Throne of Tides mount bug - Immortal party edition

[Trubadidudei]

You have all heard of, seen and tried the Throne of Tides elevator mount bug, one of the weirder bugs in WoW that blizzard does not seem to care much about at the moment due to its apparent uselesness.

However, theres a twist to this story, and it lies in timing your dismount carefully.

Heres the exploit: If you dismount just at the moment that another player presses the mount button on your bugged mount, the player will mount YOU!

To illustrate this, I present to you exhibit A:



This is how things look from your side. To other players and to the player on your head, it will look just like the other player is mounted on your mount as would happen in the elevator, except for the fact of course that you're never dismounted.

First of all, this is hilarious. To prove this I present to you exhibit B:



Above you see me doing a frontflip with a shaman stuck on my head, I have run the tests, and this is 100% hilarious.

Secondly, you might notice that the shaman seems to be doing an action in the first picture, that is because he is! While on someones head, and while someone is riding on your head, you mantain full controll of your characters spells and abilities, with the notable exceptions of eating and drinking, and of course being able to move anywhere where the "mount" does not want to go.

Furthermore, you gain the full benefit of all auras such as mana tide or devotion, however you are IMMUNE to ANY unfriendly effect! When you mount someone, you seem to merge with that person, and you become an untargetable part of them. Any threat you generate is transfered to the bottom target, as you seem to actually BE that person. This means that it is impossible for you to take damage from any source, as you are essentially a helmet. This also leads to more exotic and wonky effects, such as stealth being shared by all people above the target who stealthes (Il note why i specify "all targets above" soon). I present for this case, exhibit C:



Note in particular how stealthy the shaman is, shamans are not naturally stealthy.
I have not tested the implications of this particular trait yet, but I presume it might mean that if you "mount" a warrior, then you might benefit from his stance bonuses, if you mount a DK you might benefit from his aspects and so on. I havent tested that last part though, so thats up to you to find out.

For a caster, being mounted on someone also has the added benefit of giving you the ability to cast while your "mount" is moving, essentially turning you both into an unstoppable death turret. Other then that, combat functions normally as one would excpect.

The best part of this, however, is yet to come! I present to you...exhibit D!



Yes, you are seeing this right. It is a shaman, on a rogue, on a deathknight who is riding his deathcharger, WHILE DRINKING NOGGENFOGGER! This seemingly impossibly impossible impossibility is made possible with the magic of huge jellyfish elevators.
The deathknight in this case is not really on his mount, but I see it that way as I mounted him, and any effect he applies on himself is simply shown on him as he would be mounted.
As mentioned earlier, auras such as stealth is only applied to people ABOVE you, thus the deathknight in this case will not benefit from it. However the shaman can attack continiously while in stealth, as it does not break until the original caster breaks it (not that this has much use within an instance, if the shaman aggroes a mob, it goes on the rogue in despite of stealth).
However, there is seemingly no limit to how many people can mount upon each other (although i havent tested this yet), meaning that your entire party can mount upon eachother, and then upon the tank. Note that range issues still apply, so third place up in the tower will not be able to reach groundmobs with meele attacks, however with 3 ranged dps and a healer stacked on a tank, you essentially turn into an entire party on a stick. This will let you easily own the entire istance with the exception of the last boss, as you do not gain the damage buff at the end of the encounter in this state (However, as long as the tank can be healed through the debuffs, you are immortal, so killing the squid is still possible in this state).

We tried to "export" this bug to another instance by qeuing directly from the instance, however some wonky mechanic that we havent quite figured out yet seemed to prevent this from happening and threw us out of the instance instead (although there seemed to be a window of opportunity where we might have made it if we had acted quicker). We have yet to try BGs, summons, or other methods, so that is all up to you. However, this state does not seem very stable, as one can dismount suddenly because of seemingly random factors that are still unknown to me. Thus, I do not have much faith that this can be used outside the Throne of tides (but feel free to prove me wrong)


As a final note, id like to give some advice on how to do this bug, as the timing can be quite tricky. When we did this, we were three guildies sitting in Teamspeak and counting down to get the timing right, something which i would recommend (but with five guildies of course ). With my latency, the right time to press dismount was roughly 0.2-0.4 seconds after having said "MOUNT!" on Teamspeak (which is when the other player was supposed to click me to mount up). This may vary depending on your friends and your own latency. If the target moves up towards your head but then suddenly "dismounts" in mid air, you are dismounting to late. On a successfull "mount" the player moves smoothly from the ground up on your head about half a second after you have dismounted.

That is all i got! I leave you then with one final image of the bug in action:



PS: Couldnt be bothered to proofread this, so feel free to go all grammar nazi on me

[ichik]

Legendary, IMHO!
At least made me laugh out.

[Parog]

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA I haven't laughed at something creative in game in a long time. People like you who take the time to take screenshots like that and put effort in what they do, even if it's something "for the lulz", are awesome!

+7 rep

[Razkaz]

Happened to me first time i did it... this one is old.

[Nefti1]

Throne of the Circus!!
Rep+ great find!

[Leonim]

Very well written, liked it alot! +rep

[baichii]

Repp'd and lol'd! Thaks for sharing! : ]

[facelesssoul]

Amazing work, probably hotfix incoming but yeah +rep!

[fa3sr011]

Now that's creativity in action!

[Eldarius]

Party on a stick, awesome. +rep

[Vuljor]

dude just reading this was pure win
great guide! hilarious to read!

i'll give you all my rep

[Trubadidudei]

Wow! Thanks alot for all these positive comments!

However, when I look back at this I realised I missed the mark with this thread, forgetting what might arguably be the entire point of this thread and indeed the very exploit itself.
I forgot...the "In soviet russia" joke. And its such an obvious one too


As a final note, I really do hope that this exploit can be used for something else then ****ing around in Throne of the tides (although it arguably makes the instance easier, if youve got five guys on Vent to make this happen, its already pretty easy). Its such a weird exploit, it almost looks like an implemented mechanic or something of the sort. Most of the time when doing something like this one would expect to fall through the floor or be disconnected, or at least for the thing to not properly, but thats not the case here.

If one did this with the going out of deadmines bug (before it was fixed), I guess it would have been theoretically possible to stack and entire raid on top of one person. So lets hope that the "ride the non-passenger mount" style of exploits will happen again in a more practical setting sometime in the future, as it could result in loads of fun

[Arkad]

You get my +rep on a stick!

[Vyre]

Nice read, and you put a lot of effort in it

nice job

[xbadassx]

+rep11111111111111111111111111111111