As a software programmer I wish that were the case.
I dunno, the bug even happens on pservers so it’s not just a back-end problem. It’s a bug with the client itself. Vanish has been broken since 1.0. 
Amen brother.
It’s not about what harm it would cause - it’s about what side-effects it could bring to the table when it’s not updated for 10 years and someone finds an exploit with it.
Yeah his comment didn’t even make any sense. If it’s a bug that means it’s going to act erratically. If it was part of the game design it would affect everyone equally LOL
Right, so “that could be used as an exploit in ten years” means we shouldn’t give people a way out of what appears to be a bug they simply cannot fix or find a way to get rid of.
Okay… glad you’re not into gamedev, lol.
You could, you know, address any exploits that happen when they happen instead of not implementing a change for fear it could be misused at some later time?
Just a thought…
But that’s ok, I myself and others have listed at least 3-4 other ways we could have ways of dealing with this too.
Maybe there’s something in the lootarang’s code that causes the game to ask “is he in combat with anything…?” and/or to scan your surroundings for lootable corpses is somehow also scanning for entities you are in combat with and it finds zero and thus clears the combat flag.
It might not be “there’s a lootable body therefore you’re in combat” as that makes zero sense.
That’s a bit cheap. You know it’s not always a critter.
I think that being unable to loot something or forgetting to loot it is a big cause of the in combat bug. The looterang finds what you might have missed as long as you’re within range and loots it for you so I think that is some alleviation to the in combat bug
It’s possible. I’ve had the problem only rarely, but I’m in the habit of looting everything. If this theory is correct, it would explain why.
The point I was making is I think the act of the lootarang scanning for nearby corpses to loot, is causing the game to evaluate your surroundings, to perform a check.
I don’t think lootable bodies are causing you to stay in combat. Have you ever manually looted a corpse and had it clear combat? Or is it ONLY when you use the lootarang?
I can tell you that leaving loot on a corpse does not normally keep you in combat. I’ve done it many times, and 99.9999% of the time, combat is cleared when everything near me I was fighting is dead, regardless of loot.
But the lootarang, an object we know causes the game to run code that scans your environment for lootable corpses, clears combat.
This tells me that it’s the lootarang itself, or rather the code it’s running, is what’s clearing the combat, and not the act of looting the corpses.
Wouldn’t be surprised if Blizz did some kind of lazy thing here where they wrote one script that scans your environment for hostile enemies, enemies you have aggro on, and mobs that can be looted and the lootarang calls this script and passes a “… and loot anything lootable” as an option, and they use this same script for a number of things.
Let me clarify that looting is not the only cause of being stuck in combat I’ve just noticed that about 90% of the time if I loot something I missed I’m out of combat immediately. I don’t want to even remotely claim that it’s the cause of the bug I just noticed that the bug seems to be fired off more by failing to loot something at least in my case from my experience
I’m not making any assertions as to the actual root cause of the bug
I haven’t had it happen to me in quite a while because I can recognize what I’m still in combat with easily (usually a critter or nearby mobs that are fighting each other).
Actually when I think more about it…
I bet it goes something like this: There’s a common script that lists all entities (mobs) near you and returns their statuses. Friendly, hostile, neutral, dead, lootable, etc.
And there’s probably a script that’s always running that’s looking for an “In combat?” variable and when you enter in combat, this is turned on and you enter combat.
When you leave combat, via killing everything that you’re in combat with, or leashing it, or causing something to despawn or turn friendly, it’s supposed to flip the combat bit to Off.
But, the game forgets to do that for whatever reason now and then and it’s on.
Using the lootarang causes the game to list the status of all nearby mobs and it sees that there’s none that are in combat with you and it goes “oh, whoops, better flip that combat byte off, because nothing’s in combat with the player”.
Or something like that.
EDIT: I have seen instances in which I was stuck in combat, and I find some random mob, that was not in combat with me, kill it, and suddenly I’m out of combat. Doesn’t always work, though.
Clearly you have been blessed by not encountering this bug.
And bugs aren’t always easily reproducible or consistent in a way that is easily discovered. If that were the case, this game would have a lot less bugs.
I have crossed half a zone and still be in combat with some mystery thing.
Sometimes force quitting the game, logging on an alt then back to the problem toon clears it.
Sometimes killing a few new mobs clears it.
Annoying always.
My favorite bug is the one where an NPC would shoot at you, but instead of hitting you, it follows you for a few zones if you take a flight path.
I’ve been hit by spells in Orgrimmar from other zones before.
At this point it’s more prudent to say that it’s intended game design or an edge case that they don’t wish to put any extra time looking into.
The combat checks happen at action/button press or on event updates. Generally it’s because an action state is still active, stale, happened too early, or too soon.
I would assume that either an action state hasn’t finished or you’ve gone too far for the distance check to be activated and the update fails or returns nil. They probably have a reason for why it works that way.
Just put a timer system in place that if an action hasn’t been taken by an NPC and/or player for X number minutes, combat drops automatically.
There’s a plus and minus to why this exists.
Not so much in Dragonflight where there are some places ‘activities’ which requires you to move a mob to a place significantly different on the map.
In Nazjatar for example in order to spawn an Elder coral guy you have to bully one of the coral elites like 1/16th of the map and kill it in front of him.
Likewise on the same map there is a gigasize coral skate that you have to aggro and kite from the high heavens and bring to another (EASILY 700 yards).
The same coding that enables these activities and sort of ‘real’ immersion causes the same glitches with combat you see. Something somewhere got angry at you somehow (P.S I get it a lot on my Warrior too and I suspect it’s tied to my Heroic leap but I can’t put my finger on it).
While this may be the reason for continued ‘in combat’ status, it shouldn’t be. Outside of dungeons and raids, distancing yourself far enough from an aggro’d npc is supposed to trigger their ‘leash’, causing it/them to run back to their static position, and quickly regenerate health. If this isn’t occurring…or it does but aggro simply doesn’t drop…it IS a bug, and SHOULD be addressed by the developers.
Put simply, you are correct that there exist several known reasons for it…but it’s still a bug, and still should have been corrected long ago.
yes…that too. Just did this a few days ago when I was stuck in combat.
Found a few things to kill and looted them and immediately out of combat after being trapped in it for a few minutes.
personally, Im not buying it.
Pick a complaint, any complaint and religiously the ‘Not me’ crowd has to chime in and start trolling the thread.
This bug has been an issue for years…that poster KNOWS that fact because he’s in here daily reading. No way in hades he magically missed all the posts and threads about it.
And I dont believe for a second that anyone who plays this game more than 10 hours a week, every week, has never encountered the bug.
Not to mention they could easily have been stuck in combat, but kept pulling stuff and ended up clearing it out as per my last post and what you point out yourself. Sometimes if you keep fighting it ends up fixing itself.
MY question is, THIS thread is about OUR seeing a bug. Those who claim not to have seen it really serve literally no purpose here in this thread whatsoever.
and we know it is because it IS erratic. I can do the same thing 1000 times and only a portion of those will cause me to be stuck in combat.
if it were part of the games design it would be consistent.
but but but…you know…we’re just making this bug up.
No one has ever mentioned it before 
for a longer list than you’ll want to read…
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/search?q=bug%20%22in%20combat%22
566.jpg (1008×3292) (darklegacycomics.com) This comic always captures the issue to me.
