Seems that during this week’s maintenance and tweaks, the “just go farm Ulduar derp derp” strategy (I use the term very loosely) has been nerfed and no longer works. You can no longer use vehicles in Ulduar, on bombing runs, or to trample Icecrown skeletons to get your charms.

In addition, healers are reporting that they are passively receiving Lovely Charms in instances, without doing any damage to the mobs. They are receiving charms for contributing to the group, but don’t have to deal any killing blows in order to be eligible. This is how it should have worked from the very start. No more Holy Nova spam for Mephitik.


Farming Ulduar wasn’t cheating – but it wasn’t right, either.

So now the healers are happy, and the Ulduar farmers are crying. Awww. It’s tragic when Big Bad Blizzard steps in and stops people from trivialising achievements. I shed a single glistening tear for all those people who can no longer “farm” charms in bulk.

(Not really.)

Cassandri over at HoTs and DoTs wrote a great article on exploits and how we define them. I don’t think the Ulduar trash farming was an exploit as such; I’m sure Blizzard would have jumped in much faster if it had been. But I do believe it went against the spirit of the event – mass farming charm bracelets in bulk and then listing them for 20g a pop on the AH.

Those bracelets are supposed to be special, people – not mass produced in some cheap dwarf sweatshop! Where’s the love?

I don’t think the developers intended people to jump into vehicles and blow up hundreds of mobs a minute to procure bagfuls of bracelets. The fact that it has been nerfed confirms this thinking – it wasn’t working as intended.

As an aside – what made me laugh was all the people whose counter to the healers was “onoez, you have to work for your achievements.. QQ”. Yet they were trivialising the achievement themselves by farming 50 bracelets in a siege engine, instead of working for them in the way it was intended….

It wasn’t against the rules. But it was a bit dirty. Call me a carebear or a goodie-two-shoes – I don’t like doing things that go against the spirit of the content, and yes, I do look down my nose at people who think it’s ok to do it. I believe that most reasonable people have an inkling that maybe something isn’t really the way it’s meant to be done. I just think that as grown-ups we can tell the difference between intended and unintended, and then make the choice not to take advantage of these temporary oversights by Blizzard. They didn’t intend us to be able to farm 500 charms in half an hour and then flood the auction house with them.

Was it cheating? No, of course not – the mechanic was there – kill high level mobs, get charms. People thought, “where can I kill as many mobs as I can, in as little time as possible?” It was pretty smart, in terms of efficiency.

It definitely wasn’t in the spirit of the event, though – and I wouldn’t participate in that, because it falls inside the boundaries of what I personally consider cheating.


Smug Keeva is oh so smug.

Obviously, some people aren’t too happy that Blizzard took away their ezmode bulk farming strat. Someone wrote in the WoW forum thread:

yeah you could have gotten 100x more charms from the ways you were told but atleast you ruined it for everyone else


Oh boy, I just couldn’t help myself… I HAD to respond:

In the spirit of the past 20 pages, there really is only one response to this.


Don’t worry, you can still get charms by grinding mobs or doing your dailies!

*smiles*


Oh man, if only they could have seen the enormous shit-eating grin that I had on my face when I posted it.


PS: The healers didn’t get the Ulduar strategy nerfed, and it’s pretty dumb to pin that on us. We were talking about a completely different issue – most didn’t even care that you could go into Ulduar. I don’t think I ever saw anyone asking for the Ulduar method to be shut down. We just wanted the imbalance in dungeons to be fixed. The healers said “we can’t get them in heroics, please change this” and the response was “go to Ulduar”. We weren’t the ones who brought it to Blizzard’s attention :P

Anyway – hooray for Blizzard listening to us and doing the right thing!



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