WoW's pre-patch stat squish has caused several low-level potions and food items to do literally nothing, with some even restoring '-0 health', whatever that means

An edited screenshot of a World of Warcraft character designed to reflect the potion buyer in the "strongest potions" meme. — (Image credit: Blizzard)

World of Warcraft's pre-patch for the Midnight expansion has introduced a stat squish—in case you're unfamiliar, it's basically required for any long-form MMO. Every so often, Blizzard has to put the clamps on damage numbers and turn everything down, because numbers getting too high is bad for everybody.

The idea is that proportionately things stay the same—you're not actually getting any weaker. However, WoW is a 21-year-old game, and sometimes things get a little skewiff. For example: There are now healing potions in World of Warcraft, potions that a first-time player might conceivably pick up, that do literally nothing.

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Multiple potions and food items in World of Warcraft are shown to have "restores 0 health" or "restores -0 health" in their tooltips. — (Image credit: Blizzard)

Just out of curiosity, I also decided to try drinking one of the negative zero health potions, wondering if I'd bump into some kind of integer failure or whatever the cool kids are calling 'em nowadays—nope. Just sixty gold down the pot and not a sliver of health to show for it, the dang thing didn't even show up on my combat log.

As funny as this bug is, it does present a bit of a problem: World of Warcraft's invested in making sure there's a steady influx of new blood, and it's not exactly a great look to start playing as a low-level character and receive a potion, only to be informed that it quite literally does nothing.

Hopefully, Azeroth's potion sellers will re-strengthen their potions soon. Either that, or new characters will simply be cursed to drink strawberry juice for the rest of time.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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