World of Warcraft Classic players report that the game’s latest patch has left a cluster of enemies spawning beneath the terrain at a spot in the Stonetalon Mountains, where they can kill characters passing overhead. PC Gamer reported the problem, which players raised on Reddit and which was picked up by the database site WoWHead.
The hazard matters most on hardcore realms, where a single death ends a character permanently. PC Gamer cited a video from a player whose undead warrior strayed close to the hidden group while levelling and escaped with a sliver of health remaining.
The enemies involved are not local to the zone. Nameplates visible in the player footage include Drywallow Daggermaws and Muckshell Clackers, which spawn in the higher-level Dustwallow Marsh rather than Stonetalon, indicating something beyond models clipping through the terrain.
Why Stonetalon
PC Gamer traced the location to how the game handled continents in its early years. Each server ran a single shared instance per landmass, which is why a character could cross Kalimdor without hitting a loading screen, and the server tracked every NPC on one continent-wide coordinate plane. When it lost track of an entity, it placed that entity at the plane’s point of origin, (0, 0, 0).
Before later expansions reshaped the continent, Kalimdor’s origin sat just below the ground in the Stonetalon Mountains. That behaviour is also the explanation for a long-standing player memory: characters disconnected mid-flight on a Kalimdor zeppelin route would reappear near a Stonetalon graveyard, because the server placed a character it could no longer position at a safe spot near the origin instead of guessing.
On current Classic servers, PC Gamer said the outbreak is likely the result of the new patch introducing positioning or networking faults that cause servers to lose track of mobs elsewhere on Kalimdor and fall back to the same origin point, stacking them into a single underground group. Blizzard has not published an explanation for the spawns.
A hotfix and server reset would be expected to clear the pile-up. Until one arrives, PC Gamer advised players moving through Boulderslide Ravine to keep a defensive cooldown available.
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