Targeting Untargetable Enemy

[Mancubus-proudmoore]

Hello, this may sound like a really odd thing, but my friends and I were bored and noted some interesting things.

With Dragonflight nearing its end and The War Within on the horizon, my friends and I are spending our time playing in old content and just goofing around with random things we’ve never tried using before. In Shadowlands, there was a crafted item exclusive to the Necrolords called “Bag of Creepy Crawlies”, and none of us ever tried using it. So, I hastily grinded up to unlock them and we played around with them. When we finally used one, it spawned a bunch of fun little things (and gave our mildly arachnophobic friend a light scare, sorry Tim!), and enemies would get mad and attack them as the item clearly intends. However, one of my friends said he couldn’t target the spawned entities. We all tried, and sure enough, we couldn’t target them. Enemies could directly target them when the little creepy crawlies used their AoE taunts, but we couldn’t target them, even if we dueled one another and had no prior target upon the crawlies using their taunt.

This reminded me of an old issue hunters had a long while back where they could tame a literal patch of fire that was entirely untargetable until it hit an enemy. I recall there was a workaround to target these dangerous things, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember it. It’s been a very long time, after all. That issue was fixed very quickly back then, but its similarity to this issue was the closest thing I could recall.

So, my question is this; is there some way to target an NPC that is normally untargetable? One of my friends said that it would be annoying if an enemy somehow came about that was like this in The War Within, and we tried to find ways of targeting untargetable mobs such as the mentioned entities created by the Bag of Creepy Crawlies item. However, we could not figure it out. We’ve tried all sorts of macros, like “/focus [@mouseover,exists,nodead]”, which DOES let us set a focus on the untargetable mob, but we can’t attack the focus or interact with it.

We don’t know of any enemies of significance that are like this, but it’d be good to have a countermeasure just in case such a thing ever does occur, even if said problem is quickly patched once found.

[Pawgwalker-dalaran]

Sounds intentional, likely to prevent people from abusing it in pvp situations to make it harder to target another player. Like a rogue popping them and vanishing, or a hunter FDing, and so on. Spells that would normally break an enemy player’s target and force them to have to retarget again, which a lot of people would most would likely use the tab key to try to reselect vs directly clicking on them.

The not being able to target it with macros directly part likely stems from the totem stomp macro changes that happened ages ago. In pvp, people would just have a stomp macro to target a high priority totem and destroy it since they had next to no health and usually died in one tap. No matter how chaotic a team fight got, they could stomp totems before they could even pulse once. It was super annoying if you played a shaman and had this happen constantly.

The one way you might be able to target one of those spiders would be selecting the enemies target, in the situation you described where the npcs were attacking them after being taunted. But even that might not work if there’s some kind of “untargetable” flag under the hood.

[Mancubus-proudmoore]

I could see tab targeting a previous target being annoying, yeah. The item I used as an example isn’t available outside of open world Shadowlands zones, but even still I can see the tab targeting issue. Though, correct me if I’m wrong; didn’t they do something in the past to make it easier to tab target players over npcs? Or am I tripping?

Regarding the totem, I could definitely see that being annoying and fully understand the change, even if it does seem a bit unfair. I mean, it would’ve been common sense to hinder an enemy’s tools, but I guess for gameplay fairness that had to be done.

As for the potential flag, maybe I should’ve posted under customer support with a suggestion to remove that sort of thing from non-player things (anything that’s not hunter pets, warlock demons, shaman totems, etc) lol. In the case of the item I mentioned, it was equivalent to the one toy from Pandaria that made the taunting lizard dude, whose name I forgot. It’s not like the previously mentioned bag gave any advantage other than to temporarily confuse enemy NPCs, but still.

I appreciate the history lessons though. I really didn’t know about those pvp changes since I rarely do pvp. It’s neat to learn about these things.

[Pawgwalker-dalaran]

@Mancubus-proudmoore

didn’t they do something in the past to make it easier to tab target players over npcs? Or am I tripping?

Yeah, I kind of remember them doing something along those lines. Like if the system saw that you were engaged in pvp combat, players would always be first priority or something like that. I want to say this even affected hunter pets in pvp as well, but it’s just not something I can confirm off the top of my head since I haven’t actually paid attention or thought about it directly.

But probably 7/10ths of the time, when something like this changes, you can just assume it was due to exploits in pvp based situations. The other 3/10ths of the time, it’s usually due to m+/raid based situations. Like long ago, I think there was some hunter mechanic that was broken and would count spawned toys and things of the sort as “pets” and was allowing them to do ridiculous damage or something. People would pop like 30 things out for boss fights. I could have that part wrong about it being hunters, but they’re hunters, so let’s just blame them (even though hunter is probably my first or second most played class lol)