WOTLK First Week Recap

[Kenneth]

We are at the 1 week mark for WOTLK and a lot has happened. Let's break it down.


World First 80
The first thing to cover is the first 80 of course which was obtained by retail world first Echo raider Naowh. Naowh "streamed" his journey to world first 80 but it was mostly just a way to see how far he had gotten by showing his XP bar but you could not actually see what he was doing until he revealed it at a safer and higher level which is understandable with possible griefing in the cards. Other world first racers such as LMGD did similar streaming styles. Naowh finished in under 10 hours using an old retail exploit. He even mentions the exploit he used was something he practiced on retail going into this and he was surprised people forgot about it and didn't think he would be the only one. So what got him so much xp/hr? For this we turn to a death knight named Rokir. Rokir does something special in that he spawns a ton of zombies that also give you experience. So with the power of kiting as a prot paladin and an rdruid out of the group healing him just in case he came close to death Naowh was able to net well over 1 million XP/hr. These zombies also didn't need to be killed all the way. They despawned after a certain amount of time and gave full experience if you hit them enough! This was fixed the morning after in Tuesday's reset and Naowh has not been rolled back and has earned himself as the official world first 80 in this iteration of WOTLK Classic.


Wintergrasp
The honor farm is one of the most grindy portions of WoW especially in a fresh start/expansion setting. But as we all know "Exploit early exploit often" is the common trope with WoW. This was the case with Wintergrasp. If you don't know how Wintergrasp works every 3rd hour 3/6/9/12 Wintergrasp is queueable. It is queueable up to 30 minutes after the hour. Normally when you finish your game you are done for that 3 hour session but early on you were able to queue it up again within that 30 minute window. What this led to was the defensive teams letting the offensive teams steamroll them to use their time efficiently and get into as many games per 30 minute windows as possible. Due to this people were netting upwards of 80-100k honor in one Wintergrasp session which is an absurd amount of honor. It has since been fixed but methods to bypass the fix keep popping up, some right here on Ownedcore. (Check the Classic WoW Exploits section). But these exploits are being fixed rapidly once they pop up. Blizzard to try calming down the community outrage over the fix has lowered all honor gear by 30%.

Raids come this next week so we should have some interesting stuff to cover with which guilds get world first. Some of the bigger guilds on mega servers have transferred off due to the insane queue times and their capability to possible hinder a launch day raid.