I’m getting tired of being in a middle of a fight and for no reason at all, I am phased to a different phase.
A few days ago, I had just cleared out a location and was looking at my inventory to see the items I just picked up and I was phased into a new phase with all mobs in location and suffice it to say, I was killed because I phased right into a large group of them.
Sharding is pretty annoying for a bunch of other reasons too. What they need to do in my opinion is connect a whole bunch of low-pop servers to shore up open world population and turn off sharding almost entirely, with the only two “shards” existing being one for war mode off, one for war mode on for each connected realm group.
It happens to me when I go herb picking which is pretty annoying 
what they should do is just merge servers. i get that some people have characters with the same name but having people rename a toon once is much less trouble than all the issues these connections have caused. a zone should just be a single zone. not 5 with layers.
The problem with merging extends beyond character names. It’d also have implications on guild names, and mergers almost always cause the population to scuttle around, which means that guilds will split up and new imbalances will be created.
Connecting realms yields all of the benefits of merging realms without the downsides of merging. It’d put everyone on a single layer, and you’d be able to trade and guild up with anybody you see.
the only two meaningful issues with mergers are names and economy. both of those will be fixed on their own as time passes. people will settle for new names and markets will stabilize after an unstable period.
as opposed to layers and shards right now. see an herb? move to it and watch it phase out because you moved 5 feet. see a mob? watch it either despawn or watch 5+ mobs spawn on top of you or even both because you moved 5 feet.
at it’s worst, you get this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAljm0J9-B8&ab_channel=aceperson
connections are not worth the headache it causes to the players OR the devs. mergers would fix this issue and the only issues that would come after will naturally fix themself with time.
I think you may be conflating the concepts of connected realms and cross-realm zones.
Connected realms are functionally identical to merged realms. They “live” in the same data center and everybody can trade with each other. There are connected realms that do not have cross-realm zones enabled and have layering disabled – see any of the low population RP servers.
The only difference between connected and merged is that you and your guild get to keep their names.
Cross-realm zones are very different from merging, and I think what you’re referring to. These pay no need to connected realms, but instead pull players from a huge range of servers to populate the zone. You cannot interact with everybody you encounter in CRZ, and you can be pulled between any of the numerous CRZ shards that exist for a given zone with little to no notice.
Aggressively connecting realms would allow Blizzard to disable CRZ, thus killing shards/layers while also keeping the world alive.
“Working as intended”
As Blizzard devs would say.
so i can go to nazjatar right now and herb nodes WITHOUT THEM DESPAWNING?! no, it still happens. whether it’s layers or crz, it pisses people off. they shouldn’t be moving people in and out just to meet a population quota. throw in the fact connections cause rare mobs like the time-lost protodrake to become stupid to farm and other rare stuff.
you need to accept that your method has many more flaws than you are willing to admit. connections and layers actually hamper peoples experience in the world because either they can’t find something because there are tons of people who shouldn’t be there or they get phased in the middle of a zone for no reason.
You’re missing my point entirely. Connected realms do not have layers/shards, period. Layers/shards are the result of CRZ, which is entirely separate from realm connections.
If you fly through Nazjatar and your Zin’anthid node vanishes, that’s because CRZ decided you belong in a different shard. If CRZ were turned off, that wouldn’t happen.
do you have proof they are separate systems? as far as i know, they are one and the same. i’d also say if it was that simple then why did blizzard decide to use the worse option but lets be fair here. blizz has been making the worst decisions they could for a while now.
As I mentioned before, connected low pop RP realms have CRZ disabled, placing everybody from that group of connected realms into the same plane of existence without layers/shards/etc.
well then blizz just needs to axe layers and crz. i’d have to experience connected realms without that crap before i could make an informed opinion then.
Honestly I think its worse on my medium pop realm than my hi pop. Wouldn’t you think with the decreasing pop realms they would trim down sharding. Its quite annoying.
Some of that isn’t actually caused by CRZ, but rather that particular area having a different quest or world quest phase enabled. For some reason there are some quest phases that only trigger when you get close, resulting in things disappearing as you approach them. I really noticed this in 8.2 doing one of those fetch WQs in Nazjatar where you have to grab various ingredients from around the zone, I found one I needed that phased out when I got close (as did all the mobs in the area), and phased back in as I backed up, endlessly repeatable if I just kept walking back and forth. They could disable CRZ right now and those particular instances of phasing would still occur.
Yeah I think the algorithm they use tries to avoid sharding high-population realms except for extreme spillover circumstances, instead trying to pull people from low-pop realms into medium-pop shards to create the impression of high population.
hey they’re only paid $15/month by at least a million different users along with expansion prices and inflated price of services in the game
I had a quest objective phase out of existence every time I approached it in Highmountain today. I’ve done this quest a million times on other chars and have never had this issue.
It is absolutely annoying…especially when you’re farming a node, either herb or ore, and as soon as you’re done supposedly collecting it, it disappears and you get the “Invalid action” or whatever that notice is telling you that you failed to farm that node…Granted, sometimes this can be caused from other ppl tapping it before you, unless as it disappears, your entire screen glitches just a little showing you phasing into another phase.
I also agree with you, OP, on fighting mobs, getting them all down only to rephase into an entirely new batch of mobs that eat your face b/c all your cd’s are down, and you’re out of mana etc. lol I don’t have that bad of an issue on my better geared characters, but my “baby alts” are done for. lolol
Something definitely needs to be done to get this remedied. In the meantime, toss out tickets and bug reports when it happens, something HAS to get their attention somehow someway.
Good luck to all!! Happy Gaming!!! 
