My Ten Favorite WoW Bugs

As an admitted lover of list-making I'd been thinking about making some WoW-related lists for WoW's fifth anniversary. Then my love of procrastination and forgetting things overcame my enumeraphilia, so here we are.

I've spent more time in WoW than any other game -- there's also more of WoW than any other game. In all the time I've spent in all of WoW I've also encountered many more bugs than in any other game. These are my favorites :

1. Casting when in motion but not moving
Most spells in WoW require the caster to stand still. Originally, however, WoW just required the caster to not be moving (i.e. not pressing movement buttons). So you could start casting spells while you were jumping through the air or falling from something. My dream was to kill a hordie in Blackrock Mountain by matching their lava jump (why bother with the steps when you could make a long jump down into the lava?) and Hellfiring them to death (Hellfire is a channeled spell). It was never to be, Blizzard fixed this at some point in WoW 1.x.

2. Glitching Through Doors
You might still be able to do this, it's just that everything you'd want to glitch through is gone. See, you'd get yourself killed by a closed door, then go back to res. Even as a ghost, I think, you couldn't get through the door. But for a moment after you rezzed your character would ignore the door and you'd run right through. In vanilla WoW I once snuck into Caverns of Time, long before the first expansion was ever announced. It was beautiful and I sadly lost all my old screenshots (probably my number one biggest WoW regret), but it was a less-finished version of what it is today -- even before The Burning Crusade it still had that nightime-stars thing going on and that was awesome.

3. Bad Graveyards
One time I was doing some PvP around Chillwind Camp and the horde killed me. My ghost then appeared at a graveyard in Northshire Abbey, about ten zones distant from where I'd died.

4. Cross-Faction Instances
A guildie zoned into Molten Core, the original raid instance in the game, and ended up in the instance of Twelve Prophets, a pretty serious Horde guild on our server. They killed him pretty quick but he got screenshots.

5. Terrible Raid ID Bugs
Raid ID's in modern WoW reset every week at the same time for everybody. They used to reset a week after the Raid ID was obtained by zoning into the instance. They were also very buggy and you'd sometime keep a raid ID from a previous week even if you hadn't been in the raid.

I read a forum account of a player who had once raided with a guild but had then left. The guild leader, believing some superstition about raids, refused to let the raid group disband, keeping it going from week to week. Well, since the raid ID's belonged to the raid they also stuck with everyone who had ever been in that raid group. The poor player was stuck with that guild's raid ID for three or four months, unable to join a new raid group.

6. The non-flying Pet
Pets now despawn/respawn when you mount. For warlocks, at least, this wasn't always the case. Pets would just follow the player, but that wasn't much of a problem. Until TBC introduced flying mounts. Every time you flew someplace, you would be "dragging" your pet along with you, except they'd be running on the ground super-fast and aggroing dozens of mobs. I used an infernal the other week, and actually they still do this.

7. Reckoning
I'm probably not remembering the name of the ability, but Paladins used to (still do?) have an ability that would be triggered and would empower their next hit whenever they took a crit. Problem was, the amount of empowerment was not capped and continued to rise everytime they were crit. So an enterprising paladin took turns dueling some rogue friends for a few hours (but not hitting back), then found Kazzak. Kazzak was an outdoor raid boss that was a tough fight for a 40-man group, and the paladin one-shotted him.

8. In-Air Queueing
I've heard about this one recently. I'm not sure if it's always been a problem or if it's a more recent thing, but evidently accepting a BG invite while on a flying taxi can be hazardous, as once you leave the BG you'll be returned to the world high in the sky sans flying taxi.

9. Disappearing Boats
Players riding on a boat back in vanilla WoW would occasionally have the boat disappear from underneath them instead of taking them to the next continent. This would happen so far out in black water (which causes fatigue even on dead characters) that players would be forced to spirit res, taking a big repair bill and a ten-minute debuff for their troubles.

10. 30-man Scholomance
Though it's not really that much of a bug, dungeons originally had no cap on the number of players entering, so people would often "raid" the 5-man dungeons, exchanging any sense of tactics or discipline for the crushing DPS of a 30 man raid. I only did this once before they patched in the limits but I do remember, oddly, still being a little intimidated by Scholo.