Can my AOE attacks hit a PVP-flagged player?

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1

Hi, this has happened to me a few times recently.

I’ll be participating in a big event with a lot of mixed-faction players, like a Grand Hunt, and someone from the opposite faction is PVP-flagged. I’m very careful not to attack them, but while attacking the mobs around them I eventually become PVP-tagged myself.
I assumed that this - AOE attacks hitting a PVP-flagged player and causing me to become PVP-flagged - was an intentional feature, but after some googling it sounds like it shouldn’t be.
I had a look through my combat logs and identified the attack that hit the other player, and it was definitely an AOE effect.

So - is this working as intended?

2

Only the devs can say for sure if it’s intended, but it is inconsistent with how flagging generally works in modern WoW. So, it’s certainly worth putting in a bug report listing the specific spell that is flagging you.

3

Thanks for responding! I couldn’t find a solid answer on whether AOE attacks from a PVE player were supposed to hit PVP-flagged targets so it’s good to know that this is inconsistent behaviour. I’ll do some experimenting next time I see a PVP-flagged player and will file a bug report if I can reproduce it.

4

Do you have the option that automatically picks a target in front of you set?

5

I’ve seen it as well. It caused me a bit of panic-checking of my own PVP status.

I full-on showed a PVP-flagged player as taking damage during tab-targeting on non-AOE attacks.

There’s definitely something broken here, but I’ll leave it to the poor PVP players to report it (“I was attacked by a PVE player and couldn’t attack back” is pretty much what I’d expect that to look like).

6

Ok. I’m glad to see that this isn’t just me. It’s been annoying to get flagged doing world quest content when I’m just trying to kill mobs, but I just experienced opposing faction players ignoring the bosses in Primalist Future to FOCUS on players who inadvertently flagged during the boss fight.

I now know that when I cast a chain lightning into a group of baddies, I may hit an opposing faction player while 1) not flagged 2) not in war mode and 3) not on a pvp server.