The new NPC dungeons in World of Warcraft have led to major errors – and particularly where no NPC companions are supposed to come along.
The Patch 10.2.5 Seeds of Renewal is only a few days old, but there has already been a major incident. The NPC dungeons, which allow players to visit instances without teammates, have caused a significant bug. This affected players who are exactly at the other end of the difficulty spectrum – namely in “Mythic+”. Blizzard had to quickly push out a hotfix.
What was the problem? This week, there is the affix “Afflicted” in “Mythic+”. This causes ghosts to appear in the dungeon at regular intervals, who need help. But since Patch 10.2.5, something strange happened with the ghosts: They suddenly became targets of various abilities and could be aimed at by boss attacks.
The blame lies with the implementation of the follower dungeons.
Why are follower dungeons to blame? The fact that enemy abilities now also target NPCs seems to be the fault of the new follower dungeons. Here, players can visit dungeons at normal difficulty with NPCs by their side. However, to ensure that the dungeons are presented as intended, the NPCs must also be affected by enemy and allied abilities – since this patch, they are treated like players.
The consequence is that NPCs in dungeons can now also be affected by boss abilities.
In most cases, this has no impact on “Mythic+”, because there are only a few allied NPCs there – and certainly no companion followers.
This changes, however, in weeks when the “Afflicted” affix is active. Here, ghosts appear who ask players for help and want to be freed from a curse, a magical effect, or a disease. These ghosts count as allies, after all, they have to be dispelled.
This, in turn, led to the NPC changes for the follower dungeons resulting in the Afflicted ghosts also being treated like players. This means that the ghosts can be hit by boss abilities. What may seem like an simplification at first, if these ghosts intercept strong abilities, can also have catastrophic consequences. Often, you need to run to a specific spot with an ability – but the ghosts move very little.
An example: In the fight against Yazma (Atal’Dazar), the ghosts could not only die from the spiders, but they also created souls that floated towards Yazma. Only 4 souls are normally summoned here, which the heroes have to defeat – if the ghosts were active, then it could be up to 6 souls.
This also caused frustration among enhancement callers. Their strong buff effects could also affect the ghosts, so the effect was completely nullified and the actual teammates were left empty-handed.
What did Blizzard do? After the bug was noticed, it took only a few hours for Blizzard to push out a hotfix. As of this morning (19.01.2024), this fix is already live. The ghosts are no longer “treated like players” and thus can no longer be affected by boss abilities or the buff effects of the caller.
No one probably thought beforehand that the follower dungeons would be responsible for a bug in “Mythic+”.
