A World of Warcraft player racing to be one of the first in the world to clear the MMO's latest raid quietly used a bug to squeeze out a tiny bit more damage on the Nexus-Princess Ky’veza boss. It only gave him around a 4% damage increase, but it could've been enough to finish a fight his guild had been attempting for days in the world first Nerub-ar Palace race.
The bug could be called an exploit depending on who you ask because it takes a very deliberate method to use it. Team Liquid raider Imfiredup used a spell called Splinterstorm that is normally supposed to automatically shoot towards your current target. If you didn't have a valid enemy target, however, the spell simply wouldn't work properly and continue building up the debuff until you did.
By targeting his own character and using WoW's alternative 'focus' targeting system to cast his other spells (using macros) at the boss, Imfiredup could build up over 200 stacks of the debuff without Splinterstorm automatically seeking it out. Then, all he had to do was click on the boss to unleash a massive explosion of damage at once.
It would be one thing if everyone was openly using the bug, but Imfiredup appeared to be trying to hide it on the Liquid stream. Instead of having his normal target health bar on the right side of his custom UI like most players, Imfiredup put the focus target's there, which many think was to cover up that he was actually targeting himself most of the fight for the bug to work.
WoW mod developer Luckyone posted a screenshot that explains what's going on. You can just barely see the blue circle underneath Imfiredup's character that indicates he's targeting himself, despite having the boss health bar where your main target would usually be. In the middle of a fight where hundreds of spell effects are going off from the boss and other players, you wouldn't notice this unless you knew what to look for.
Explaining the @LiquidGuild mage bug mentioned in the @Gingitv tweet in this picture pic.twitter.com/N0XaIO9gf2September 21, 2024
But people eventually did. Rival raider Gingi, of Echo, called Imfiredup out on X: "Bro Liquid is sitting there openly exploiting spellslinger stacks on a mythic boss. If this isn't ban worthy what is LOL? Crazy."
Just a few days earlier, Blizzard temporarily banned several world first raiders, including Gingi, for using an exploit to max out a faction reputation way earlier than you're meant to. "They were so fast at calling out Method and myself for doing [the] Severed Threads [exploit] and then they pull this?" Gingi asked in the post about Imfiredup.
Gingi's post sparked discussions about whether or not the bug should be allowed and that led to people spamming Liquid's Twitch chat with messages calling for Imfiredup to be banned. Before Blizzard issued a hotfix that fixed the bug, Imfiredup had already swapped to a different mage specialization and stopped using it. And then a few hours later Liquid became the first guild in the world to kill Mythic Nexus-Princess Ky’veza.
Even though Blizzard fixed the bug soon after it was discovered, it didn't end up banning Imfiredup, who is currently streaming attempts on the next boss in the raid. The tiny damage increase might've been low stakes enough for it to give him a pass. But there are still people who think using anything like this should be punished, no matter how insignificant it is.
I think it really depends on the bug and how game-breaking it actually is. There have been exploits in the past that completely nullify entire boss mechanics. Sure, a 4% damage increase could matter in a race against some of the best players in the world, but I think in this case, it only needed to be fixed ASAP so other players didn't feel like they had to do it too.
