Actually, it was foreseeable and only a matter of time. But a few days ago it has now happened and Blizzard has withdrawn a YouTuber a large part of his content base. The “Gently Pressed Toad” can now no longer be used for exploits and bugs. The developers have pulled the ripcord.

What was that toad? The “Gently Pressed Toad” is an item that Alliance players could buy in the Warlords of Draenor expansion in Shadowmoon Valley after completing some quests.

The Toad could be purchased an infinite number of times and thrown at a destination. It then counted as an attackable enemy – but not anymore. The toad is now “friendly” and thus can no longer be harmed.

The peculiarity with the Toad was that it had a very low level. This ensured that abilities that would do perhaps only 1,000 points of damage at level 60 would hit the Toad for several hundred thousand points of damage. Rextroy could then use that to create absurd scaling with a variety of abilities.

For example, there are abilities that affect all enemies in the vicinity for a fraction of the damage taken by the main target – regardless of the level of the enemies in the vicinity. This has already made for insane multi-kills in PvP.

Why did Blizzard change it? Even though Blizzard hasn’t mentioned the change anywhere, it seems obvious that they’ve simply had enough of all the exploits and strange interactions that keep being found. Far too often the Toads are the lynchpin of such exploits, so it simply seems easier to restrict the functionality of the Toads instead of having to tweak all the other abilities every time.

Is Rextroy still making videos? Yes, definitely – he’s since found a few new methods to reach absurd damage numbers and even take down current raid bosses virtually single-handedly. However, he’ll have to get a lot more creative now, because one of his most reliable sources of help so far, the aforementioned Toads, no longer works.

However, we can probably assume that Rextroy will delight us a few more times with particularly absurd methods to run enemy players or raid bosses into the ground. When the time comes again, you will of course read about it on MeinMMO.

What do you think of this “surrender” on Blizzard’s part? Sad? Or the only right decision?

Elsewhere, Blizzard has also capitulated – and completely discontinued a “WoW Mobile”.