Um, nerf Warlocks? With all of the talking we've been doing about Wrath of the Lich King lately, we haven't really mentioned the one thing players are supposed to be doing on the beta servers: finding bugs. Fortunately, Sneakthief found a very nice one -- when you combine the Warlock 51 point Affliction talent Everlasting Affliction with the set bonus from the Tier 5 Warlock set, you get an everlasting Corruption spell that goes up in damage 10% every time a Shadow Bolt hits. (He's beating up on a Servant of Allistarj, by the way, which is why the mob isn't dying.)

Extrapolate a few minutes later, and you've got 536 million damage ticking every time Corruption comes around -- which seems to be the cap, so I'm sure a math major can tell us just why that number's special. And all that damage happens to be, as Sneakthief says, enough not just to take down Kil'jaeden with one tick, but all of Sunwell combined. Of course, this is an easy fix (one way to do it would just be to put a cap on how high Corruption damage can go), but this is exactly what the beta is for: finding hilarious bugs and posting them on YouTube whoops, I mean fixing them.

Update: The figure in the video works out to be 2^29. Thanks, math nerds! We love you!


Update2: Man you math guys are smart. 2^29 is apparently three bits less than 2^32 (a usual block of memory usage, I believe), and there's some good speculation in the comments as to what the other three bits are for. Damage type sounds like the best answer to me -- any action you take that does damage outputs a 2^32 bit variable, with the damage limit being the aforementioned 536 million number, and the leftover memory specifying one of eight types, the last one of which is healing. Nice job, brainiacs. We should note: this is all speculation, so don't get all cut up over the fact that Blizzard doesn't use "IEEE floating point standards" or whatever those are. But it's fun to look inside the code behind the curses and see how Blizzard programs this all out.

Tags: 51-point, bug, bugs, everlasting-affliction, talents, tier-5, warlock, wrath-beta, wrath-of-the-lich-king

Filed under: Warlock, Bugs, Blizzard, Expansions, Humor, Classes, Talents, Wrath of the Lich King