World of Warcraft's phantom damage bug was fixed with the release of Patch 12.1.5, according to Wowhead, which had covered the problem about a week earlier.
The bug was a display fault rather than a combat one. When a player took damage from a melee swing, the interface briefly showed the health bar dropping by double the real amount before rebounding to the correct value. A 100,000-point hit read as a 200,000-point loss for a split second, then corrected itself.
Wowhead says the behaviour had been present since The War Within, with some reports placing it as far back as Dragonflight. Its practical cost was panic: a health bar that appeared to crater left players reacting to a near-death state they were not actually in. In Delves, Wowhead notes, many players who saw the dip assumed the companion Valeera had landed a well-timed heal.
Repeating its earlier test on the live patch, Wowhead reports no extra damage and no rebound on either the health bar or raid frames, calling the result crisp compared with what players had grown used to.
The fix follows an earlier one for the fake damage shown by Murder Row. Wowhead says it hopes the pair closes out the bugs that were reporting incorrect health information to players.
