Cranberry

After reading a comment on [Stormchops] procing spell crit effects when it itself crits, I wondered how many other little tricks one can use - ones that might never occur to anyone. So here's a thread for them, and to start them off is one of my own:

A wall of smoke flares works as an excellent way to hide your numbers in AV, or simply spammed all over a defending tower can video lag up the offense.


EDIT: I'll add posted tricks to a list below, for ease of reading. Extremely minor or impractical ones (i.e., farming the cracked power cores) are not listed here. The details will be left to individual posts though. Toss me a PM if any of these don't work.

-General-
Spells whose mana cost is reduced to zero do not put you in the FSR, can stack Pendant of the Violet Eye, and can be used with no mana at all in P2 ROS. (post was specifically on uses of Totem of the Maelstrom)
Magic Dust works on mobs of any level.
[Kreeg's Stout Beatdown] stacks with all buffs except Mistletoe.
Combat Pet trinkets like the Commander's Badge or Gnomish Battle Chicken can be used and swapped before a fight.
[Bloodthistle] stacks with everything.
AoEs and Wanding go through Spell Reflection.

-Raiding-
Leaving someone outside Zul'jin's door will cause tornadoes to follow them.
Kalecgos, and some other bosses, can be despawned by having a hunter shoot and immediately feign death.
Dying from debuffs whose damage counts as yours (Burn, Conflag, etc), or while being untargetable for some reason (Felmyst's MC) will not deal durability damage.
Flame Cap can be used to boost melee dps when Healthstones will not be needed.
A warlock can die outside Aran's door, and a druid can stealth past Chess trash and rez him to the repair vendor.
On absolutely-must-have-that-last-1DPS fights, the blue Use: necks from Jewelcrafting are a substantial dps boost.
Most pets will benefit from Bloodlust if it is used while they are active.
[Thornling Seed] can be used to momentarily distract adds.
[Greater Ward of Shielding] can be used to reduce incoming AOEs on shield classes, or for ROS P1. Cannot be applied in combat.
[Wail of the Banshee] affects bosses.
[Lei of Lilies]'s Lily Root is superior to both Night Dragon's Breath and Luminous Bluetail as a mana consumable.
[Vial of the Sunwell] benefits from % boosts to all healing.

-Professions-
Alchemist's Stone and Gnomish Death Ray can still be used after dropping Engineering.
Gnomish Rocket Boots can guarantee a first cap in EOTS.
Gnomish Battle Chicken's Battle Squawk is a 4-minute 5% haste buff

-Class Specific-

Warlock
Warlocks can summon themselves, then hearth/port and accept the summon to return to where they were.
Infernals and Enslave Demon do not remove Demonic Sacrifice, and can therefore be used for extra damage outdoors.
You can override a DoT curse with a non-damaging one if needed.
Curse of Recklessness does not actually remove fear effects and can be used to ping-pong
Reflected/used on MC'd melee Curse of Recklessness can provide fear immunity or a dps boost.
Reflected Siphon Life or Drain Life is a health gain due to Fel Armor.
Placing a Siphon Life on every target of a multi-mob pull can provide a rather substantial health stream.

Paladin
Shattered Sun Pendant of Might's scryer proc will stack Vengeance.
Holy/Retribution Paladins can use Blessing of Sacrifice on tanks to regain a small amount of mana from the taken damage.
Crit heals with Divine Illumination active will actually increase your mana pool - Illumination restores based on *base* mana cost.
Divine Shield protects from Dark/Demonic rune's health cost.

Hunter
Wyvern Sting's DoT is overwritten by other stings.

Shaman
Earth Shield's healing is calculated when it is cast, so Use trinkets can be used pre-pull to buff it. This also works with ROS P2's aura.

Warrior
[Solarian's Sapphire]'s bonus remains if it is removed after casting Battle Shout, except on the casting Warrior.

Priest
Arakkoa in Terokkar can be mind-controlled for a 5-minute buff that reduces all ability costs by 5%.
Shadow Fiend mana return is based on their damage, which is based on their Attack Power, which is based on your spell damage at time of summoning. Increasing any of these (via BoM, for example) will increase mana return.

Druid
The 3pc Cenarion set bonus to Thorns remains even after the set is removed, except on yourself.

 

Starfire

Cute thread, but I must wonder how much people are willing the post if they fear something will get nerfed or changed.

While I hope I am not going off-topic here and/or hijacking... I have wondered in the past about this. Are secret nifty things better for the game? or worst. There's a certain sense of accomplishment for discovering something, certainly, and it could be arguable it was put in there purposely. On the other-hand, is it all an unfair advantage? If its not documented, should it be removed?

Like back to the Stormchops... that seems clearly unintended, since Stormchops, as far as I know, mostly just proc on critters.

On that note, I'll help the thread out:
[Gnomish Death Ray] is BoP but does not require engineering to use or wear.
[Philosopher's Stone] is BoP but does not require alchemy to wear.

Not terribly useful in a raid instance, but pretty useful for a level 29 or 39 twink.

 

Cranberry

The death ray is funny as hell in 39 pvp. Non-twinks tend to get 1-shotted.

 

Howard Roark

Engineering rocket boots can guarentee you the first flag cap in eots.

 

Prinsesa

Especially if you combine them with the [Parachute Cloak] as you jump from the starting rock.

On the subject of Stormchops proccing spell crit effects, the Scryer proc from [Shattered Sun Pendant of Might] will stack up a Retribution Paladin's Vengeance when it crits. I should see if Stormchops can do this as well.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

jasura

Not sure if this is known or if this is even the intended place to post this but...

One time we were finishing ZA after one of our early (Failed) ZA Timed Run attempts. Our elemental shaman went AFK while we were buffing for Zul'Jin and I didn't notice it. Well we started it out and he of course got locked out by the fire barrier that formed. At first we just /facepalmed as Zul'Jin was still very hard to us at this point. Well he comes back and is wondering what the heck guys. We made it to Phase 3 and lo and behold he gets chased by tornadoes... Past the fire barriers...

After a bit of experimentation on subsequent attempts, he found that anything that creates aggro (Power changes, buffs, heals, whatevers) would somewhat cause him to get aggro on the tornadoes and he would "Kite" them. Well either that or it was just random and he felt better at night because he found out how to kite tornadoes. /shrug. Anyways, he would sometimes be able to get multiple tornadoes to latch onto him and stay onto him almost until Hex-lord's door. I can remember one time when he was able to get all four tornadoes on him for a solid 15 seconds. Do you know how quickly ZJ P3 goes when you pop heroism in both groups and everybody gets 15 seconds of straight DPS?

This actually reminds me of one of the funniest moments in wow in recent memory. We tried to do this again on a subsequent ZA reset but had a hunter that had just come back to wow after a 3-month break instead. I can remember the resto shaman explaining our little kiting strat and the shaman saying "Ok you gotta cast spells to get aggro from them... Ya, just cast spells... CAST AS MANY F*%$ING SPELLS AS POSSIBLE" to a hunter. All he could say was "...ok"


We have not tried to use this "Kite tornadoes" strategy in at least a month or two because we now find the fight to be relatively easy because of overgearing but it sure did help get us past our problems with this fight. Being that we considered P3 to be the hardest phase at the time, having something make it 20% or so easier really made a huge difference. I doubt that this has been fixed but I am not sure if we tried it since 2.4 came out. It's a really neat little find.

 

Trifle

I noticed a similar thing in that flametongue proc crits gave me charges on my lightning capacitor (and probably anything else based off spell crit procs).

 

aerwyth

I would not recommend actually doing this. We had a player end up outside the fire barrier by virtue of tornado knockback during phase 3. He was then promptly targeted by the claw rage ability at the start of phase 4, causing to boss to go past the fire barrier and reset.

 

• Tecton

We did that to our ret pally the other night, we'd just pull the boss over to the wall and he could melee him, while kiting tornadoes in P3. Actually made for a remarkably easy kill. Not that I'm advocating doing this normally, was just amusing.

 

Caducus

Does anyone remember the good old times we had at Ragnaros, Caster Dps popping Deviate Fish and getting turned into a little blop just hoping they would get the Cast-time buff out of them?

Or oh my god Admiral's hats! I once farmed feathers like a madman for 3 days to make a hat for each person of the raid.

Good old vanilla times.

 

PsyBomb

A cute resto shaman trick I found: Healing Wave rank one costs 23 mana and takes one second to cast. What is interesting to note here is that the [Totem of the Maelstrom] reduces this to 0, making it free to cast and as such it won't place you within the 5SR. This doesn't seem like much of an advantage, given that you can pump out all of 90 HPS with it in Sunwell gear, but look again.

Evil tricks include using it to stack up Healing Way and trigger Ancestral Fortitude. It counts as a nature-school spell, so it can trigger [Fathom-Brooch of the Tidewalker] for +335 mana (again, no investment other than 1 second to cast), and as a heal it can be used to charge up a [Vial of the Sunwell] (despite the fact that its normal heal at +2k healing is around 85). In ZA it can trigger the [Amani Charm of the Witch Doctor] (and since THAT heal takes place over the course of 9 seconds, I've had it help soak a nasty Saber Lash before... for nothing). I know for fact that I've missed several and I didn't write some of the less-useful ones here, but you get the drift.

Sum of it is that whenever I find myself with some breathing room, I'll equip the totem and spam HW(r1) on the tanks until such time as I need to start actually healing again, at which point I cast a main-rank healing wave and swap out mid-cast so that no time is wasted. I also do this in the few seconds before a pull to prep them for healing (and maybe get the armor bonus on the pull)

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

Northerner

Cute indeed.

I remember well when the SoA and Luci neck got killed (sadly I only ever had the one) so the evil frost mages couldn't get mana while casting R1 stuff. The irony compared to now is thick and heavy for certain.

Still, I would have thought the actual mechanic ('free' spell and 5SR) would have long been fixed.

 

dill

for some strange reason not all warlocks know, that
- they can summon themselves, HS/whatever ( for example, take shadow resist gear for Mother Shahraz from bank or repair near inn with a little discount with their exalted Scryers of Aldor faction npc ) and instantly return back to instance

 

Prinsesa

I recall this being posted before, but in the interest of REALLY maximizing DPS on Brutallus, wear your [Commander's Badge], activate it, then replace with your normal trinket before the pull.

The Dragonling lasts for a couple of minutes, and his Arcane Bolts add a non-trivial amount of damage, especially if your whole raid does it.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Baalzaman

That plus the Tiny Voodoo Gnomes (trinket from Hex Lord Malacrass)!

 

insi9nia

The old Shaman sentry totem had made fools out of more melee than i can remember.
Usually in a pug AB i would be the sole defender at LM, its pretty amusing to jump off the
cliff, cast your sentry totem and have 2 warriors charge you only to notice the ground disappear
from beneath their feet and plummet to their deaths below lol.



For the uninitiated.
(The old sentry totem causes your character to freeze when placed.
So when you jump off a cliff, cast your totem. You'll be stuck in the air.)

Maniq loves me.
That is awesome.

 

Wunlastri

Pretty sure they share cooldowns, as the netherwing shares with the servants from scholo.

 

Aker

Did a badge run last night in Kara. Right before Nightbane, I used my [Mr. Pinchy] and brave Mr. Pinchy fought alongside us for a bit.

Sadly, Mr. Pinchy isn't smart enough to not stand in the fire.

 

drowsy

We had this nice thing going on Kalecgos learning, where after the trash started to repop we would have wipe protection, and pull and leash him a few times. This despawns him for 20 seconds or so and allows for rezzing people out of range, buying another few attempts before having to clear trash again. Oddly enough though, he refuses to leash on occasion and just kills everyone.

 

vorda

They do not share cooldowns. Had some amusing world pvp moments because of that.

 

Eyegore

You do not have to leash, a hunter can shoot him and instantly feign death to despawn him. If that gets resisted however, then it's a mad dash for the end of that hallway to leash him. Usually goes off without a hitch tho >.> (It interrupts eating/drinking however, so if you do not want to waste buff food do not start eating until immediately after an aggro/feign to start eating. You will have enough time then to get the buff on before he respawns, and the crafty hunter can look around to see who starts eating :-/ )

 

McInaction

If you fd before the shot actually lands you're not in combat and fd cannot be resisted.

 

Amonra

If you really want the smallest of small damage upgrades you could get [Chipped Power Core] and [Cracked Power Core].

They use the same cooldown as healthstones, so no use for a fire mage/lock (flamecap is better) but will provide a very small boost for other casters.

Just don't get any ideas about farming lots of these for raiding - they are both unique.

 

bluenote

He still makes an awesome OT for mother! One of our warrior MT has it.

 

clavarnway

[Demonic Rune] and [Dark Rune] are also in this vein. Share cooldown with HS. Not unique though.

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