I recently came back to wow after 12 years. Never gamed on an iMac before this and when I play any BG’s the enemy players will not load for a very long time. I can usually see their pets but can’t see the enemy team to fight or click on them. It’s making the game unplayable because I love PVP. I’m not great at trouble shooting here’s my specs any help would be more then appreciated. Default graphics set to 4.
Playing on a iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019
3.1 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5
Radeon Pro 575X 4 GB
16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
Ventura OS 13.0.1 (22A400)
HD is 1TB i dont know if its SSD or not.
If it’s 1 TB it’s most likely not an SSD, but to be sure you can open System Profiler (hold down option while clicking on the Apple menu and click System) and then check the SATA section. It will provide the name and model of the drive in question. If you are unsure what the model means you can post it here and we’ll be able to decipher it.
If the drive is in fact a HD, then you’re going to see this problem going forward regardless of your settings. The game’s CASC filesystem combined with APFS results in absolutely abysmal load and pop-in times in-game. Even reinstalling the game by deleting the /Data folder in the main WoW folder and clicking Update in the Battle.net app (after emptying the trash first!) won’t completely resolve this due to the extreme inefficiencies with APFS.
You can avoid much of the loading slowdowns with an external SSD (preferrably thunderbolt as to get the most speed with the least hit on CPU), but only if you format the external SSD as HFS+, not APFS.
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Thank you so much! It is infact an HD. I will have to look into buying an external SSD and doing the fixes you recommended. Much appreciated!
I think I have the same problem and would like to try the SSD solution… how do I reformat it to HFS?
Then, I just choose the SSD drive as the location to install WoW, and that’s it?
Open Disk Utility (found in /Applications/Utilities) and right click the SSD. Make sure to right click the partent entry for the SSD (the topmost one in the nested menus) and select Format. You would choose HFS Extended (Journaled) for the format option. You may need to do this twice due to a longstanding bug in Disk Utility that fails on the first attempt to format an external drive of any type. Hopefully you won’t get hit with that bug, but one never knows. Do not select any other format option except HFS Extended (Journaled). Do not select Case Sensitive either. It’s more headache than it’s worth for that one.
You could point the Battle.net app to the SSD for WoW’s install, yes. But if you want an easy way to keep your in-game addons and preferences without any muss or fuss, you could do this instead:
- Delete the /Data folder inside the main WoW folder. Your folder structure should look like this:
/World of Warcraft/
—/_ptr_
—/_beta_
—/_retail_
—/Data
Once the /Data folder is deleted, empty the trash. This removes the game’s data files and prepares you for the next steps.
- Move the WoW folder to the SSD. With the data files deleted it should take no time at all to copy everything over.
- Launch the Battle.net app and go into Settings > Downloads. Change the Default Install Directory to the location on the SSD that contains your WoW folder. If the WoW folder is at the root level of your SSD, select the SSD itself. This will change all of your Blizzard games to use the SSD, which is a wise thing to do since nearly all of them use CASC for the filesystem now.
- Click the World of Warcraft icon to select that game within the Battle.net app. Click Update so WoW reinstalls. Do not under any circumstances interrupt the install or click Play before every last step of the install is complete or you risk corrupting your data files and having to start all over again.
- Enjoy WoW again.
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THANK YOU for taking the time to explain this… I really appreciate it.
I will try this out, and I do not use any add ons or preferences so I probably don’t need to mess with the /DATA folder and just install from the battle.net app to the SSD.
Your preferences are still stored in the /WTF folder. This makes it so you don’t have to redo them from scratch. Also, doing the above steps gives you a fresh install which is contiguous and not fragmented like all install get after a few patches. Fresh is fastest, and if you’re having loading issues, fresh is the best course you can take.
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I went and bought an SSD and formatted (journaled) and installed the files on my external and so far everything seems to be working great! I can’t thank you enough for the help I was really discouraged and thought I would have to buy a gaming laptop. This saved me alot of money!
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