A warlock in our guild who is a Demonology buff has been using my services to use what is probably, ok definitely, an expoit. Here's how it works.

The warlock uses Demonic Sacrifice to sacrifice his pet, which gives the warlock a 30 minute buff depending on what pet he sacrificed as follows:

1. Imp: Increases fire damage by 15%
2. Voidwalker: Restores 3% of total health every 4 seconds (180 health restored every 4 seconds for this warlock in question)
3. Succubus: Increases shadow damage by 15%
4. Felhunter: Restores 2% of mana every 4 seconds

This buff lasts 30 minutes or until the warlock summons another demon. So far, no exploit. OK, now comes the exploit part: A priest, shaman, or paladin can resurrect the demon and the warlock doesn't lose the Demonic Sacrifice buff. It's a little tricky, though, because resurrection takes 10 seconds and the demon corpses will despawn after 10 seconds. The resurrecter has to be ready to cast resurrect on the demon within a second (maybe half a second) of the moment the warlock sacrifices his pet. Basically, you have to cast resurrect on the demon while it's still in its death animation. Otherwise, the demon's corpse will despawn before it gets resurrected.

This is a major exploit. Consider when the warlock uses a voidwalker for this, as our guild's warlock often does. He gets the voidwalker sacrifice buff, plus he can use Master Demonologist to reduce all damage by 10% and use Soul Link to share 30% of all damage taken with the voidwalker. The warlock how has over 6k health with -40% damage taken and heals for 180 health every 4 seconds. Basically, the man is practically invulnerable in this setup. (He could even take one of Vendetta's pyroblast hits!).

The other option he sometimes breaks out when he wants to deal more damage is to sacrifice a succubus. This boosts his shadow damage by 15%. Plus, he can use Master Demonologist to increase his and his succubus's damage by 10% and still use Soul Link to share some damage with his succubus.

This isn't an exploit.

If Blizzard intended these buffs to be active as a tradeoff for SACRIFICING the use of a minion, it most certainly is.

What of this "trick" doesn't say exploit to you?

Maybe that he's been using it?

It's actually surprising how many locks actually use this exploit, though thats understandable since both the MD and DS bonuses are great, and combined they are godly. One warlock argued that because the tooltip says "The effect is canceled if any Demon is summoned" rezzing the demon is not an exploit. So really untill i see a blue post saying wether this is an exploit or not I'd say it's one of those creative uses of game mechanics.

Translation: Exploit

I'm not too concerned with it, though. It makes the warlock more powerful than he or she should be, but I haven't seen anything game-breaking involving it. I'm sure Blizzard will get around to fixing this loophole if it becomes a real problem.

I was under the impression that a 10-second corpse timer on the pets was their method of preventing this, and that players being able to start up that rez during the death animation would be an obvious move against the intention of the spell.

Affliction > Demonology for leveling.

Just a tip.

This is an extremely well-known "exploit". It's been around for fricken ever and is frequently discussed on the warlock forums. It'd be a simple thing to completely prevent it, and as it stands, I've never seen it called an exploit by anyone who's opinion anyone cares about. If that changes, sure, I'll embrace it's new ranking as exploit.

It's an absolute pain in the ass to do, and worthless in Battlegrounds (which is the only place Blizzard actually cares about PvP balance).

Is it extremely powerful? Yes. Yes it is. But it's also impossible for the solo warlock to do, and you do make great tradeoffs for the ability to do it. If you're just discovering how completely kickass the warlock talent trees are, welcome, have a nice stay, roll one up, if you like.

Well what sucks about it that this exploit makes Demonology better than affliction for endgame PvE, so it limits our choices a bit because it's too good, not that I'm complaining.



Goblin jumper cables. And the tradeoffs aren't that big really, since these buffs are so flexible.

I guess I'm too much of a purist. When I see something that's obviously not working as intended, I don't care to exploit it like that. A good example is the Bijou turnin at Yojambe Island. It was broken for a couple weeks where it was possible to do the turnin without actually losing the Bijou. Blizzard hadn't announced anything about this exploit, and by the "well, they haven't said anything!" reasoning I could have called it a neat trick to get a lot of Zandalar reputation. Score!

But they didn't say a single thing until they had posted Infernals at the altar on all realms to prevent ANY turnins, then shortly after performed a hotfix to the realms. There was a good chunk of time where I could have easily used the "Blizzard hasn't said it's wrong!" copout.

Just because Blizzard hasn't gotten around to fixing something doesn't mean it's "right" to exploit that fact. I was under the impression that was a general consensus.

Another fun semi-related Warlock trick: if you respec out of MD, the buff does not disappear.

So theoretically, you could sac->rez a Succubus for +25% shadow damage, then respec to a Shadow Mastery build for an extra 10%.

Spirit Bond for the hunter does the same thing, until the pet has to be resummoned, so as long as you don't have to fly anywhere you can use that to what little advantage the craptacular spirit bond now gives.

I imagine the MD buff goes away after a logout as well.

It goes away when you fly somewhere. I inadvertently verified this when I re-specced my warlock.

So if you want to respec in UC and run to Blackrock mountain or respec in Thunder Bluff and run to Silithus, then yes, you could potentially exploit this. Something tells me this will be very low on the priority list.

Minor. Extremely Minor. Very spot-use, very temporary power that doesn't upset any balances of power.

Pets die, Shards are eaten, preperation time required, and a dozen powerful warlocks aren't going to win the MC battles for you alone. Still need everyone else for raid encounters. Also, been a while since I've seen big blue tank a MC giant.

How is this minor? It looks like at least a 10% buff to your power. If I had to pay 1g25s everytime my raid lost an encounter by that margen.... Oh wait I do. The fact that it is a little bit of a PITA doesn't mean much, if its much of a problem, only pop it on tough encounters. Many raids do stuff like turn in Ony heads before Rag for a smaller edge.

Because warlocks can already cap out their damage capabilities in PvE without needing to do this. Aggro is the limiting factor, not DPS.

Thusly, imp + MD > DS succubus + MD and rezzed pet.

Not to mention the fact that succubi vaporize in AEs.

This is a neat trick for showing off big numbers. It's not a functional increase in power.

I can think of important places where this is not the case, most obvious being Ragnaros.

You're just wrong.

O'Rly!!??

What exactly does Rag do when a caster pulls aggro? I have never seen his firey behind budge an inch.

In our guild we have a PvP mage who has no problem "accidentaly" pulling aggro. He dies 2-3 times a raid to the Giants, and thats without trinkets or flasks. As soon as the Rag fight starts, he goes all out - a similar setup to the 1 shot discussion, except without the BWL loot. And.... Rag eats frosty death. No negative reprecussions for our mage, who is at or near the top of the damage meter.

If this was intended behaviour it would not require a low latency connection to make it work. I checked it out last night and my priest (an Aussie like myself) was never able to start the cast in time.

I learned a trick to make it more likely to be successful. The priest starts off by not targeting anything and clicks on resurrection. This highlights the spell so that the next thing that gets clicked on gets resurrected. Then the warlock counts down 3, 2, 1... start spam left-clicking on the demon. When the demon starts dying, a click should go off, and the resurrection should happen in time. Of course, having severe latency will make this harder to do.

Yes, really.

+25% damage < -20% aggro.

As a ranged dps, against Ragnaros? No.

Rinnhert, I have no idea where your guild is in the core, so I'll explain the mechanics of the Rag fight for you.

Rag is completely stationary. He cannot move at all. His main melee attack only has about a standard melee range. He has a random fireball + AOE knockaround that is completely random, aggro has no bearing on it. So long as there is somebody in melee range of him, he will never do anything other then the random fireball and lava surges to ranged people.

Therefore, as soon as the fight begins, ranged DPS goes completly all out, with no consideration of aggro, since you pretty much only have 6 min to burn him down.

In other words, you are just wrong.

Now can you position the sucubus such that she survives more then 30 seconds? I don't know. But 15% of a well geared lock for even 30seconds is a lot of damage. Or use the felhunter to preserve your health and restore your mana.

And that was just the biggest most obvious place I could think of using it. Here are some others:

Sucubus - Razor, for elminiating mages. Maybe vaporizing insects from a rumored swarm encounter in AQ. Hakkar. General Draksaith. Domo. Sulfuron. Gehians. Lucifron.

Voidwalker - Offtank Cho'rush. Warlock mount quest. Panther boss in ZG. Flamepacks. Garr.

Imp - might see a lot of use in neramaxxis if many bosses have high shadow resist. Tiger in ZG.

Everywhere else, yes.

I should have been more complete in my original denial. Ragnaros is not a fight I worry about- it's trivial. It's #$%&ing farm status.

You in BWL, dennis? Just because I don't spam the Crossroads with ego-stroke posts doesn't mean I'm still in MC.

You understand the aggro-centric fights? Forced time limits generated by fixed aggro reduction?

You've got one encounter in the endgame where pure damage matters over aggro management. Everything you listed beyond that, in raid context, besides mage duty on Razorgore, is a fight where Joe Warlock with his sacrificed succubus will net less damage compared to the next warlock over with his MD imp out. He'll have an average DPS much higher, but the total effect will be less damage and he'll have a higher chance to get murdered by a raid boss (and wipe the entire raid by pulling into the caster group). Add Ruin in to the mix, a defining PvP ability, and you've got absolutely huge damage and a random chance to gib yourself with every cast.

Sac'd succubus + rezzed pet is the kind of bull#$%& you do when your shadow priests are allowed to cut loose and DPS. You do it to break up the monotony of downing Ragnaros for the 30th time. You do it to show off. It is not something you do when the imp would benefit you, and your group, more.

Bully for you. Its farm status for us now too. It is not farm status for everybody, it looks like about a third of the 40man raids on our server can't get him. Does that mean that significant exploits that effect it are unimportant? You repeated your original denial, and BOTH times any rational person looking at your post would say that you were discussing Rag.



I do understand aggro centric fights. That's why I made a list of the nonaggrocentric ones. Also on the list are fights with minions where the MT gets a big aggro lead while the raid deals with minions. The panther boss is going to get a lot harder once green whelp armor is nerfed, DS/MD voidwalker with soul link might be just as overpowered. Also the future content of AQ and Nerimaxxas.... I don't know exactly what will be there, but I bet there are places this trick could come in very handy.



So now we are only talking about 0/30/21 locks? There's a lot of other builds out there.

Sigh... aren't paladins supposed to be good and pure? What's with the personal attacks and foul language? Maybe you really should have stuck with the UD warrior.

Hey, now. Undead are the good guys. We're just misunderstood. We want everyone to experience the benefits of being undead. Is that so wrong?

There's no graceful exit from this, so I'll just get to the point and leave.

You're right. On this one fight, it'd be a boon.

You're wrong to think it'd be more helpful on any fight with a traditional tanking arrangement where the warlock himself cannot take the hits. You're arguing just to argue. You're ignoring context to maliciously rebut my statements. This



and this



are perfect examples. What the hell am I supposed to respond with?

Excuse me, you're riding this bull#$%& train alone.

Have I done my share of this crap? Yes. But I'm trying to better myself. I'm trying very hard (and here come the snide remarks in three... two..). No, I didn't handle some points of this thread well, and I doubtlessly will fail again, but I'm trying.



Jerry's right. The undead are completely misunderstood and really have the good of all life in mind. Unfortunately, they still need to die.

From what I've been told, the GMs know about this and haven't done anything to stop it. I'm not going to search the forums looking for it, but I've read some posts quoting this.

Arnath

Hmmm speak for yourself. My baby undead lock wreaks havok and destruction to the full extent of his lvl 37 abilities on all he encounters.

How is he wrong?

I dunno, but there's a Blue post in WoW forums always linked to in the lock forum that says this is a "creative use of game mechanics." Locks say they haved asked GM's about it too, and gotten the same response

This doesn't mean it won't be deemed an 'exploit' later on of course and maybe patched.

Another (less powerful) "creative use": If you happen to be fighting demons, you can have an enslaved demon and the demonic-sacrifice buff at the same time as well. In Dire Maul or some other places, you can have an elite demon pet alongside the DS buff for five minutes minimum.

Works great for farming satyrs too.

Not an exploit according to Tseric




Tseric answers questions

Er, that's Tseric very weaselly _not_ answering the question. Ironic given the text you used for the link ;-)

My interpretation is that they have decided it's not worth the headache of trying to warn/ban/suspend people over it, but when they get around to it those corpses will start dissappearing at 9.5 seconds.

Tseric's answer is dumb anyway, 50% chance on the XL cables is not "small". I love those things on my hunter.

At which point people will find a troll priest (there are a few of us); we can res in somewhere between 7 and 8 seconds using berserking from full health, quicker still if we beat ourselves up a bit first. And then if you really want to burn a cooldown and a reagent, there's druids ;-)

Fix the problem properly and just have the buff from the sacrifice removed when a pet is resurrected as well as summoned.

I used to love Jumper Cables. But now the only time I end up wanting to use them is in OOC rezzing for MC/BWL, and that got killed. I'll have to test it out to see if the latest changes make it impossible altogether, or just really hard (Razorgore, be next to the corpse already, trinket already equipped, and hit it ASAP after Vanish).

If I didn't hate all the time I spent getting Engineering up, I'd abandon it so I could get a farming skill again (Currently Elemental Leather / Engineering).

OMG overpowered troll priest racials!



Yup, buff should go away when the pets gets ressed.

I have played Blizzard games since warcraft II......
They LOVE to create "creative use of game mechanics."
All their games have "creative use of game mechanics."
It is one of the things that make their games fun.
Can you think of one of their titles without "creative use of game mechanics." ?

So yup maybe buff should stay if pet gets Ressed......
lol
And you can be sure that if it becomes Grossly overpowered Blizzard will fix it.
But you can be sure blizzard leaves tricks to be plain overpowered.
Think witchwild bow in LOD, a little unique bow commonly found waiting to tricked into overpower...lol

Just heard about a similar exploit but haven't had a chance to try it out: pets with a Pally's Blessing of Salvation won't die from being sacrificed, but you still get the buff.

Sure that's Salvation and not Sanctuary?

Or Sacrifice (shares the damage). I could see bugs with with both Sanctuary and Sacrifice. Salvation though I do agree would be a very very odd bug.

Nope. I'm not DS specced at the moment so I can't try it out, but I'm tempted to do so before the next raid just to see what all the fuss is about.

I'm DS specced. I haven't tried Sanctuary, but Blessing of Sacrifice works - the pet survives with a few hitpoints. I suspect BoProtection and BoSanctuary also work.

Which is an reagent free method that isn't lag senstitive. Still feels like an exploit to me.

I believe it is not an exploit because a CM said it was not an exploit. This is old news, the exploit was discovered probably... 5 months ago.

Edit: Realized snappy tone. I was in a hurry. Sorry, I love you!