulted in him pulling threat and dying).

You forgot about farming tradeable spider venom sacs that would cure poison effects from low level characters from the wetlands just before engaging Viscidus in AQ 40. People would farm the sacs, give them to an alt that would log out, then log in right before viscidus, trade all the sacs to the raid and then log back on their main. This was practically required to get through that boss unless half of the guild was engineers. The poison damage was insane.

In tbc as a holy priest tailor I would save my primal mooncloth cds for right before getting summoned to raids for the hour long little mp5 buff it gave when u made it

I remember that Spirits of Zandalar spellbook glitch - I was ganking people in orgrimmar on my hunter and I could give them the buff right before I killed them. They were very confused.

You pretty much nailed feral druids. We take a D tier spec, use the most ridiculous strats to maximize every aspect of our class, just to take us to C tier. Don't even get me started on all the weaving we gotta do in wrath

Super cool! would love to see more videos like this. I totally thought you were going to talk about the recent warrior glove cheese strategy.

It wasn't just ferals: Rets could do a "spelladin" build with MCP that was surprisingly effective with seal of righteousness and spellpower gear. I tried it during AQ40 and I went from being towards the bottom on bosses to being in the top 5 in my raid. 50% attack speed buff is just insane.

I’d love to see a video on some of the weirder mechanic-based builds in classic, like the BoM spam prot Paladins. I’m sure there are others but I can’t remember them off the top of my head.

Do a follow up video on more minmaxing! I never really did any of this stuff but I find it very interesting when people push game mechanics to their limits for a better parse

There were also mew world buffs after AQ, but we were all so tired by that point that we usually ignored those ones. A couple times I also grabbed the Blackfathom Depths Buff on my mage. On my horde chars I considered grabbing those barrens buffs from the quilboar, but eventually decided against it.

There was a debuff you could obtain in black fathom deeps that increased the frost damage you deal by a certain amount, like 7 i believe? But because it was a debuff, the timer would go down while you were logged out, so you would either have to do it first if you were going on a buff tour before raid night, or you would do it just before raid so you could have the buff for the beginning part of the raid night

Loved the vid WillE! Our guild used to use arcanite dragonlings for the fire mages to pump too. Also we had a designated mage use fetish of the sand reaver to pick up the ignite tick and reduce threat for us to pump harder.

This is such a throwback to Classic. We'll never relive such times, it's been wonderful.

You can get a 30 min 10% armor buff from turning in armor plating in AV, used this on patchwork in vanila naxx, and it still works

We had a feral cat druid in our SoM raiding team. He'd either tie, or just flat out do more damage than other warriors on said raid team, doing all those gigabrain strategies to minmax Feral Cat dps

WillE! Love the video! So happy to see you bring light of all these ways people were min-maxing! If you ever want to cover all the crazy things people did to speedrun let me know!

A missed mention is the Blood Elf quest giver in Blasted Lands that you would kill boars, vultures, scorpids, etc. in exchange for R.O.I.D.S (+25 strength 1hour) or Ground Scorpok Assay (+25 agility 1hr) BUT... you could only carry one of these items in your bags at a time, and it had only one use.

For the 2 phases of TBC, shadow priests could cancel the debuff from shadow word death allowing them to use it in their rotation without fear of dying due to taking too much damage from the backlash effect. This was an useful because on certain fights the priest could kill themselves from full health depending on the conditions of the fight due to having BIS gear with almost no stamina bonuses on it (fixed by phase 3 when priests actually got enough stam to prevent this).

So glad you just explained all the min max things of the past. Super informative.

You oculd get into LBRS, mind control an add to get a fire resistance Same existed in Stratholme, if you mind control a scarlet That's the little perk that are lovely when it's barely known but a nightmare when it's mandatory

I had the pleasure to play BWL, AQ40, and Naxx in one of the top guilds with great guildmates and did the (increasingly difficult) world buff routine hundreds of times between multiple characters. There was a masochistic fun; it was a mini-game, a chore, a boon. When you carved your name onto warcraftlogs it was worth the effort. On Whitemane, the largest NA PVP server, it was dangerous. You learned the proclivities of the gankers and dispellers on the other faction. In Felwood you'd scout a Songflower out 15 minutes early with an alt to be sure nobody was covering it. The atrocious insanity of getting the Darkmoon Faire buff when it was a Horde month. I could go on for pages about all the stories and tricks and tactics and tragedies but... ..I wanted to give a shout out to the Alliance melee players who did Warchief's Blessing weekly. Truly determined individuals to do that consistently. The logistical organization and ambition involved in getting so many players such a ridiculous buff is high level. Here's a tip of the wine glass to you guys, if any of you ever read this. I stuck with my Paladin healer and Hunter and left the melee competition to those slightly more intense than my sanity could withstand. -Rheen/Mihr - Whitemane Alliance 2019-2021

I remember in MoP I used to run a pre-pull set on my warrior. It was the Firelands 2 set that gave a small damage boost after battle shouting lol

Imagine going through all the trouble of obtaining these buffs and then wiping to trash in Naxx40

Back in retail, I made use of the buff you got from standing in the Light from Omen's corpse during the midsummer event. That was a +10% to all stats buffs that lasted an hour. Oddly, it was NOT a buff that was widely used on my server in classic. Other buffs I have used: In Dire Maul, there is an NPC that sells a drink that provides -5 int and +25 spirit for 15 minutes. At the time, this was neither a potion nor food buff. Very few specs care that much about spirit, but resto druid was one of them. It was cheap to get and you could get a lot of them. There were also a number of holiday buff items that I stashed away for extra buffs, like chocolates, candies from Hallow's end, mistletoe, the +30 stam for an hour argent dawn buffstones. In level 19 pvp, you could have truly staggering levels of cheese.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. As MS bear, I remember weapon swapping to pummelers for the snap threat ALL THE TIME, and prior to flying back and forth to booty Bay and SW, I would gather drops in Blasted Lands for a huge +30, on-use, stamina buff.

I knew about the Chicken force proc in Classic, a lot of advanced hunters were minmaxing trinket swaps that could be done with Feign Death and summon trinkets were highly underrated. On a similar note, I’m surprised you didn’t talk about melee-weaving for classic hunters. It was a pretty substantial benefit when performed correctly, worked wonderfully with windfury, and allowed hunters to get something out of all the buffs that only granted melee AP.

I think I had over 5k+ runs in gnomergan for the pummeler. Was MT for my guild so had no choice but to stack my bags with around 10 each raid

Alliance players could actually just delete their manual crowd pummeler just as the boss was about to die. Then item restore them after the raid and they would get restored with full charges, and with any enchant you have put on it. On horde side windfury getting applied to the pummeler would cause it to not get restored with full charges, but rather with the charges it had when you deleted it.

the level 13 quest items that only work on undead in the blood elf starting area that are still being used even in wotlk, they give a 10 minute buff for 30 attack power or 12 spellpower vs undead mobs only

I found a cool trick of getting underwater staff on my hunter and ganking off the coast of STV for hours.

Story time. Had a buddy in a guild that would just use the lost item feature ever 2 weeks or so to get MCP back smart as hell. Told me about it during phase 1 I'm TBC because we did the same thing to get the rings from the kara quest chain. Miss that guy

I played for a while with an alliance guild in Classic. There were *several* raiders who paid for a second account, so they could level a horde priest to 60, so they could use it to Mind Control their raid character and go into Orgrimmar for the Warchief's Blessing buff. And all raiders needed to either level a warlock to 20 or make a couple alts to keep with those warlocks, planted around the world at every single world buff location. Some at Dire Maul, some on the hills above Booty Bay (so you were in town for the buff, but hidden from pvp), and multiple in Felwood at different flower spawn points.

Another amazing video WillE! Never was sweaty enough to get a war chief blessing but would get my normal raid world buffs every week in classic... One week with every buff on DMF week last buff I needed was songflower. Ended up getting stun locked and killed by a rogue and lost all buffs! I rage quit and didn't raid that week because it literally felt pointless without world buffs...

11/10 video. 10/10 for the actual video, +1 for ending with the Grizzly Hills soundtrack

There's an orc caster NPC near the beginning of Upper Blackrock Spire with a fire resistance buff. We mind controlled it, and ran our 40 raiders through 15 at a time to get it. It was useful vs Ragnaros in Molten Core.

I never got how people go these lengths when classic bosses and raids were already so easy.

I love videos on the lore of player made histories on MMOs like this. Showing the community and the silly stuff people would go through really makes it feel like an game full of people and not just a game you play through.

Thistle tea from cooking was always kept in my rogue's back pocket as a sort of mana potion when I needed to burst something down or maintain optimal rotation. It was not widely used so was useful at least through Pandaria I believe.

When we were raiding MC we would have our tanks grab the Fire Resist buff from the mobs inside Blackrock Spire. It was an easy 65fr that helped out a bunch when it can time for Rag and later in BWL for Firemaw.

I only liked this video for the insane AD transition, I am going back to watching the rest of the video now. That was insane I loved it so much.

In classic my guild reached the point after farming Naxx, where our main tank warrior could outheal some healers in fights if we had enough dps, just because of how little healing needed to go out while his flask buff kept him topped off.

Had 3 warlocks, 2 priest, mage, hunter in classic. Only raided on one warlock and one priest, and a bit on mage. All of them handed in heads, hearts, summoned to raids/buffs, provided portals home, reset npcs hundreds of times, cleared tribute, boosted in loads of dungeons. Was a real community effort getting buffed for raids.

wasn't there a buff in alterac (battleground), where u got 10% increased armor when u finished a quest?

How did you not mention the fire weapon enchant from vanilla being used in Wrath by warriors for deep wounds?

In the Night Elf starting zone, near the lake is an NPC that has a quest to find seeds or something to that effect. When the quest is completed, 3 plants spawn and can be tagged by anyone nearby. They would drop a consumable that would increase damage by a whopping 1. Yes one. On Private servers I would camp the area and whisper new people how to do the quest so I could effectively farm these, as they only would spawn upon completion of this quest. I could sell them for 3-5 gold a piece! Crazy min-maxers

As a horde guild that needed a bit of extra help in the first weeks of Naxx, we'd do the following before patchwerk: We'd summon the tanks to camp taurajo in the barrens, and hand each of them some pre-farmed blood shards. The tanks would turn in the shards to recieve a 10min? 15min? percentage-based armor buff. The raid-summoners would summon the tanks back to naxx, and once inside, we'd summon the tanks again to get to patchie, and then we'd engage. We probably couldn't have risked it on a PVP server though.

I remember some hunter pulling an abomination from Under City to Stormwind for a buff. i think it was only available during the halloween event though.

Feral Druid in my guild farmed those pummelers every single week for every raid in Classic. I don't know how he did it, but hey I solo'd Dire Maul North, Maraudon and BRD Arenas as a hunter so maybe he wasn't that crazy

In Legion there was a green gem from classic called Enchanted Pearl that gave like +10 flat to all stats but it actually gave +10% to all stats because something in legion broke the math with it. It was broken and I used it for EN ToV until it got fixed in NH. Good times

I played feral cat dps in vanilla. I found the best strategy to be wearing a full set of healing gear, spending all talents into restoration and keeping the other dps alive. And when all was going good, I would go in cat form and help out a little. Such as druid class call at Nefarian.

There's a dmg increase world buff from handing in the Sand thingy in Silithus. I used it in naxx 40 once just for the lolz :D

19:22 Guhh I was so glad when sunwell finally dropped and i could wear plate on my ret for once.

I played Era and dealt with all the buffs raiding but hearing you lay everything out in this video really shows how absurd and ridiculous it was to have all those buffs in the game in the first place

You should mention Prot Paladin in Classic and the Greater Blessing of Kings threat generation strategy

You forgot the two armor rings, armor trinket, and warden staff (armor) for bear tanks. You could hit 75% damage reduction when fully stacked

What's crazy is all those world buffs weren't even necessary. People being properly geared and knowing even a half decent rotation was all you needed.

Light of elune, bag of marbles, fishliver oil, arcanite dragonling, major recombobulator, nightfall, blasted lands buffs, valentines chocolate, halloween sweets and buff, the missing diplomat buff

There was also the pvp buff put in the game when AQ came out, but I believe it was backlisted on WCL, so nobody used it

Additionally we had a token ret paladin who swung Nightfall. Having a ret paladin was not min/max but swinging Nightfall was enough dps increase to our caster combined with the ret DPS that it was a net positive raid addition.

In ICC we had mages who were spell stealing a buff in Dragon Blight before accepting their summons on Rotface/Festergut (whichever was the left one), so we could make the DPS check we had been missing.

Take me back to a time when everyone was spamming ZG heart buff in Org on GCD.

There's also the albino snake auto attack reset, that could only really help feral druids bearweaving because of their long swing time

Hunter's using Steam Tonks to instantly dismiss their pets and then cancelling the Tonk, to call the pet again. Would instantly heal pets to full. With most hunter's being BM in TBC, that was a huge amount of dps you could save from not having to revive your pets

I'll always wonder now: The raider who did the math proving C'Thun was unkillable pre-patch... what if the raid groups had gone to this absurd level of minmax?

World buffing became a quest in and of itself. It contributed to raid logging but it sure was an interesting social experiment. The coordination was extensive. Between that and world bosses, classic classic was clearly the most fun of the expansions of Classic WoW.

I was the rogue class lead in my guild back in vanilla. My second and I used to battle it out every week in Molten Core for top dps and it was quite a riot.

Ahh... good memory. Too bad my study got in the way and I couldn't finish TBC with my guild :(

Not a world buff tactic but we've been farming Thornlings in east dire maul since p2 in tbc. You could bait a few bosses abilitys with those little plants, Vashj pre nerf was one of those.

Missed Hunter melee weaving mate . Was part of the optimal dps rotation for both Vanilla and TBC classic .

Crowd Pummeler, ha. I also did some tanking in the ICC 5-mans with the Earthshaker - because bear Swipe triggered it a LOT.

DAMNIT, you made me come to the comments 60seconds into the damned video. that was the tightest, smoothest segway ive ever heard... well done sir!

Another little dps increase I remember is Warriors /sit to get auto-crit by a mob to get more rage. If it was a mob that didn't hit hard, even DPS could do it. Was fixed a long time ago though. Also a very, very minor DPS increase - the sword dropped by the Headless Horseman. Make a macro to use its effect to summon the pumpkins and switch to your main weapon. Only a trickle of extra damage - but hey, its easy to do.

The menders in botanica would give a huge spell power buff. I remember going in there in og tbc and tossing it out before raids. I think it got nerfed down to 3 min duration or something but still cool to do.

Forgot the repeatable quest in blasted lands to get the various unique potions depending on your class.

Solid ad transition

1:07 Tbh : This promo is so good implemented that i wont skip it . GG ! ;)

Aaaah the Zandalar buff bug. That night was interesting 😂

I really did love both vanilla, and re-release vanilla. I had so much damn fun both times. I never got THIS sweaty but I cant hate on those who did lol.

I spent more time and effort making a lvl 19 twink Rogue to lay waste to Warsong Gulch then any of my other characters back in the day. In fact, my entire guild spent a large amount of time being bodyguards while I was fishing in STV and farming arena trinkets.

@WillIE there was a bugg early on where windors stacked :) I had 5 prior to a speedrun, but clicked it off

Bag of Marbles and Light of Elune are two items that you receive early game that can be very powerful late game. Bag of marbles is a 25% accuracy debuff for 10 sec. Light of Elune grants immunity from all spells and damage for 10 sec.

We had frost mages getting the minor frost damage buff from BFD in our sweater MC runs. +15 frost spell damage. 97 to 99 parses with all the consumes, buffs etc. Mad.

I remember Sodapoppin farmed soooo many of those Crowd Pummelers lmao!