[MORE NEW INFO] Client-Server Desync/Bad Character State

Support Bug Report
1

Quick Facts

• :warning: This is a server-side bug. UI settings, video options, addons, and even running repair have no effect on addressing the bug. Any client-side fixes you may have tried that worked are the result of correlation, not causation.
• This issue is not related to latency or lag, although it may play a part in the triggering of it.
• To fix the issue temporarily, you need to get your character to despawn from the world. That means changing instances (doesn’t always work) or LOGGING OUT, NOT exiting the game. If you enter the world before your character despawns, you will STILL be bugged.
• Imgur Gallery with some symptoms: imgur.com/a/LM5kdi3

There’s a number of other threads on this issue.
You can find them below in the “The Unfortunate Victims” section

The What

This is a client/server desync bug in which typical game interactions and combat mechanisms no longer function as expected until your character is taken out of the world via a logout, and despawns entirely. This is not an addon or UI issue, and is server side. Exiting the game but logging back in before your character has disappeared keeps the bug present, and other players can see some aspects of your bugged status. Reloading does nothing. Again, this is absolutely 100% not an addon issue, even if many of the symptoms manifest as client-side bugs.

This is not a case of server or internet lag! The game still sends and receives packets and everything else behaves normally. You are still able to play and interact with the world, you are just greatly hindered, and in real-time.

I will give specific examples of the unexpected behavior later in the post, see “The Symptoms”.

The How

I have been unable to reproduce this with 100% effectiveness but have located a few cases in which I can trigger it with greater frequency. So far, I have only personally experienced the bug on Demon Hunters and Rogues, although other reports in this thread indicate it can happen in other situations, too.

With my rogue, Kyrex on Wyrmrest Accord, I have triggered the bug at the following times:
• 3:55 PM PST Jan 24 - On the quest Do the Thing!, I interacted with the Driftwood → Clam → Crab → Seaweed → Pearl, and did not notice the bug until after I turned it in. However, I noticed odd behavior after the Clam, where everything including interacting with other objects was disabled with the “Can’t do that while confused” error message, even after the debuff from the clam expired, all except for the Crab which, after interacting with, I was able to resume playing. Once I turned the quest in and tried to grab the follow-up, I noticed the bug had taken effect.

• 4:08 PM PST Jan 24 - I used Grapple Hook to gap close to an enemy, Marked for Death, Run Through, and stopped to loot it quickly while also crossing the border into Azsuna, triggering whatever sharding/CRZ/etc tech might be in place. The bug was triggered.

• 4:11 PM PST Jan 24 - After relogging and fixing the bug, I happened to do the exact same thing as before and the bug was triggered again.

• 5:35 PM PST Jan 24 - Once again, killing/looting mobs along a zone border very quickly triggered the bug.

I have been able to consistantly reproduce this bug through the above method. Kill and loot things (with auto-loot enabled) quickly along a zone border. Kill mobs on the other side of the border, kill mobs on your side then initiate a loot while you cross the border during its processing, etc. Do this, and you can trigger the bug pretty easily. I recommend the Sundered Shoals on the border of Suramar and Azsuna, there’s plenty of crabs on both sides of the border.

@Blizzard devs: Note that this method to reproduce the bug may only work on non-CRZ servers. This was done on an RP server in War Mode and thus there were not separate shards for Azsuna and Suramar, and therefore the same identical mob existed in both zones and was not replaced by a copy in a different shard.

In addition, flight paths and Metamorphosis usage with Demonic talent and the Eye Beam is reset on Meta cast azerite trait also sometimes (but rarely) seem to trigger the bug. This is where I first noticed it, but could not replicate on demand.

The Symptoms

This bug causes a number of bizarre problems, I’ll highlight a few of them:

• You are able to mount, but your mount is invisible thus you run/swim through the air. Other players can see this.

• You are unable to dismount through any means besides reactivating your current mount, or right-clicking the debuff. Even with “Auto Dismount In Flight” enabled, interacting with the world does not dismount you. Attempting to use another mount fails; all of these return the error “You are mounted”.

• Combo Point generation is throttled. Usually you cannot generate any combo points while in combat, but they are all granted to you after combat ends. Combo points also do not degenerate outside of combat according to your client, but attempting to use them fails with no error. Unlike normal interactions when you have no combo points, the game attempts to consume the GCD. Normally, the game simply doesn’t do anything.

• Stealth/No Stealth states are reversed. Animation sets, and action bars, are swapped. The game will attempt to let you use your stealth abilities out of combat, but will fail with the “You must be in stealth” error. Note that normal behavior simply prevents you from even attempting to use the ability without any error, and without attempting to consume the GCD.

• You sometimes can be stuck in permanent combat which denies you from mounting. This persists through Vanish, Invisibility, and Zoning. Normally while in combat you are unable to trigger a /logout command, however because you are not actually in combat server-side, attempting to logout in this state will initiate the countdown.

• Your character can be flagged as Dead with all client-side effects and denial of ability usage, despite being alive and the world is able to act against you.

• Health/resource regeneration out of combat sometimes halts permanently. This is server-side, and other people see your health bar stuck at a lower percentage too. Note that this doesn’t always seem to occur.

The Unfortunate Victims

All of the following threads describe the same set of symptoms and often similar triggers.
• HUGE mount bug: invisible mounts, able to interact
• Character Status Update Bug
• [Windwalker] Tiger Palm not generating Chi on use. Unable to use abilities
• Druid Transformation Bug
• Demon Hunter Bug?
• Combo Points, Stealth Bar, Combat Recognition Bugged
• Rogue Stealth UI Buggy
• 8.1 Feral combo points bug
• Many recent bugs all seem to be tied together

6 Likes
2

I’m experiencing the same thing, have also noticed increased lag (not network) the past few days.

3

Just experienced the same issue on my horde toon. Very frustrating.

For what it’s worth, I exited the game, deleted my cache folder, logged into a different (alliance) toon, logged back to the horde toon, and the issue seemed to be resolved at that point. No clue if that’s a reliable fix or if I just got lucky.

4

Exact same thing happening with me. It feels like lag, but I’m not getting disconnected, my ping is sub-100 and the rest of my internet connection is working just fine.

Restarting the game client fixes things on load, but the minute I begin playing then the same issues crop up.

In addition to the OP’s bug reports I’m also experiencing Victory Rush being constantly active yet when I press it the game states that I can’t do that.

5

Yes same thing here too, all thought it doesn’t seem to stop the quest progression, you just can’t see it, it’s kinda like a weird lag. I’ve disabled all add-ons, that didn’t seem to do the trick. And I have some interesting video of mountless flight. LOL

6

Im having the same exact issue and its starting to upset me. My internet connection is fine and ping always shows around 60, FPS at 100. Reloading UI helps for a second, then eveything back to desyncing. This is starting to happen at the worst times, in dungeons, during world ques invasions, island expeditions. We need a fix for this please. Only thing thats working for me is logging out for a full like 2 minutes and everything works fine again for awhile.

7

Glad to see I’m not crazy and others are experiencing this issue too.

This is definitely not a traditional lag/latency or “connection” issue, so I’m not sure latency reports are particularly useful. Something is happening to our characters that is putting us in a bugged state. For me, I’ve only noticed it with Flight Paths and Demon Hunter’s Metamorphosis.

For everyone else, could you talk about how often you get it, what classes you might be playing, where it happens, and what you are doing around the time you notice the problem start?

8

Been having this happen to me for a while now, the problem usually goes away after relogging (I haven’t had to close the client entirely as of yet) but as someone who doesn’t have the best of load times it can be rather annoying to have the problem happen back to back.

9

Sorry I didn’t read the op’s long post but his subject seems to be about what I’m here to post about anyway.

My character has been getting killed by mobs, runs back to his body in the dead, black and white screen state, accepts the rez when he’s near his body, stays in the dead state (black and white screen, buttons inoperable) but mobs see me and proceed to kill me again.

I can’t attack back cause my client still thinks Im dead so buttons don’t work. I can run away and if I run far enough away from where I died, the screen will pop back to color and my buttons become operable.

There’s definitely some mis-communication between server and client happening here.

This has been happening in Drustvar in the Crimson forest near those three witches you have a quest to kill.

Also, after rezzing and am actually alive, if I mount up I have invisible mounts.

10

I’d just like to add deleting cache doesn’t help. Deleted my cache, problems still occurred.

11

To me this sounds like an extended period of lag - as if the data for your character has not been correctly transferred. So you do something - ie mount - but the game does not respond by instigating all the follow up activities that go after that action.

I’m not a computer or programming expert but it reminds me very much of the lag we have been experiencing in Oceanic since the expansions released. We would, for example, click on a herb node and it would take an extended period of time for that activity to generate a result. Meanwhile everything around us in the environment was behaving normally - which became old very fast when that lag became active in combat, which it frequently did. So whatever the effect is, it has no impact on the wider game but purely on your individual character.

Best I can describe it is as if just about every action from the point of the glitch happening was hit by some huge universal Global Cooldown.

Whether it is connected to sharding or something else, its obviously getting worse, not better.

12

Its happening again today (Jan. 16th), same as before.

13

This is not the issue. What is happening on Oceanic servers, and in your examples, are actual cases of lag, be it on the server or ISP side of things. There’s definitely an issue on your side of the pond going on right now, but I am confident that these are separate problems.

Lag is not occurring in these instances. Things are still happening with proper timing all around you, and you can still to an extent interact with the world at large. Very specific interactions are breaking in unexpected ways. I can still run, attack, and kill mobs but combo points are simply not generated until the very instant combat ends, whether that’s 5 seconds or 5 minutes.

I can mount, dismount, and loot, but I have to do so specifically by manually dismounting and the mounts themselves are invisible. Quests are still granting credit in some cases, but others, namely ones that require items, requires this “bugged state” to be reset with a relog, no matter how long or short you wait.

Yocraig’s case sounds much more like what I’m experiencing. There’s clearly a disagreement between the client and server whether or not he is dead. The server thinks he is alive so the world interacts with him appropriately, but the client thinks he is dead so it will not even allow him to attempt to cast abilities (as some rules are enforced client-side before even paging the server).

1 Like
14

I’ve encountered this error on every one of my characters during any extended play sessions. It’s not just combo points. This happens to any resource generation including maelstrom and rage. For instance, I’ll stop generating maelstrom or rage and then after combat, I have a full bar just like what happens with holy power and combo points. This has been going on since 8.1 dropped and I find it hard to believe nothing’s been said or done about it. This can happen in the middle of a raid fight.

Logging out does resolve the issue, but that’s not a good work around when you’re trying to run content like a mythic+ or raid.

15

Do you have any memory of what might have triggered the bug in an instanced environment? I’ve never had it happen to me in an instance yet. Any more information might be helpful to Blizz, hopefully the method to reproduce it I’ve posted in the OP helps already.

16

Solid link. Thanks Kyrex.

18

I think you may have just gotten lucky. I’ve done it with both of my demon hunters.
Glad it worked for you though.

19

I’ve been experiencing this while in Northern Stranglethorn.

  • Whenever I use the victory rush skill, I can press it a bunch of times and it’ll just keep doing the victory rush animation while not actually using the skill.
  • My mount is invisible, cannot use the automatic transition from mount to target when I charge a enemy. (Nor can i use heroic leap while on a mount)
  • Restarting the client and reloading UI doesn’t seem to have an effect on whether or not I’m bugged. I’ve constantly logged in and logged out, restarted client and it still persists.
  • I died due to this bug and I tried to release my spirit and on my screen I never resurrected but on the server I was resurrected so It seems like I died while dead.

I have a feeling movement skills may have something to do with the bug

20

Have you actually sat and waited the /logout timer? As this seems to be a server-side issue, it’s important that your character is taken out from the world before you log back in, which is not the case immediately if you close the game.

Also worth noting that this isn’t a permanent fix - there’s something that is triggering the effect. If you relog, the bug might be fixed but triggered by something you’re doing immediately after and you have it again.

21

Can confirm, this has only happened on my rouge. specifically twice, on an island expedition and while fighting an elite for a quest. What happened was everything was normal, then all of a sudden I was not getting any combo points for my attacks. I wouldn’t be able to do much and i would die. Now when thsi happened on the island when i went to respawn, I had a 30 sec rez timer, timer was up and nothing happened, the spirit guide was gone and I tried to go to my body and when i went there i was attacked my mobs, but i couldn’t attack, I guess the game registered me as alive but It was like i was still in spirit form. The second time this happened when i was doing the quest WANTED: Jabra’kan and like before everything was normal then all of a sudden i didn’t have any combo points and i was pretty much defenseless; this time when I went to my body, I hit the rez button and was still in spirit form but was attacked by Jabra’kan and couldn’t fight back. Only way to fix this was to log out and back in.