One of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic's most powerful weapons has been more powerful than intended for 14 years, all thanks to a simple typo that went unnoticed by both Blizzard and players back when the weapon first debuted back in 2009.
The weapon in question is the Legendary healing mace Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings, which can be acquired by gathering fragments from the expansion's iconic Ulduar raid and completing subsequent quests. What makes the weapon so powerful is its special effect tailor made for healers. When using Val'anyr, heals have a chance to activate a shield on their respective targets that can absorb up to 15% of the amount healed. Ulduar released back in 2009 originally, and arrived in Wrath of the Lich King Classic on January 19, 2023.
TODAY was HILARIOUS this is literally the funniest thing to have in QA. A war room going down where we're trying to hackerman out solutions only for the solution to be… a single fucking 0 tacked to a script causing things to break. S+ tier problem lmao<a href=«https://twitter.com/hashtag/ClassicWoW?src=hash&ref_src=» https:>#ClassicWoW
pic.twitter.com/6BavsHTe9k
That makes it an incredibly powerful weapon for tank healing, but as Blizzard notes in a March 27 hotfix, the weapon's special effect was actually stronger than originally intended due to a nearly 15-year-old typo. The shield granted by the weapon was always intended to cap out at 20,000, but an extra «0» in the weapon's spell script actually made that amount 200,000. That's a big difference.
«The absorb shield from Val'anyr was always intended to have a cap of 20,000 health, but there was a typo in the spell script in original Wrath of the Lich King version 3.3.5.,» Blizzard's hotfix
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