There are few things more frustrating in a World of Warcraft dungeon than, midway through a complicated boss fight, suddenly disconnecting, or DCing, as it’s known. When this happens to me, I am immediately overcome with guilt. I no longer contribute! I’m a huge pile of dead weight! Not only am I not dealing damage at a critical moment, but I will certainly just die and my friends will have to waste time reviving me or healing me with mana. We will be slower. Our stopwatch (in a mythical key) will lose precious seconds. I’m a failure as a human being and should never do a dungeon again.
Oh, is it just me? Good. Even so. It sucks for DC!
But maybe it sucks less now. Because players think they have discovered something strange after the latest WoW patch. Instead of characters freezing or disappearing when their players log out in dungeons, those characters appear to continue fighting alone, without player intervention.
This has been reported by a handful of players this week following Tuesday’s big Curse of Ula’tek 12.1 update. The original poster states that they were in a dungeon with an Evoker that disconnected about 39 seconds after a boss pull. In the linked video, you can hear the person claim to have performed DC, but you can see the Evoker continue fighting and casting spells. The poster claims this happened twice, in two different dungeons. And several people in the responses corroborate this, stating that it happened to them or their friends too:
“Okay, I thought I was confused,” reads the top comment on Reddit. “This happened to my brother today while he was on his warrior. We were on disk and his client crashed. He stayed there for almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds on his D/c. His warrior charges at the boss and starts hitting him. My brother was actively narrating his new login. According to him, his game crashed, froze and he pressed Alt+f4d and logged back in.
“Very strange”
Other answers offer suggestions as to what might be happening here. One explanation is that the person is actually bouncing and this is all an elaborate hoax, but it seems like a strange and unlikely thing to lie about for basically no reason. It’s also possible that the game’s relatively new (but still predating this latest patch) one-button rotation feature could be queuing up optimal actions in advance for some reason and continuing to finish everything that was queued before the disconnect. I’m no expert, but I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced by the explanation, given the way the Evoker in this dungeon (look for the player character with dragon wings) continues to move after disconnection. But I don’t play Evoker, so I may be missing something about how they work.
A better suggestion, however, is the idea of players who go offline temporarily becoming “followers,” an NPC mechanic that typically allows players to complete easy dungeons with fellow NPCs. The idea is that a sudden disconnect would allow the NPC AI to briefly take control and have the character do a roughly optimal rotation and try to avoid the mechanic for a while, giving the player a window to come back and take control. If that were the case, it would essentially establish a buffer for people who accidentally disconnect, helping them avoid falling into situations where they could take damage, fail mechanically, die, or cause problems for their party through no fault of their own.
However, such a feature would probably be ripe for exploitation. And if it was intentional, it seems strange that Blizzard would add such a big feature without telling anyone, making it more likely that this is some kind of bug that will be fixed. We’ve reached out to Blizzard for comment on whether or not this is real and, if so, how it works.
