This has happened to me several times. I’ve seen in trade channel that it happens to others as well. All players will freeze in place. I will not be able to cast abilities, mount, or use portals. I have two options at this point. If I wait, the problem seems to fix itself after about two minutes. Players will fly across the screen at lightning speed, everything updating to where everything is supposed to be, and boom - it’s fixed. The other option is to alt+F4 and simply log back in. This has been happening to me several times per day for the past week or so. It seems to be getting worse.
There are two ping latencies reported when you hover over the “?” at the bottom right: World and Home.
The latency when you see this freeze is probably bad on one of these two “channels” which would be better named as Chat and Actions (nothing to do with external World latency and internal Home latency). The one that’s got a huge lag during a freeze is the Actions channel while the Chat channel is probably normal lag.
That can be hard to track down, but it often is related to a dead “hop” on the path from your computer to the Blizzard game server you’re on. It might also be your ISP or your anti-virus/firewall software employing a new security filter that unfortunately catches WoW accidentally (Wave Broadband in the Pacific Northwest did this a while back and I had to use a VPN to get around it until Wave fixed it).
If it doesn’t go away after a week, try one or both of the following tools to capture what’s happening with your IP traffic and submit a support ticket.
Running a Traceroute - Blizzard Support
The first reply from Blizzard to the post below also has TCP/UDP port numbers that should be on your safelist ONLY IF you or your ISP have to manually configure those (that’s not typical, but some routers and ISP filters do need this info).
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