Finding Dastardly Duos too hard? Try taking off your shirt. No, really.

On day one of Dastardly Duos going live in patch 11.1.5 — finally — a lot of players were finding that, in addition to the usual methods of maximizing your score against these deep cut bosses, there was another way to make the event even more fun: legendaries. Enterprising folks quickly figured out that the Dastardly Duos system would flatten your item level to 619 — whether that was scaling lower items up or higher items down; however, that included the legendary items in the game that still have their effects active! Got a Death Knight who’s still got a Shadowmourne in their bank, an Evoker still rocking their legendary fist, or a Mage who’s got a Dragonwrath just gathering dust? For one brief, shining moment, you could equip them, zone into Dastardly Duos, and get to experience those orange pixels at full scale power again.

Unfortunately, fun was detected, and Blizzard hotfixed this so that legendary items, specifically, no longer scale in Dastardly Duos. (Back to the dustbin, Shadowmourne.) However, in the process, a new bug was added which might accidentally make your Dastardly Duos experience much, much, much harder — but it’s got a very easy fix you can employ, at least until Blizzard applies another hotfix. Currently, all gear is still scaled upwards or downwards to item level 619 — unless you’re wearing a shirt or tabard, in which case your item level gets averaged to item level 1, which really prevents the vent from being doable. Therefore, if you want to try any Dastardly Duos before this new bug is hotfixed, but you’re still wearing those purely cosmetic slots, the solution is: take off your shirt and tabard before going into Dastardly Duos. (If you’re already zoned in, you need to zone out and re-enter the Dastardly Duos arena for your ilevel to go back to normal.)

Clearly, someone at Blizzard was listening to a little too much of Blink-182’s fourth album, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, and decided to imitate it with their new Dastardly Duos strategy, Take Off Your Shirt and Tabard. However, it’s a little disappointing in a piece of already-delayed and even-further-timegated content to see not only an essentially harmless side effect squashed, but then a brand new and inscrutable bug introduced — a definite misstep in a patch full of missteps, and hopefully one fixed soon.