What’s up with the training dummies?
I visit training dummies a lot, usually to try out new rotations or check gear upgrades to make sure they’re doing what I expect. But recently, the training dummies have been more… realistic. Almost lifelike, in fact.
For example, Cynwulf discovered he could skill up his newly acquired Polearm on a dummy.
I’m pretty sure that dummies didn’t allow you to skill weapons before.
If that wasn’t weird enough, training dummies now apparently have souls, and can be farmed for Soul Shards:
I’m a little hesitant to post this. If this new behavior is intentional by Blizzard, it’s awesome. I love it. Farming shards is now a trivial matter, just like it should have been all along.
But if this is a bug I expect it to be hotfixed pretty darn quick. Which is a pity, because the improved training dummies are really cool.
Cynwise's Warcraft Manual 
Cool! Looks like they also have an unlimited supply of souls too!
I’m fairly sure that they’re allowing soul shards to be farmed from target dummies in anticipation of the shard system change in Cataclysm. Might as well enjoy it while you can – soon enough, your shards will be like the DK rune system. 🙂
According to @schwarzwald, it’s a side effect of the Drain Soul minor glyph. I have no idea if that’s right, but the new behavior is very cool!
I’m pretty sure the weapon skillups are new, though.
And as far as the new and improved shard system — I’m looking forward to it. Can’t wait to see how they implement it, it’s has the potential to be amazing!
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Hell, it’ll be nice to have a BAG again.
I had just purchased an Abyssal Bag the week before the changes were announced for some ludicrous sum of gold.
Oh well. All gear suffers from planned obsolescence, even bags.
Knuckle sandwich, here I come?
Great find. 🙂
Exactly! Pity I already maxed out my weapon skills the old-fashioned way. 😦
Oooh. Oooh.
Time to skill up unarmed on my hunter and maces and 1H swords on my death knight! 😀
This would have been so much easier to do than stealthing through Dire Maul to attack the ghost dudes at the back of the King’s room (which keep you in combat & reduce durability, so if you didn’t remove your gear you’d be getting a repair bill).
Ah well. All the much easier for my DK.
I’ve known about the soul shards for a while. @Mandaril mentioned it a while back so it’s been working for some time.
I’ve tried leveling weapons before, within the last 3 months, and I know it didn’t work then. If it works now, then I’ve got some work to do on several characters.
The weapon skill ups seem to good to be true. Perhaps that will be hotfixed? Meanwhile I’m going to try it out 🙂
These were patch changes a while back. At work so can’t look up which one.
So @Psynister and I did some testing on this today, with surprising results.
His mage was unable to level up any weapons on autoattack.
My Death Knight was able to level up both in the Ebon Hold and Ironforge, but only while spamming his attack sequence. White auto-attacks did not work.
I don’t have a different class that can test this out — perhaps someone with a high level rogue or hunter can jump in here — but it looks like using special attacks on the training dummies results in a skillup, while white auto-attacks do not.
More data is needed. 😦
Update: I tried this with my own DK in Stormwind a couple of days ago and got nothing.
So it’s either been fixed so that you can’t do it now, or it’s only specific training dummies that allow it to happen.
I can’t do it anymore either on the Ebon Hold training dummies.
Looks like it’s been hotfixed.
Oh yeah, also tried it with a rogue using special attacks and no beans there either.