---
title: 'WoW Players Are Breaking Midnight''s Maths'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=tKC4pkWF6OY'
video_id: 'tKC4pkWF6OY'
date: 2026-08-19
duration_sec: 752
channel: 'Bellular Warcraft'
---

# WoW Players Are Breaking Midnight's Maths

> Source: [WoW Players Are Breaking Midnight's Maths](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tKC4pkWF6OY)

## Summary

This video discusses three major issues in World of Warcraft: a Guardian Druid exploit that allowed five players to time a +20 Mythic+ dungeon using a single ability, the rising cost of repairs due to gear inflation, and the upcoming Discord integration hinted at in the game's PTR files.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to WoW News** [00:02] — The video opens with a promise of stories about game updates gone wrong, including a group of Chinese players exploiting a Guardian Druid buff.
- **Guardian Druid Thrash Buff** [00:46] — Blizzard buffed Thrash's damage and bleed, but forgot how the spec works, leading to an unintended synergy with hero talents that turned it into arcane damage, ignoring armor and benefiting from arcane talents.
- **Five Guardian Druids Time +20** [01:13] — A group of five Guardian Druids timed a +20 Windrunner's Spire with about a minute to spare, using Thrash almost exclusively, as shown in logs.
- **Self-Sufficiency Through Thrash** [02:39] — The spec became self-sufficient due to Ursoc's Fury and Elune's Favor, which healed them based on their arcane damage, making them nearly unkillable without a healer.
- **Nerf After Exploit** [03:20] — Blizzard nerfed Thrash damage and Elune's Favor healing the next day, and plans to change Apex talents in the future.
- **Rising Repair Costs** [04:01] — Repair costs are increasing due to gear inflation, with costs based on durability points, item quality, and level, not gear type since AQ patch.
- **Cost per Wipe Breakdown** [05:55] — With full myth gear, a wipe costs about 220 gold for most specs, 249 gold for demon hunters with warglaives, and 247 gold for shield users. Champion gear costs 87 gold.
- **Real-World Comparison** [06:38] — Using WoW token prices, 220 gold equals about 2 cents, while Charmin Ultra Soft costs 49 cents per 100 sheets, making wiping in real life more expensive if using more than 3 sheets.
- **PTR Durability Changes** [07:45] — On the PTR, weapons and shields no longer take durability damage from combat, only from dying, reducing repair costs significantly.
- **Discord Integration Hint** [08:42] — A string referencing Discord settings was found on the Mists of Pandaria PTR, suggesting guild-centric Discord integration is coming, possibly in patch 12.1.
- **Potential Debut at Summer Games Fest** [11:38] — The Discord integration might debut at Xbox's Summer Games Fest on June 8th, or be released on a random Tuesday.

### Conclusion

Blizzard faces a Goldilocks problem: sometimes moving too fast, sometimes too slow. The video highlights the need for better balance testing and hints at upcoming changes to repair costs and social features.

## Transcript

going to be a strange edition of the WoW news. Sometimes the game updates a bit wrong. Sometimes it doesn't get updated quickly enough. Chaos starts to bubble up, and all we can do is wait for something to change. And at other times,
there are problems going back 10 or 15 years that we really need to address >> I've got stories of every one of those kinds today. We'll start with five Chinese bears walking into a dungeon, and then, well,
we've compared the difference in cost between wiping in World of Warcraft and between wiping in World of Warcraft and wiping in real life. were nerfed. Now, they'd picked up a reputation for crazy single-target burst
in AoE. So, Blizzard had a simple enough solution. They nerfed the single-target buttons, and in exchange, all of their main sources of AoE got fairly heavy buffs. For one example, we can take Thrash. Its direct damage was tripled,
and the bleed from it was doubled. Except, when Blizzard did that, they kind of forgot how Guardian Druid actually works. But who didn't forget is this group of Chinese players. And that's because using Thrash's buffs,
they pulled off a Mythic Plus score heist, where five Guardian Druids timed a plus 20 Wind Runner's Spire. It wasn't by a lot, mind you. They had about a minute to spare, but they did it all the same. Now, naturally, you'd expect
builds, niche items, or were just playing out of their minds good. Well, we have the logs, so we can see exactly how they played the game. As you can see, they they they pressed Thrash. Sometimes they pressed other
buttons, but mostly they were pressing Thrash. I mean, seriously, every log just is tons of Thrash, the odd Moonfire, and a few or no casts of their other abilities like Mangle, Raze, or Swipe. Now, of course, they still had to
defensives, interrupt, and CC like crazy, and even doing that, they still earn their clear. They did well. But, we haven't got to the main reason why. was Blizzard being a little bit silly. It's Thrash's a few interactions in a
certain hero talent tree, you see. Like this one that buffs it even further and turns it into arcane damage. Now, that lets it ignore armor and benefit from lets it ignore armor and benefit from all of these arcane empowering talents.
modifiers that are all through the chain, you see that even a small change can completely snowball things. Never mind tripling its base damage. That's may be wondering, "How the hell could they survive a plus 20 without a
healer?" Well, the logs tell the story here, and once again, it's Thrash. The with Ursoc's Fury, which wasn't very strong before the base damage buffs. But, then there's another little thing, Elune's Favor. It heals bears off their
Elune's Favor. It heals bears off their own arcane damage. So, basically, with one heavy buff, Guardian Druids became pretty much self-sufficient one-button using just machines. And it's all because Blizzard seemingly forgot how
that's mostly because of things we've already talked about, but there is already talked about, but there is another thing, Apex talents. You don't need to take them, and skipping the Apex talent let bears grab just every [music]
Thrash talent they could to make this work. Of course, the spec got nerfed day. Blizzard took a chunk of the Thrash damage off, and they reduced the healing from Elune's Favor. So, now they're back in line, and Blizzard have got plans to
change the Apex talents in the future. Quite the fun story. Blizzard were before the dungeon was completed, so don't go blaming these players for exposing the thing that's broken, but maybe it'll teach their balance team to
either double-check their work or maybe get some better automated testing. Now, if you aren't turned into an invisible god by the accidental consequences of a single buff, then you may find yourself wiping. And that's getting really
Another thing Blizzard should probably check before the entire player base goes broke is repair costs. And no, this isn't the community just scraping the about and be angry about. It's actually becoming a real problem. And I say
becoming because it's actually getting drastically worse over time. And like with the druid rebalancing, the culprit is Blizzard's maths. So, we followed up on Wowhead's initial investigation and yeah, so far we can confirm it's not
really looking great. So, right now it's a few hundred gold per death purely based on the repair costs. And it's all because of gear inflation. You see, as you get hero and myth gear, the wipe tax shoots up drastically. You see, contrary
to popular belief, repair cost hasn't been based on gear type since the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj patch, which was over 20 years ago. It's always been about durability. Each point of durability costs a set amount to fix, and that's
driven purely by item quality and level. So, we compared maxed-out hero gear and leather and plate, and we found that both of them were 1.6 gold per point of even the item doesn't matter. A hero six out of six belt was still 1.6 gold per
point. But the real meat comes from quality, where a myth two out of six level as the hero gear that I just talked about, well that's 2.7 gold per point. That is way higher. Now, item level's got an impact as well, but it's
fairly tiny. And weapon slots are a bit different as well, where they cost only 80% of what other slots do per durability point for well, some reason, shortly. Now, weapons have also got different max durabilities, meaning that
different specs do actually pay more per death. The worst are actually warglaives for some reason and dagger and fist users come off the best. But what we did is we put together a spreadsheet and after jumping off the Skyreach entrance
far too many times, we worked out what everything costs. So here goes. 65% of specs use a single two-handed weapon and with full myth gear would pay about 220 gold per wipe. And here we were thinking that potions and augment runes were the
only things we needed to worry about. Now with full champion gear, it was nowhere near as bad. It was only 87 gold. Now demon hunters on warglaives gold. Now demon hunters on warglaives actually do pay up more. It's up to 249
gold and shield using classes like paladin, warrior, and shaman, well you come in second with up to 247 gold. Now here's where it's really fun. At 220 gold, that actually works out to almost 2 cents per wipe. Seriously, using WoW
token prices in the US, 1 cent converts to 129 gold. And speaking of wiping, apparently the USA's leading toilet paper brand is Charmin Ultra Soft. Now that costs about
Charmin Ultra Soft. Now that costs about 49 cents for 100 sheets. So, I can now confirm this breaking news right now. Now that is that if you use more than three sheets of toilet paper to wipe, then wiping in real life is actually
more expensive than wiping in World of Warcraft and once again, it's a huge win for team Japan and the bidet. Anyway, it also does mean that one sheet of quality toilet paper is worth about 64 gold. I know this sounds like a joke, but it
really isn't. So, I've got an idea for you Blizz. You've been making brand deals with Pringles and all sorts of snacks and drinks. How about you hit the Charmin for your next one. And here's the tagline. Wiping might break your
gear, but with Charmin Ultra Soft, not your rear. In all seriousness though, we're getting heroic world tier, harder ritual sites, and a new mythic flex raid in the next patch. So, if you want players to engage
probably going to die a lot. So, maybe hold back in making failure so costly. you in this one. It's not a full fix to the problem. It's really like categorically a different one, but it is kind of nice. Wowhead's testing is
showing that on the 1207 PTR, weapons and shields have stopped taking durability damage from combat entirely. The only thing that gives them damage is dying. So, that's basically the protection warrior block tax being dead.
And in Wowhead's 2-minute test of just auto attacking, a 40 gold repair bill on auto attacking, a 40 gold repair bill on live came to just three gold on PTR. there, of course, don't really change, but the constant drip from just being in
gone. So, that's Blizzard doing the right thing in the fairness issue there, at least. Now, let's move on to something that they're quietly building. Do you remember the social media updates that Holly promised? Well, we finally
caught a sniff of them. It's just a tiny one, though, but it's this. It's this single line on Mists of Pandaria PTR that is specifically Discord. And it's a string referencing Discord settings. It seemingly is something controlled by a
like we're getting guild-centric Discord integration coming, which honestly is pretty cool. Now, we don't know what there's certainly no shortage of inspiration for Blizzard. Right now, we
use Wowhead's calendar for raid sign-ups. Maybe a better in-game version synchronizing roles would be really cool, as well. You know, dropping new right channels immediately. Of course, Discord did a lot of work last year with
their SDK. I've got to imagine that way more is possible now than was before. gung-ho and just spam, say, player achievements into a Discord channel. maybe help keep people invested in each other's gameplay. So, I think this
matter in the downtime between [music] raids. At the end of the day, Discord is now kind of the third space on World of Warcraft is just the gameplay that's engaged in. That's a huge difference from WoW in the past. Making those
things closer together just makes complete obvious sense. And they'd be fools not to do something with this in player [music] housing. Now, as much as maybe you could want to laugh at say their very silly Twitter integration for
patch 6.1, I think Blizzard are taking this one quite seriously. Holly's been pushing WoW as a third space. Of course, that's really what WoW was back in the day, but kind of is way less today because a lot of our social dynamics
have changed on the internet. And I think half hijacking Discord to keep merge those two spaces together is a fairly efficient smart thing to do. We relationship with Xbox as of late where Game Pass comes with Discord Nitro,
which could be a bit of a slam dunk for Blizzard if it works well. So, I guess here's the virtuous cycle they would want. Your guild uses Discord more, so you pick up Nitro to, you know, have emotes or a soundboard. And in the
process of getting Nitro, you got access to Diablo 4. I mean, you can see the vision, right? Just complete social and gaming domination for Blizzard and Xbox. Naturally, the next step is the Lovense integration. And if you don't know what
done with the news. We don't know exactly what the Discord integration is going to look like, but we do know roughly when. If it's on the next PTR, then that's pretty much the most recent build of WoW's like back-end tech. It's
nowhere to be found on patch 12.0.7's PTR, but that actually makes sense It's just a few weeks out. So, if I was placing bets, I'd say it'll be the patch after, 12.1. And if the usual schedule holds, then we'll get 12.0.7 on the 16th
of June, and then 12.1 PTR shortly after that. And of course, 12.1, coincidentally, is when the road map promised new housing, social, and UI integration is the type of thing Blizzard probably would say is important
enough to debut at the likes of Xbox's Summer Games Fest, which is going to be in the 8th of June. Or maybe they'll just drop it on a random Tuesday, who today's stories, it's that Blizzard have a little bit of a Goldilocks problem.
Somehow they move too fast, but also too slow. That's what it's like being a huge finding balance in the middle. And speaking of balance, Season 1 is balanced very, very differently in terms of gear acquisition, to the point where
in many ways it feels unrecognizable, and when 12.07 comes out, that'll be even more so. If you want to find out how and why, watch this video next.