The Couple Hours when Champs Ruled Them All

Soooo was anyone else around in early June of last year (2020)? Did you happen to remember the almost legendarily ridiculous Champion bug that had INSANE exploit potential?

Honestly I do not remember the context around how I heard of it, but I did spot a forum thread demanding, “Take the game down immediately” and clicked on it for shits and giggles.

It was not what I was expecting.

In case Tumblr decides to be stupid and squish the crap out of that screenshot, the jist is the following. On June 3rd, an update which included a tweak to Champions caused the skill “Champion’s Challenge” to incorrectly interact with an LI Legacy, specifically “Fight On Critical Rating”. Champion’s Challenge is meant to reduce the target’s outgoing damage along with briefly force-taunting. Instead, it was increasing the target’s outgoing damage, based on the legacy’s rating x 100, then – 30.. which maxed out at +859970% increased damage. G O D D A M N.

But since it buffed the target, you might ask, how could it be exploited? Well.. one, damage reflecting skills. Two, sparring another player, who could then take that insane buff and go ape-shit with it. Normally the effect only lasts for 5 seconds, but there were reports that the “debuff” was also bugged enough to be permanent until death/defeat, and that someone could very easily take this into an instance and one-shot everything, “including T5 Remmorchant” which was the latest raid at that point.

I have a champion, but he is parked at level 50 with an XP disabler for SoA instance funtimes, which means no LIs for him, which means I could not replicate this. Buuut thankfully someone provided a screenshot.

*snort* ohmygod. Meanwhile here’s my Burn Hot with its measly +74.8% damage.

I am really not sure how this got past beta testing (if there even was any…) but to their credit, this was temporarily disabled / hotfixed within a few hours of the forum post. I am not sure if anyone actually managed to use this to any nefarious intent, but personally I found this to be hilarious.

FEAR THE ALMIGHTY CHAMPIONS. Here’s a link to the thread my screenshots are from if you are curious: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?680590-Take-the-game-down-immediately