The Weirdest Ways Players Minmaxed Classic WoW 

Catch up fast with the best leveling guide made by Classic's top speedrunners. I've done Loremaster of Northrend 3 times using this, can confirm works very well. Guides for Dragonflight/ Gold Farming also available! www.restedxp.com/?ref=WillE Use Code: WILLE for 5% off!

Furbolg costume (alliance). It has short cast animation, that looks like holyspell being casted. Alliance paladins/priests could use this item to bait kick/counterspell. Once you complete the quest in ashenvale and drop the chain, you'll get this item forever and as many uses as you like Also the flame harpoon from brd. Proc scales with spell power so paladins with t2 and zandalar trinket can get thorns effect that hits for 500. Or any melee with harpoon + zandalar

Another point on flasks: you had to run most of Scholomance, or part of BWL to get to the Alchemy Lab to make them

All the ridiculous summoning spots people conjured up for every raid always got me laughing. Underneath Naxx, the spires on top of Naxx, the top of AQ gate, behind AQ gate, behind UBRS portal for BWL. PvP servers were something else during world buff hell

I love minmaxing. I don't like being expected to do so.

A few things. Blessing of the black fathom was a debuff not a buff. The magic dust saw usage in ranking. I ranked to 14 and remember instances where a druid stole stables by putting whoever was back there to sleep. People started farming it like crazy for back caps. Finally, I was in an AQ40 raid where the last person alive used light of elune and killed the boss as a ret paladin. It was the most epic thing ever.

You really should do a video on Zandalar Tribe and AQ opening. The peacebloom wars and the lenghts alliance players when (taking control of neutral AH to transfer herbs) they tried to make sure no horde players got the mount :D Plenty of material on that just by googling peacebloom wars. By far the best time in classic when we were raiding duskwood at 6am to get the quests done :)

There are a few more oddities like this. The most notable is the turn in for a Warrior's Diamond Flask apparently also gains a buff for others. Another is on Patchwerk all the troll mages getting their health to next to nothing before pull by standing in slime to get more oomph out of the berserking racial (and using demonic runes as a dps increase for the same reason). Juju farming and crazy holiday items farming (mistletoe [suiciding in TB to clear the debuff], candy [armies of lowbie alts], etc) is another. All the silly things related to ignite management could also be a video in itself.

i dont recall the exact details, but you could catch a rat in the barrens, which put it in a cage in your inventory. when releasing it, it didnt count as a pet, but rather a critter, so warriors could get a little bit of extra rage before a pull by killing it. you had to recatch it every time you wanted to do that iirc, since you could only carry one

Gor'dok suit for larger attack range. increases your melee hit box. Immature venom sacs farming. fishing for the right raid using mind vison. Fishliver oil

I think Gorak's guide to AQ War Effort really embodies the difference between then and now.

You talk about the original Classic with such passion! Your love for it shows in your videos. Great work!

I half expected Bogling Root from the NE starting area to be on this list. The depravity of feral druids knows no bounds... Give us our level 30 bis weapons and bogling roots!

The problem with Light of the Elune, is that I STILL HAVE IT on my main after 17 years witing for the right moment to use it! :)

Ah, Bag of Marbles. I saved those all the way up to Brutalus. In fact most of our guild did. It made progression on him so much easier, I can tell you. I swear we wiped more on Felmyst and Kaelgos!

I would love to hear a discussion on farming the poison cleansing sac for viscidous. That was the only way my alliance guild was able to eventually down him

For AQ40 progression my guild would have a 5man group go do lbrs and farm the immature venom sacs. We'd try to have 200-300 ready for raid to make visc easier. They'd only last an hour so they'd have to sit on an alt that no one played and then would get summoned into aq and trade some out really fast before the pull. We stopped after 4 weeks of doing it tho.

The bag of marbles still worked in tbc. Used half the charges in progression and none of them missed. The final charge was used in wrath classic naxx, but it missed. You can actually farm a weaker version (10%) with wail of the banshee that drops from baroness anastari in stratholme.

Let's not forget about the Felwood consumes and the pretty obscure Blasted Lands quests that would give you a consume as well. The things we went through for the fractional gains :)

that arcane buff from classic was used for sunwell plateau, for kalecgos, a boss that did lots of arcane damage

No Bogling Root? I'm surprised. It was an item from the Night Elf starting zone which meant farming it was creating a night elf and leveling to like level 5 to get the quest. The item gave you +1 weapon damage, and if you split stacks of it, you could stack it up.

The instance caps on certain dungeons were more than you had listed depending on when you played. You used to be able to take 15 people into Strat and Upper Blacrock, and 10 into BRD. It was changed around the time they introduced the 0.5 Tier sets however.

The only time I ever used the fire resist from lbrs was on nostalrius pve. Good memories rip Nostalrius.

The biggest difference between classic and vanilla was information and mindset. Back in vanilla you where not expected to show up with Songflower, Dragonslayer, Dire Maul Tributes, 4 bags of consumables, full understanding of the boss mechanics from RU-vid videos and enough add-ons/macros that you always have something telling you to what exact button to press and when to press it. You where on the other hand expected to suffer thru 4 hour MC runs with a lot of wipes because half the raid didn't have threat meters or deadly boss mod to tell them not to blow up the whole raid on Geddon ^^ And yes you could count on most of the raids being in some weird off spec using the blue dungeon sets untill they had tier 1 sets. At least that's my memories of them. Back in vanilla it was all being discovered as we played the game. There was not the minmax cultural standard as it was on private servers and in classic. For better or worse they where two vastly different experiences. And yes everyone where speed running classic but I want to try to see anyone today go back in time and try to sheepherding 39 total noobs in crap gear without worldbuffs, add-ons and no real understanding of boss fights and not having a mental breakdown at the 5th wipe on Gaar because there where no way to mark the mobs and the tanks got the adds mixed up again xD

Fish. Liver. Oil. Because of this level 21 quest reward item, I hit my first and last 100 parse in Naxx as a fury warrior

Don't forget how Nightmare seeds were really good for tanks in TBC, as well as thornlings and Gor'dok ogre suits for lady vashj!

I got one for you WillE: Greater Arcane Pot (+35 spell power) + Potion of Greater Firepower (+35 fire spell power) + Dragon Breath Chili for melee classes. Oh yes. It does exactly what you think. Even in SoM. And DBC can be stacked on top of all other well fed buffs. :^) */whisper* It's free damage. Jom Gabbar, Food Jazz what's up?!!

There was a boss in MC that requires Arcane resist or at least Arcane damage potions: Shazzrah

amble I loved that "bunch of dudes making cool shit" vibe, and I think it's a significant chunk of what is missing from modern wow. All it needed was some cleaning up of class design to avoid useless specs/classes and vanilla wow was where it was at. Even then, the weirdness had character. Even over TBC and Wrath. Retail since Cata has felt increasingly on rails. Everything is optimised. Questing is a linear race, not an experience. Everything is designed around competitive play. I don't play competitive games. It's an MmoRPG ffs. The RPG came from dudes making cool shit. Now it's just soulless. It stopped being designed like a game, and became designed like a job. You *have to* log in daily to earn your arbitrary currency, or it feels like you're falling behind. The only complaints I've heard about vanilla have come from sweaties. People who treat a videogame like a job (granted obvious concessions for content creators for whom using the game as a medium for their actual job, entertaining, is a requirement). If you're so invested that you can't help but waste your actual life in a virtual world, then you need to sort your life out. For real, it's a recreational activity. It's not the game's fault. Sort your life out. Design based around avoiding degenerate behaviour has made the game the emotionless pos it currently is. I don't want a game that is hyper-optimised and balanced if that means everything fun about the game has had to be pruned away to do so. Starcraft is hyper-optimised and balanced, it's also still fun because it's an RTS. That's how it's supposed to be. Wow, at it's core, is an RPG. The MMO part is an adjoined social aspect. Rpg's are, and should be, broken, because they are about *you*. Not the gameplay. Not the other characters in the game. Not the story. All these things exist only to serve you. Fps and rts games are about mechanics/gameplay. Point and click/adventure games are about the story. RPG's are about you, the player. It's in the damn title. /ramble over.

There was a time when BGs scaled player stats based on their ilvl, and BiS was sometimes a white item with no stats was better than a lower ilvl item with high stats.

I min maxed my wallet and went to a private server

Very stick glue and the magic dust/slumber sand were so clutch in bg's. I still have 1 charge left on my glue I cant bare to use it

The silithyst buff wasn't removed from WL right away, and it had some other convenience, the sand was transferable from player to player, and a lvl one could hold on to the sand next to the camp without handing it in. Before WL banned it, we would take around 20 minutes buffing everyone with that buff as they got tp'd to naxx. Was kinda fun I thought although maybe too much effort for a 30m buff

Shazrah in MC Vanilla was a real struggle with the teleport into arcane explosion, where arcane resistance could have helped. People were just terrible at movement back then and I have no doubt the explosion hitting half the raid lagged you out on our 2004 toaster PCs. I believe AE even had it's animation changed to reduce lag, it produced quite a detailed animation on everything hit, watch some older WoW videos to see this. Ofcourse Classic just killed the bosses before the mechanics were even relevant so no wonder you didn't remember this boss.

I got the BFD buff for some of those first MC runs! The orb exists in two places in BFD the first is by the Murloc boss and not that far in. The second is at the end as you mentioned. Plus we're mages, we just grabbed the buff and then ported back and logged. It wasn't too bad.

Light of Elune was tradeable I know because back in the day I used to buy them in the auction house for my mage for southshore/terrans mile zerging before battlegrounds were implemented

The scarlet medic buff could be very useful on prophet skeram. On private servers it was almost mandatory due to some coding bugs, but classic values being what they were made it useful but skippable.

We even used the marbles on our one shot first kill on Brutallus in rotation.

I remember being part of my guild's black lotus 'cartel' (before they changed up the spawns) All of us in the EPL parked at black lotus spawns, waiting for hours for them to respawn so we could get them, and co-ordinate between each other for future spawns. Sad, but fun, and never again.

glad to see ONSLAUGHT getting a shout out

Speedrunners would be scouting AQ40 instances for the ideal random mob spawns. For example, the packs after Twins contain a random number of Qiraji Slayer and Mindflayers. The slayers are so much faster to kill that your instance ID would need as few of the other (mindflayers) as possible. Finding such ID would be done by a hunter entering a fresh AQ40, some clever eagle eye scouting and a Weakaura that would automatically count the mobs you are scouting. If there were too many flayers, go outside, reset and try again. On Firemaw a guild was paying a large sum of gold(thousands) if someone handed them an ID with just a 4-5 flayers(or less). The odds of finding such IDS were astronomically small though.

What I find interesting about unique quest rewards is that there are many of them in the early areas but after 10-20 levels there are almost none of them. It's like they ran out of ideas or time to implement those special items. It's quite sad because those items added a lot of flavor to the game.

If you're doing a video on AQ 40 gates opening I have a bunch of clips / screenshots you can have from the Horde side on Kurinnaxx US with so many players standing around the gong we crashed the server multiple times lol. It really was an amazing time

seems like farming furbolgs in Winterspring or scorpions in Blasted Lands for quest-consumables before every raid is not even counted as min maxing ))

Its been quite a while since I played the base game but I remember there were some quest items that you could mess around with that while were not game breaking were fun to have around, like the wand that transformed you into furbolgs. I remember getting this and just never finishing the quest just to keep the item. Still had the item in Legion too.

Hunter specific: solo farming Shadow Hunter Vosh'gajin in LBRS for a 1 in 3 chance for a partial stack of Doomshot.

The arathi basin pots were on a separate cool down from normal pots so you could use those too.

There was people during the naxx scourge invasion event in class who were utilizing the 5% AQ buff as well as the scourge invasion 10% damage buff. There was 1 lockout where you were able to get the 10% from dmf. So these mf stacked them all, invalidated their logs, just for that one chance at 25% raw damage increase.

Like the hidden tumbstone for the blizz employee that died

Back in Vanilla I 10-manned deadmines all the time! Super fun, meant you could take a lot of lowbies with you

The fish oil buff from red ridge 20% haste was awesome when I popped my mcp for snap threat on patchwork!

I remember getting the Light of Elune! I wanted to save it for exactly the situation described here. Unfortunately, I misclicked it when doing something utterly trivial. I never got to see whether it *could* block all damage.

You have talked about multiboxing before, but how common it was in classic is what eventually got it banned. I was the guy on Whitemane alliance with a druid team that I used to camp every black lotus node and corner the supply. What is funny is that I wasn't even the only one with this strategy. My guys were also engineers and I got some good mass sapper hits on guilds getting songflower. I ended up making more gold farming e'ko (winterspring buffs) than I ever did on black lotus though.

Such a love/hate relationship. Was such a rush trying to progress in blues and greens.

I personally think the poor gear itemization of classic made acquiring gear more fun. Complete a quest with four possible options of gear, all four suck. Or maybe one is a fantastic piece that sticks with you for a few levels. It really felt like GOOD gear was more impactful and important, even at max level.

You forgot about paladins putting judgement of wisdom on a boss and then spam throwing snowballs for an infinite mana regen.

I still have my light of elune sitting in my bags, waiting for the right moment to use it.

My guild commonly used the "resist fire" buff from BRS mind controlled mobs while we were progressing. (yes casual guild) It didn't take too long to get everyone cycled in and buffed before we returned to Molten Core. WoW Classic's quirks were fun

I'm pretty sure I still have the Light of Elune in my bags on modern WoW. I literally saved it so long I can never use it since I out-leveled it.

I remember asking in guild at some point before Legion what I should be saving Light of Elune for.. guildie jokingly said l should save it for sargeras.. well joke's on him, couple expacs later we actually got to defeat sargeras lol.

we were a realm first clear guild as horde in classic, and we used all of these except the quilboar one, since we had no real use for more tankiness as we were running patchwork with dual-wielding main tank already.

just for the record: we still used bag of marbles in sunwell on brutallus during the stomp

Best wow analysis youtuber of all time.

Im not going to say how, cause as far as i know it isnt widely known, but there is a macro that allows any caster that channels a spell OR uses a long cast time spell to fire their wand while channeling/casting. It might seem small but imagine an extra wand attack on top of say... a full arcane missiles..or perhaps a cast of pyroclasm. I used it myself and it is legit.

The Flame Deflector. It's a consumable item costing bronze, wool, and flame sacs, crafted by engineers (although engineering is NOT required to use it). It grants a shield blocking a mere 500 fire damage, and importantly, does not share a cooldown with potions or healthstones. The catch? The schematic has a whopping 0.5% drop rate off of the final boss of Gnomeregan, so any engineer looking to craft these will likely have to repeatedly solo one of the game's more frustrating mid-level dungeons. It has obvious uses in MC and BWL, but it's also quite useful for fighting mages in pvp, because charges of it are so incredibly cheap, and even frost mages will often use Fire Blast as part of a burst combo. Classic's lack of resilience places a greater emphasis on bursting down targets, and an extra 500 hp on top of all other sources is nothing to laugh at. This is not to be confused with the Hyper-Radiant Flame Reflector, a similarly-named anti-fire trinket which was also crafted by engineers and also had a troublesome schematic to acquire.

I'm glad I wasn't a caster in classic needing flasks/mana pots eventually they went down in price but still since warriors optionally used the health flask since there was no dps one. Also I went insane and farmed 250+ of the consecrated sharpening stones and never had to farm or buy elemental sharpening stones.

Ahh yes, the AQ opening event where they despawned all the mobs in Silithus so they could get the event to actually work, but ore nodes were still spawning. I got tons of arcane crystals running around the hives while everyone else on the server stood around the gong like a boob. :)

Love the retrospecs! Keep em coming

you using the light of elune gave me a mini-panic attack

My Light of Elune is like a good luck charm, I always keep it next to my HS =D

I and my friend in classik wow encounter a rogue who use Arcanite grenades in open PVP, this grenade cost 50 to 100 Gold per use! and that rogue using it on open world pvp like ist Thorium grenade we are hunting him across SW and he trown like 20 arcane grenades agains us.

You can still go get the light of elune in wrath I picked one up a couple weeks ago while doing loremaster.

Razorhide buff was so strong that it even made shaman tanks viable on patchwerk, and that during progression.

As funny as this stuff was, the stupid amounts of raid prep required for classic was terrible. I hated my time with classic, the turbo nerds killed my chill vibe

I knew a spriest in SoM that would use wisdom and spell power back to back anytime he went oom. It was wild

Holy shit, I didn't know popping that mana flask just gave you extra mana instantly, I would have assumed it worked like most other things where when you 'increase your max' it ONLY increase your max, your current stays exactly where it is. And on top of that you could spam it?? Holy shit.

Questing on day one launch of any three expansions was absolutely fucking ridiculous.

I did a few MC clears where we whent and got the fire rez buff from upers . The logistics of it were annoying.

no mention of Diamond flask? Warriors stacking the +healing gear and regenerating 100's every 5 seconds was kinda wild

I just come back to play white mane I love the 40 man raids so much fun

I remember stopping with leveling at the end of a zone to create "excellent" gear with blacksmithig back in the day...

I have Light of Elune sitting in my bank to this day, as you have said haha

in vanilla that bfd buff was a debuff and would tick down while logged out

Lol STILL HAVE all the slumber sands and really sticky glues on all my characters. Always keep em but never used them.

ironic I remember getting this buff on my mage for phase 1-2 when you played frost early super fun when you showed up and nobody knew where you could of gotten it XD

Calling it "Blackfathoms Deep" instead of "Blackfathom Deeps" actually maddened me.

I still have the Light of Elune in my bank lmao... and yes, still waiting for that one time to make that epic play lol

we had a guy that used 5 flasks every single Patchwork kill

my guild used the bag of marbles on prog on brutallis in tbc still

Any plans in the future to do a video about the insane min-maxing that's been going on in Wrath with Unholy Death Knights? Some of the stuff they've been doing is absolutely insane to get the slightest advantages.

Dude you gaslighted me into thinking I was in a Mandela Effect timeline where it has always been pronounced "Blackfathom'S Deep" and not "Blackfathom Deeps"

Sweaty nerd: *YOU NEED TO, GO TO BLACKFATHOM AND GET THE BUFF, IT'S EASY SO YOU W-* Yeah... no.

Never got the idea of farming for 3 hours to be 10 minutes faster in the actual raid.

Progress efforts was wild !

When you do the AQ40 video make sure you mention the exploit people were doing to shut down the server. If a player logged out in a secret location in wetlands mountains the whole server would reset

I did only the min. part, uninstall after making lev 70. And now I miss Barrens, thanks!...

Onslaught was distill spamming as far back as BWL speedruns, definitely wasn't a new strat for naxx.

You forgot about Soul Revival buff from Scourge Invasion event during Phase 6.

Distilled Wisdom were being popped as mana pots as early as BWL P2 speedruns. Yiu also missed Fishliver Oil for alliance.

i knew all of those, and i always knew that they were overpowered.. however they always ended up sitting in my bank FOREVER, since it feels like there's never a good time to use them. I feel like a big nerd knowing all of these lol.