After a slight issue I had with the app itself, I had to uninstall it, “Oh well” I thought, it’s not much of an issue after all, all you need to do is just go to the directory and launch the game.
Well, turns out, whenever you want to do that, the .exe itself directs you to a bnet download which installs the app.
When did this change? I remember being able to play the game without the app not too long ago, perhaps in Legion?
It is working for me but for a long time for some reason I wasn’t able to run the game without getting redirected to battlenet.
My wow icon location looks like this: \Desktop\Wow_retail_
You can have bnet app close after starting the game at least, but I don’t think you can run without it now. Maybe I’m wrong
Yeah, once the program is running, you can pretty much exit bnet, still, you need to access it first for validation purposes for some reason, something you didn’t need in the past.
Voice Chat and Communities are actually Battle.net features.
run wow.exe under World of Warcraft\_retail_ (via shortcut or just go to dir) and profit… works for me.
same here, i only run the launcher when i want to check for game updates. otherwise i start the game with a shortcut that has
C:\World Of Warcraft\_retail_\Wow.exe
as the file path.
If you have pc you can pin the warcraft client while the games to the bottom bar and it will work until the next big patch then you have to update remove old pin add the new version.
I do that on my laptop because it has a hard time launching
I never realized there was an option to launching without the bnet launcher, I always use it, lol. What reason is there not to use it? Just curious. 
This works for me on Mac:
hella:~ $/Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/retail/World\ of\ Warcraft.app/Contents/MacOS/World\ of\ Warcraft
You don’t need the launcher to run WoW.exe. And if you know how, you can automatically enter your password and get a seamless login.
I’m sure they want everyone to use the launcher to advertise their other titles. It also has info on server status and such.
I use it…but if you don’t want to…just use it and after starting the game just close it.
You don’t need the launcher at all to run WoW.exe