Regarding Raid Buff Cooldown Resets and Terrain Exploits in Ulduar

Greetings,

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

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

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

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

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

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