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

[@WillEmmo]

Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring today's video. Go to strms.net/WilleHelloFreshOctoberYT and use code POGWILLE65 for 65% off plus free shipping on your first box!

[@alondor8157]

NGL. I laughed when I heard a European guy advertising a American product he can't even try himself XD.

[@roujin518]

There were a TON of effects just based on MC adds and having those adds provide buffs to your raiders. Also some of the adds that you could MC like the adds outside of Void Reaver were so broken that they could almost solo the boss.

[@hugemugus4537]

@@alondor8157 mate hello fresh are in most Europ aswell so your comment is not correct ;) eat it myself in sweden

[@frederikknudsen8811]

@@alondor8157 it is in Denmark aswell :)

[@kblaedel]

@@alondor8157 So close! Berlin is almost in America :)

[@brettprickett4146]

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).

[@Magnus_1996]

I never knew these buffs were actually being used like that, thanks for sharing! Actually secret knowledge ;)

[@Mrlonefighter]

Yeah that armor was insane. When I was ranking on my Warrior alt, I used to queue up and fly to Camp Taurajo some times, and get that buff just before entering WSG. Having that extra armor and the thorns effect was hilarious vs other melee.

[@keonepatterson327]

I used to have my hearth set for the inn there on every single one of my twinks and would get the buffs as soon as a Q would pop, the speed armor and thorns effect was pretty OP at low levels, id always be the FC jaha

[@lightner6924]

My guild just kills patchwork and dnr have an issue. We don't need any help. Kiting the adds is easy. I guess you need all the help you can get 😂

[@redjuvee]

@@lightner6924 its a surprise you have a guild at all, considering you've gotta belittle people about something that happened two years ago. you seem like a shit person to have around

[@ericwallhagen3146]

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.

[@wowhallo]

Or just spam flask of distilled wisdom

[@-a-s-a-s-]

@@wowhallo That's what my guild did on our fastest BWL clear. Can't remember how many flasks it took but it was an insane amount.

[@heyhelmar]

it has just become so ridiculous. I rather go casually facerolling Dragonflight than play in such toxic min max environment - and this comes from someone who loved classic / private servers once

[@gecgoodpasi1654]

@@heyhelmar the mentality is the same in dragonflight especially when the expansion is new many players will quickly find the min max meta and play it till first patch nerfes it but they got better at removing tools from raids back then u could literally take any buff into a raid basicly

[@heyhelmar]

@@gecgoodpasi1654 but I'd assume there's more fun stuff besides raiding?

[@SpaceStormy]

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!

[@andromidius]

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.

[@lct23]

It was a pain and made it to where playing on your main was risky until the chronoboom came out late in classic. Really wish that was available upon release

[@shelbyseitzinger927]

Exactly, but if you didn't want to hurt your MT's girlfriend's feelings and carry your siblings, they'd make the 30 man raids doable. XD

[@riv3ra625]

It was only bad when dispelling became a big thing. Before people were being pieces of shit intentionally dispelling world buffs getting the buffs was easy

[@shelbyseitzinger927]

@@riv3ra625 I mean if you could play 30 hours a week and still didn't want to play your main for a fun yeah but I don't really consider that easy. That's kinda why Wrath was so good because you could still minmax but it wasn't a full time job to be fairly competitive

[@johanlahti84]

Obvious alliance player. Never tried Sapphiron without paladins and worldbuffs, that's for sure. ;) Wink.

[@Mrlonefighter]

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.

[@hardcoreclassicenjoyer]

For a mage, it was absolutely a DPS gain on flamegor when your frostbolts aren't being pushed back because of the flame buffet tick and you can stay in longer to pump

[@Mrlonefighter]

@@hardcoreclassicenjoyer true

[@austinhensley6553]

dps loved it because they could wear less fire res gear meaning more pumpage, and they could stay in longer meaning more pumpage. and casters got their spell pushback reduced but they werent warriors or rogues so they were just there bc the raid needed buffs

[@MrSh4des]

Oh the memories...

[@Blackread]

Fireres was pretty amazing on some fights, especially Firemaw in BWL. You could sometimes go through the entire fight without having to ever los the boss because the stacks would constantly drop. Being able to consistently do damage largely outweighed the bonus damage from your regular gear.

[@Twistedfail]

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.

[@Drumboardist]

Yeah, so unless you were a Feral druid in a raid clearing a good portion of Sunwell *and* had a Helmet with enough stats to justify it, then the Wolfshead was BiS for DPS...pretty much the entire run of TBC. Insane lil' thing there. But hey, at least we didn't have to worry about Bearweaving.

[@TheWTFsauce]

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

[@CherryCola55PSN]

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

[@gunzbngbng2242]

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.

[@emmanuelhoule8070]

You hunted for hunters lol

[@johnlatham2903]

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).

[@Varoxlol]

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.

[@ExtrnalSorce2]

How expensive? Never even heard of this mana flask but it sounds not very cost effective

[@masimies]

@@ExtrnalSorce2 200g+ on big servers

[@Silentpaws]

@@ExtrnalSorce2 Noone said min-maxxing would be cheap! Healers in classic wow speed runs would chug Distilled Wisdom Flasks everytime they went below 1k mana to get their mana pool up and there was no cooldown on chugging these.

[@wildefice1]

​@@Silentpaws Good lord I have heard stories of the classic meta degeneracy, but hearing about healers casually dropping THOUSANDS if gold per raid in flasks ... I can't even conceptualize it in my mind. On my private server toon I am proud to say I have 500 gold after the better part of a year of playtime. What you just typed made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

[@Fishdog252]

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.

[@RaexxorLP]

Do u know if anyone actually did this? Sounds insane

[@thiskneegrow]

@@RaexxorLP no, because the reward was extremely miniscule compared to the dramatic decrease in dps if you messed up. it's nothing more than a theoretical dps increase if done perfectly, which there are plenty of those.

[@silentsnooper3307]

I'm amazed anyone would go through that much effort.... to be middle of the pack.

[@ZarisWhiteFoot]

Bro wtf are you talking about? I play priest and paladin

[@reidcacaro2919]

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

[@miskee11]

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.

[@DIEGhostfish]

I love that kinda stuff even if it probably got tedious

[@kfiercescene]

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

[@Mrlonefighter]

Yeah I did that as well on my Arcane Mage some times

[@Isellmysoulforbeer]

I did that as a warlock as well every life tap I didn't have to take was a shadow bolt I could hurl at the boss

[@Therdoez]

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

[@Zac1996]

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

[@TheJum]

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.

[@xawee7254]

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

[@Norrieification]

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.

[@hardcoreclassicenjoyer]

Quilboar buff? I got fire res buff from LBRS for my mage using mind control priest friend

[@demarge1065]

It's more warcraftlogs invalidated the aq world buff

[@DahnsHeart]

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

[@NatSmish]

Oh god i remember the fire resistance LBRS one...

[@TSLlol]

Things like this is why vanilla WoW always has been the best, these little quirks.

[@marknicklason]

This buff was actually huge though, well worth it for bwl. This buff and a few pieces of FR gear[mostly the trinket with the use to add a ton of FR for 20s or whatever] was basically an auto-99 parse for melee on the first drake in bwl [and other world buffs too of course]. Dropping those stacks...huge. It was also very very good for the raid as a whole on vael. I am sure it was useful on other fights too...been a while [Ragnaros comes to mind].

[@ugoboom]

on many private servers, the LBRS fire buff has no cooldown, so we would buff the entire raid every single BWL and still do this day. on classic, it had a 30s cooldown so only the tank and maybe top pumpers would get the privelege of this.

[@noname-gp6hk]

@@marknicklason yeah we used that fire buff for the first couple rag clears back in classic. Was fun going in for the mind controls.

[@JackPitmanNica]

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.

[@montanac223344]

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

[@SenipLuff]

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

[@tylercecil5634]

Same

[@candlestyx8517]

Sweats are something else...

[@Ordoo145]

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.

[@80085ftw]

I just went >:0

[@LifelessIsBeat]

I played this same thing in MC and BWL, and I regularly got top 5 in my group as well. It was great fun, and there was plenty of consumes you could cheese with both AP and SP gear being useful.

[@Ordoo145]

@@LifelessIsBeat I wish I would have discovered this earlier in classic, I was trying to make AP ret work but it just wasn't any good 😂 SP ret with MCP was actually competitive with the right consumes, and could really dish out the dps. Shame farming MCP is tedious.

[@tree4104]

any idea how good that build was in naxx? with exorcism and holy wrath It might actually perform quite well.

[@LifelessIsBeat]

@@tree4104 Haven't the slightest clue, honestly. Was too tryhard for the time investment I was able to commit anyways and burned myself out by the end of BWL. /thumbs-up Feelycraft tells me it was top dam, ez.

[@MD-ee2fq]

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

[@Epidombe]

Dont forget about wrath weaving!

[@Name-oopsies]

@@Epidombe theres also snakeweaving and daggerweaving now

[@General12th]

@@Name-oopsies Don't forget Nogweaving!

[@astralfields]

Jeez... when do we start doing wavedashes, animation canceling, and crouchstabs?

[@davidcardinal3654]

Don’t forget about basket weaving!! Nah but for real is flowerweaving actually working in live?

[@FridayFables]

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

[@astralfields]

Mhm. Of course a vanilla feral druid would never have compared to a worldbuffed rogue or warrior because they didn't benefit from the buffs as much. But without worldbuffs they could certainly do competitive DPS. My own guild hosted an AQ40 PUG once, we invited a feral dps because he was willing to offtank trash. It went very well until we wiped on Twins. And suddenly this guy started appearing in the #5 dps because nobody had worldbuffs anymore. He was #3 on C'thun iirc.

[@TheGreaterGrog]

@@astralfields Huh. Now I regret trying Balance instead. It sucked. Feral didn't seem to do much better, but I focused on it less and I was also bad at the game. Thank god for being the only druid in the raid so they didn't want to kick me.

[@Tanamara]

We had a bear till complex died

[@tudornguyen]

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.

[@kesasika]

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.

[@IsmaelSantos-iy4xi]

And dont forget every non-mage being required to have a frost damage wand or a melee weapon enchanted/oiled for frost damage

[@TheRiboka]

@@IsmaelSantos-iy4xi yuup had to farm the dagger from last boss in RFD for rogues/warriors Coz it had a frost bolt proc

[@michaelsandy2869]

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.

[@luddeah5107]

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

[@twistedoasis]

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

[@kerryrobinson4085]

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).

[@peebers9387]

hahaha i remember criting myself a few times🤣

[@vzwson4995]

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

[@Zuljyn]

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.

[@irimiat]

As a hunter I would always get the Ground Scorpok Assay. I used to submit the mats for the quest, use the item and get the buff, then submit another set of items and have another consumable for it in the bags. Then I'd get a summon for ZG or Ony buff, depending on what I was missing or which one was next. This basically allowed me to run the buff for almost 2h. Farming the mats for the double buff tho, that was another story, given how everyone was farming those mobs in BL.

[@Ashanlor]

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.

[@martij30]

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

[@senismarsenis9678]

Good times, dood B-)

[@Ryan_hey]

Ahh, classic vanilla....loved it. Was so much fun.

[@MrAskmannen]

They can prob relaunch vanilla again in like 5 years, people will be nostalgic for 2019 classic wow

[@nicknic28292490]

TBH, sounds absolutely horrible. And after giving Naxx a 2,5 hour run through for the first time I don't see the attraction about WOTLK, beyond nostalgia, either. HF with your timesink if you want, tho.

[@martij30]

@@nicknic28292490 I've stopped playing since the beginning of TBC, don't worry. But the Classic Vanilla experience was wonderful with the friends I've had and I'm sure it was for many others as well. Enhancement shaman btw.

[@DoubtedPumpkin]

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

[@Bartooc]

It's an easy rotation in wrath...

[@hihihihihello]

feral was the best spec that ever came out of any wow, feral most unique playstyle. nothing like it in any other game.

[@TheBlaert]

@@Bartooc It's easy enough to play, but it's hard as hell to play well. But if you get it right you'll destroy the damage meters

[@Bartooc]

​@@TheBlaert Yeah like the principle of the rotation is really simple yet the execution can be really tricky. It's especially hard on bosses like Sart with 2/3 drakes where you have to change targets a lot. Also you won't top the dmg meters at least until when Ulduar comes out then ferals are top dps.

[@TheBlaert]

@@Bartooc yep absolutely spot on. I mained as moonkin with feral offspec during wrath depending what the guild needed. Was a lot of fun

[@austinhensley6553]

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

[@droaron9116]

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.

[@SillacSaurfang]

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.

[@sirplayalot11x]

it was so substantial that some hunter parsers made a script that would pivot there character in and out of melee range, making for some unreasonably high parses. Since it was using a script, the best way Blizzard could do to handle it was to make the weapon swing timer for both ranged and melee to be shared. As of Wotlk classic, it is no longer possible to melee weave, at least not without losing a lot of DPS.

[@Sarthetv]

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!

[@Suturetv]

I would like a WillE/Sarthe collab thank you

[@Gummibrandur]

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.

[@a.o.skurtt]

LOL i was wondering why not horde thats funny asf

[@michaelgjrjvebs]

@@a.o.skurtt hey, crazy classic 99 parsing feral here(quit in tbc). The reason it didn't work on horde is because of totems. Adding windfury or another biff to your weapon caused the server to "update" it, and meant if you item restored it it would be restored at a point where you had already used the charges. You could take enchanting and DE the weapon, which had a farther back restore point, but it was still not guaranteed. Oh I just realized the guy above me said all this lol

[@egoish6762]

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.

[@brandonkruse6412]

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

[@ashrasmun1]

You could do the same with demonology warlock and moonwell challice in 4.2 to stack as much mastery as possible.

[@zelashizzz1278]

That started in cata with fury mastery, throw on a full mastery stat set, pop cds, swap to regular gear. Do this as pull timer is going to snapshot the mastery into deathwish. Always amusing when it was mistimed and you were stuck in greens on a boss lmao

[@jameshill2450]

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.

[@Pyryp2]

Don't forget warlocks at world bosses.

[@jameshill2450]

@@Pyryp2 World bosses for all intents and purposes did not exist on those servers. There was one top guild that knew the respawn timers and had it camped out to die within seconds. Nobody else on the server was ever able to even see one.

[@bamnasitis]

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

[@9blowtorch]

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

[@Deadlychuck84]

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.

[@Vrba747]

Only loatheb

[@gtetrakai]

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.

[@Knervik]

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.

[@JL-qo3ld]

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.

[@haldir108]

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.

[@Shazprime]

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

[@kedabro1957]

What's the difference between "+10% flat to all stats" and "+10% to all stats"?

[@jacksoneustice]

@@kedabro1957 +10 to all stats but it was instead increasing all stats by 10%

[@Shazprime]

@@kedabro1957 the difference is I wrote +10 flat not +10% flat read it again my guy

[@thyrbse]

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.

[@Wyrmshield]

So you were just resto

[@kenantolaymat9908]

@@Wyrmshield my brother in Christ, that was the joke

[@thyrbse]

@@Wyrmshield Yea but think about my effective dps. All the warriors and rouges that lived to strike another crit for me thanks to my unique strategy.

[@AS-qp5hx]

Along with this. A not so careful study would show that the resto tree was hot garbage and you could get a vast majority of your healing out of the first 2 levels. This, you could be 31 pt feral, and still be a raid healer, but also be able to truly swap roles as needed. I rolled LotP as a healer/off tank. Even sitting there as a kitty spamming FF was better than anything else for trash...

[@zalcal8256]

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

[@JS-vu8po]

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

[@SweetSoulBrother0]

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

[@JJ-dp6hk]

we had a bear tank that spent every minute he played outside of raiding in gnomer. I actually felt bad for the guy haha

[@solame10101]

As a bear running speedruns i spent quite some time farming pummelers. Between gold farming and mcp rng sometimes it could get really tight on time before being forced to get all the world buffs.

[@SteefPip]

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.

[@JackPitmanNica]

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

[@Phoenixstryke]

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

[@benjamin6682]

Thank you so so much. This comment will help my HC Hunter a LOT. I love you bro.

[@chalo3427]

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.

[@mrbrianc]

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.

[@ChairmanMeow1]

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.

[@XGlamdringX]

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.

[@Augrills]

Nightfall was a meme. It’s better to just have another good dps instead of a ret

[@XGlamdringX]

@@Augrills Raiding with your friends is bis. He's been in the guild three expansions and hit top 6 world as ret on Gluth. Totally worth it my friend.

[@ikempi]

As far as food buffs go and me playing a rogue, there was a fish, that gave like 20 agility (I am not sure about the value any more). But what made this interesting was the matter, you could only fish it for 6 months, then next 6 months there was another fish that was replacing it. So to max it out you needed the supply for 6 months to store for the period. Black Lotus was another interesting herb, that had long respawn. So I leveled up 2 characters just to do the early morning trip in 2 zones to ensure the income for myself and guild members. Yes they payed me for that. The HP flask if I remember correct was good even in Burning Crusade, so this went on for quite a while for me. Funny story - since I did the round trip 0700 in the morning I noticed the plants were gone for 2 days, so I pushed the alarm clock 30 mins back, so I got the plants insted. Long behold after few days the plants were gone again. So I turned the alarm even earlier to 0600. I think I ended up ap 0530 for quite some time and then could go back to 0700 and it seems my competitor has quit doing the area.

[@lucasstrong4889]

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.

[@darckben999]

I miss the old intros with the gnome head in random places...

[@andromidius]

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.

[@andromidius]

Oh, and Hunters using Steam Tonk Controller to auto-recall and heal their pets. That was practically mandatory during TBC because pets would die SO EASILY and their pathfinding was abysmal. Thank goodness that was fixed too.

[@rossseed1451]

I remember the week we saw a sapphiron log with some bonkers numbers on it... we were all like 'hackers' and cheaters', etc, but it turned out that the guild had killed Thaddius and then sprinted to Saph with the positive and negative buffs still present, they killed it in like 13 seconds or something... classic was ace, really enjoyed it, played feral druid too;)

[@TimmyTakedownTV]

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

[@daanboonen2810]

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.

[@Tantibus9]

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

[@gaskina13]

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...

[@sw1993]

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

[@zelashizzz1278]

That got "fixed" pretty quick lol

[@ghostmane2643]

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

[@simaddiction]

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.

[@Sasupoika2]

Should be mentioned about Weak Troll's Blood Potions; the change to energy regen was reverted on druid specifically really early, within month of TBC release. Thank god, since the revised energy regen sucked. Otherwise TBC was pretty straightforward, outside of regular powershifting. You could even dump wolfshead for CVoS, Guise - BiS had T6 helmet to maintain set bonus. WotLK is bit wilder. Poweshifting is gone (RIP), but there is bearweaving (going bear during low energy), flowershifting/powergifting (casting Gift of Wild to proc Omen of Clarity), snakeweaving/idolswapping (using albino white snake or swapping idol to reset swingtimer when shifting back to cat) and dual talent treant shenanigans (pre-pull swap to balance spec, summon treants, swap back to feral before pull). Day 1 feral btw

[@ZarisWhiteFoot]

Druids need to lay off the herbalism

[@Ben-vb2us]

get a mop for all the sweat in this video. Holy crap, man, if my raid leader asked me to do even 1/3 of all this back in original vanilla, I would have told him to piss off

[@kingerz]

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.

[@lescaryterri3424]

I kinda miss this aspect of wow in a way. The personal time to gather all your consumes (firewater, wipper root, ekos..) and then you got to chill in disc waiting on buffs and coordinating with other guilds. Unfortunately this wouldn't work as were not in lockdown anymore

[@MarioGomez-wv4wq]

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

[@archmagemc3561]

PvP stuff. MoP had a lot of it. There was a runestone that you could farm that gave you a pally bubble that let you bubble hearth. However there was a single item in mop that actually went through bubble and interrupted cast times called the banana peel. Yeah.... There was also a potion you could get from an alliance quest in ashenvale that gave you BoP.

[@Tijuanabill]

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.

[@xLarsson1996x]

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

[@Demha96]

I collected all world buffs every week on my warrior as a solo player with a single account, the insane lengths i would go for and hours i spent on my alt hunter to check that every area was safe was insane. Even then some even bigger sperg would dispell my buffs out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere lol. Just hearing the word Songflower makes me shudder. Not to mention the intricate ways i would come up with to try and get the Dark Moon Faire buff in Elwynn Forest. Absolutely ridiculous thinking back, never again.

[@bearj.4363]

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.

[@1Animeculture]

Parsing turned into a community sport, like a way to test yourself. It was fun in its own way to go for all these buffs and look at how annihilated a current raid tier could be.

[@LeoJGym]

As a cat main, I brought like 20 SoM in my bags. Seriously, would spend an hour a day just farming them. I'd do this until AQ40 when I finally got the mace that dropped that gave feral attack power but still needed the OH from Scholo as it was the BIS offhand for ferals. I don't miss farming this in the slightest.

[@barksatyoubarks]

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

[@cyndrr]

Cucking 39 people so the pally can feel special

[@hardcoreclassicenjoyer]

Ouro AQ40 the big one

[@barksatyoubarks]

@@cyndrr I'm so glad the mere mention of prot paladin in classic still makes people angry! Hahaha

[@skywise001]

My shaman used the windfury totem (chance on hit to proc attack) and Ironfoe (Offhand) (Chance on hit to make more hits), Hand of Justice trinket (On hit may make one more hit). All extra attacks are handled by the main hand weapon's damage. When I raided every so often an enemy would lose almost all its helth and the enemy would turn to me and squish me. My raid called my self rez my agro drop. One way to haze new raiders is to see how they reacted to this happening.

[@CagedRyno]

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.

[@milhouses]

There was a debuff for mages early classic in BFD which gave some frost spell damage and intellect

[@alexithymia6288]

As you said, there are definitely more min/max things, and I think the one I laugh at the most was "glove weaving" with 2 pairs of gloves that have the Engineering haste enchant on them for more uptime on it...

[@danteteeter6567]

One thing I'd like to point out is that Fengus's Ferocity's tooltip reads "Grants 200 increased attack power". One would think that applies to both melee and ranged, but no. Just melee AP. Hunter's could spend all day learning the route to solo clear DMT and wouldn't even benefit from the buff they got for the rest of their raid group. Maybe I only remember these because I played a lot of hunter in classic, but if you were trying to parse well you would also want to pay attention to your pet's consumables and buffs. Some noteworthy other consumables and buffs are the Silithyst Dust buff which required you carry a rock that slowed your character down a bunch to a little camp. It gave 5% increased damage for 30 min. There's also Jujus of Might or Power which required you to farm up a bunch of random drops from winterspring and turn them in; they lasted 10 minutes and gave either 40 AP or 30 Str for 10 min. There were similar consumables from Blasted Lands that lasted 1hour, except that these ones were unique so the best you could do is turn in the quest, pop the consume and then turn it in again so you have both 1hr of the buff and the consumable in your bag. When it comes to DMF a lot of people would raid with the buff during DMF week and then immediately after raid go grab the buff again and just log off until raid the next week so as to benefit from DMF for 2 raids of the month. They'd also hoard absurd amounts of the holiday event consumables or Consecrated Sharpening Stones from the Scourge Invasion event from naxx's launch to parse better.

[@sappho7278]

I did all of this just to top the meters on my rogue, including getting warchief's blessing with mind control. The raids were piss easy and could have been done naked probably. I regret it and it damn near gives me PTSD thinking about collecting all the buffs every week. I had 5 accounts with a hunter to clear dire maul and warlocks and clickers set up at various locations. I made hella gold selling summons and tribute buffs, like it seemed like a cheat code or something I made so much gold. All of my memories of classic are traumatic.

[@GrimFelArt]

That sounds so utterly miserable LOL

[@renephilipps6422]

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

[@pikl2r]

As an alliance char in classic, I had 3 lvl 20 locks for summoning (felwood, DM:N inside and OG for rend). I also had a 2nd account as horde lvl 20 priest with gnomish cap for MC. Buffs were really coordinated on discord cross-faction but man there were people and times where it was nearly impossible and required your best focus and several low level scouts and high level/high geared alts for protection. Especially towards the end. I remember nights on end trying to find THE BEST possible spot in OG which was extremely trivial. Training so much to jump on mountains (which was difficult but when you got the gist, was very easy to duplicate) both on barrens side and azshara side of orgrimmar terrain. And then chronoboon happened. Late as ever with blizzard but yeah.. Fun times :D :D Miss them!

[@rse3946]

arcanite dragonling did a stackable fire dmg buff which our guild provided for us until the mages kept ignite wiping the raid.

[@stralistv]

I remeber going into Classic, only joining WoW in Legion, and going from Demon Hunter to Feral Druid. They told me I would have to farm Mechagon on cooldown to keep any good DPS. When people say that retail was too grindy, then I remember sitting farming Honor and Mechagon and think that these older players are out of their minds.

[@paleskin5087]

You mean Gnomer not Mechagon