Monk Bug Causes Huge Damage Numbers! - World of Warcraft (Video)

Written by: Olivia Grace (Twitter @oliviadgrace - Google+) | March 12, 2013 6:47 am

13 Comments

World of Warcraft played host to a bizarre monk bug, resulting in some insane damage numbers.

Reddit user MidOrFeed put the above video of this bug up on reddit, and various tweets and forum posts appeared as more and more players discovered the bug, most likely by accident. This could have been seen as an exploit by Blizzard if players were to deliberately take advantage, but less likely if players just happened upon it by accident and proceeded as normal, rather like we see in the video above. An example of exploiting might have been for players to assemble a raid principally comprised of windwalker monks, for example.

The monk bug was based on the interaction of two abilities, Rushing Jade Wind and Spinning Crane Kick. Rushing Jade Wind is an ability affecting Spinning Crane Kick, giving it a damage multiplier. It seems like there was the accidental addition of some additional numbers to the Spinning Crane Kick multiplier, making the kick far more powerful than was ever intended. A cursory glance at some World of Logs pages reveals that, with these high numbers for monk output, Spinning Crane Kick was dealing about 98% of the damage the monks were putting out. And that was huge damage. World of Logs has one monk at 4.48 million DPS.

Now, clearly, this is not working as intended. While monks needed a DPS buff or two, they definitely should not have been putting out these sorts of numbers. People who have played for a couple of patches, specifically the Dragon Soul 4.3 Cataclysm patch’s early days, will remember a similar issue with retribution paladins, where their Censure ability that was dealing far too much damage.

Rather like the Censure bug, this was hotfixed at high speed, with rolling restarts to repair the bug completed at around 5.30pm PDT, as Blizzard confirmed on Twitter.

Monk Bug Causes Huge Damage Numbers! - World of Warcraft (Video)

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Wraylas

I’m pretty sure the guys in the video will be banned. They knew of the exploit and was taking advantage of it to down raid bosses. They even said in the video that they were hoping to one shot things.
- http://twitter.com/JuhTai James Megretton
  
  I actually doubt they will be. As it wasn’t if they were doing the latest content, rather last tier content on normal modes. They’ll no doubt get a warning of some form but nothing more
  - Wraylas
    
    Doesn’t matter if it was the newest content or not, they were exploiting and getting achievements they wouldn’t normally get.
Fabio Pizzini

The only way that has Gamebreaker to have people reading their news it is to troll wow, good job!!! /facepalm
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=803762169 Stephen Favell

Anyone able to tell me the mod he’s using for his health/rage bar/ball there?
I apologise if its common knowledge, ive only just started playing again. That looks great imo.
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Search wowinterface for Diablo. Seem to be a couple of WoW mods that give the Diablo interface. The good news is they seem updated for patch 5.2.
http://twitter.com/Deadalon Deadalon

How long did Blizzard have this stuff on PTR?
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Seems like the Monk class team failed at final acceptance testing.
- Wraylas
  
  This bug wasn’t on the ptr, somewhere between the final ptr build and what they pushed live someone slipped in a few extra 0′s
- http://twitter.com/JuhTai James Megretton
  
  We were discussing this last night actually and you may be surprised, but this bug would have been impossible to detect on the PTR.
  
  Quite literally, this bug turned up yesterday and only yesterday, a week after the release of 5.2. Why? Well, obviously we cannot be 100% – but the fact is, it shows just how vast and complex the game engine/coding truly is.
  
  One minor change, and i’m talking – extremly minor – the inclusion of say a single line of code, can conflict and break anything at any given time. Likely, a back end hotfix conflicted and broke something to do with these abilities. People can say “should have tested more” – but with the vastness of the game as it stands, nobody would have found or could have predicted this would happen. This is how bugs pop up in the first place and this is why hotfixes come out. Even then, a said hotfix could quite easily break something else.
  
  Just something to bare in mind
shadydog66

Using exploits to down bosses—how would this be fun, so ridiculous.
Kasper0255

There was no exploit. Blizzard screwed up. You couldn’t tell the monk in the raid to leave just because the class was broke. He was using his abilities as intended.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=754168227 Len Hobbel

Its been a while but watching this video made me go back to 2004 WOW. Some of those mobs did not look good at all. So use to games with graphics these days and massive story/lore/cannon…Seems that WOW looks So outdated…yet applying for its simpleton-ness. I do miss never dying in a game. For one to proclaim themselves a WOW god would be easy., and a few have. Yet non will take the 10,000 dollar challenge i issued. Only the ONE has to take it and I will offer it to all…But Warchief girl wont