Cataclysm And MOP Exploits - A Broad Overview (Patreon)

The following is a broad overview of exploits in Cataclysm and Mists Of Pandaria content.

Because of the serious possibility anything I publish may get fixed before launch I am not going to discuss specific exploits in this article. This is for those who want to get ahead of the game.

Cataclysm and Mists Of Pandaria were generally reckoned to be the most exploitable of all wow expansions. Expansions prior to Cataclysm were coded more expertly and simply: these things led to fewer exploits. Expansions after Mists Of Pandaria were generally poorly coded and complex: but Blizzard developed a quite irrational desire to eliminate exploits by any means necessary often completely ruining huge areas of the game simply to stop some minor trick.

Be aware that we know relatively little about the coming MOP remix event and it is unclear how many older exploits will work there-by contrast I am quite confident Cata will produce multiple exploits (I've found some already).

The exploit and exploration community was specifically attracted to a class of exploits known as "control flightpath". The basic method here is to use a macroed timing attack on any non-standard flight path (ie one contained in a specific quest or special situation). There are many specific examples of this in the Ownedcore.com archives and on youtube videos from the time. Control flightpath allowed you to use a vehicle to fly through solid objects.

A similar technique was developed by some well-known players of the era to glitch out quests involving vehicle mechanics to, for example, become invincible.

A class of exploits I found extremely powerful involved was/is the debuff damage exploit. I have multiple older videos about this on my channel. * These are currently active in pre-patch Cata and to some extent even in Dragonflight. The basic principle behind these is some npc in-world casts a debuff which has both negative and positive effects. Generally speaking the positive effect outweighs the negative allowing the player to do more damage than they would otherwise.

A powerful trick to find debuff exploits is to search the wohead database through google with a query such as "wowhead apply aura debuff "but also"". The "but also" debuff in the example narrows down the field of results significantly by requiring those words to appear in any results. You can replace "but also" with similar qualifiers-a good way to do this is to use whatever words were used to describe a debuff you know is exploitable - it may have a twin or in some cases an extended family.

There are several ways to exploit this:

1. Receive debuff on player accept port to instance and use.

2 Receive debuff on player pet/mnion and do the same.

3. (Hunter only) Receive debuff on player pets for use with the Stampede ability.

Cataclysm quests involving some kind of quest companion could often be both cloned (this is very gamebreaking and these opportunities will probably be patched if they make it to live) and taken out of the zone they are in using the "edging out of the boundary on spawn" method. Many of you will know this method from my many public videos featuring Johnny Awesome.

I've tried not to refer to any actual exploit in this article but hopefully regular viewers of mine will be able to connect the dots relatively easily and follow the sources to find individual exploits.

I will be giving more specifics on exploits in these expansions when I believe they will be most useful to players and/or will not be fixed immediately.