10.2 PVP Bugs (Patreon)

So with the launch of patch 10.2 there are a number of interesting pvp bugs worth covering:

Phasing In Blitz Brawl

During  the new Blitz Brawls I have experienced a strange issue where I did not seem to be phased into the same space as enemy players.  I was able to cap flags such as those in Arathi Basin with no interference. The flag was then re-capped with me standing right in front of it by an enemy player that was invisible to me. 

This appears to be the same bug that causes enemy combatants not to be visible when you enter a battleground shortly after logging in while the game is under heavy performance stress (eg in large fights in epic battlegrounds). 

Previously this bug was visual only: you could be attacked by enemy players you could not see. Now this seems to be affecting game mechanics also. This is obviously highly exploitable. 

Pacifying Same Faction Players In World PvP

For this week only world pvp is the best way to gear up for pvp (and a pretty good way to do so for pve for that matter) as honor and conquest items are not available.

This means players who want to get ahead must venture into a open world free-for-all pvp zone and participate in a mass brawl trying to obtain bloody tokens which can be exchanged for items which scale to ilvl 473 in pvp. 

There is a very useful glitch that helps enormously with this. When you enter a free-for-all pvp zone everyone of both factions should appear hostile unless you are grouped with them. This mean no one survives very long: everybody is trying to kill everyone else.

However if you log out in a free-for-all pvp zone every player of your faction becomes friendly to you. You receive healing from healers of your faction. This makes it very much easier to tag hostile players and receive bloody tokens quickly.

Arena Method To Disconnect Players

An arena team has been  attracting a lot of attention recently using a disconnect method. A druid casts entanglement on an enemy player-an evoker then uses the talented "swoop" ability to move the player. The timing appears to be inconsistent but if done correctly the enemy player is disconnected when the evoker lands. This is due, ironically, to the anti-cheat protection the game client uses when it detects what it thinks is a player going out-of-bounds.

I don't recommend the use of such methods for ethical reasons (though I can't stop any one from doing that obviously). Additionally, the approach used by the team is far too obvious: they made no attempt to engage in pvp at all and simply repeatedly try to pull of the d/c move. That said the mechanics of this method are interesting. 

What I would definitely recommend for players who do arenas is to have an awareness of the basic principles involved here. Multiple movement effects at the exact same moment can trigger bizarre effects including disconnects. There is a small but significant chance that any combination of movement or suppression of effects can disconnect a player especially on uneven terrain. Because an instant loss occurs when this does happen it is worth bearing in mind even if you have no intent to induce this effect.