World of Warcraft players report that characters continue to fight bosses even after disconnecting from the server

World of Warcraft players have noticed some strange behavior following the latest update.

Instead of freezing up or vanishing when disconnecting in dungeons, characters seem to keep fighting on their own – with no input from the player at all.

Losing connection mid-fight against a boss is one of the more frustrating things that can happen in a WoW dungeon. The character stops dealing damage at a critical moment, usually dies, and the group ends up wasting time on revives or healing.

Now, though, that situation might sting a little less. Following the big Curse of Ula'tek 12.1 update, several players have reported unusual behavior in dungeons.

One player said they were in a dungeon with an Evoker who disconnected about 39 seconds into a boss pull. In the attached video, you can hear the player saying they've lost connection, but their Evoker keeps fighting and casting spells anyway. According to the original poster, this happened twice, across two separate dungeons.

Plenty of others jumped into the replies to confirm similar experiences. One of them shared this story:

Okay cool, thought I was confused. This happened today to my brother while he was on his warrior. We were on disc and his client crashed. He hung there through almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds into his D/c. His warrior charges the boss and starts hitting it. My brother was actively narrating his re-login. According to him his game hard locked, froze and he alt+f4d and relogged in.

People offered a few explanations for what might be going on. One theory suggests the player is actually botting and the whole thing is an elaborate hoax, but lying about something like this for no real reason seems unlikely.

Another explanation points to the relatively new one-button rotation feature, which existed before this latest patch. The idea is that it could be queuing up optimal actions in advance and continuing to execute them after a disconnect. That theory doesn't fully hold up, though, since the Evoker in the video keeps moving around even after losing connection.

A more pleasant explanation suggests that disconnected players are temporarily being turned into "followers," an NPC mechanic normally used to let people clear easy dungeons alongside AI-controlled companions. Under this theory, a sudden disconnect hands control of the character over to the AI, which runs a roughly optimal rotation and tries to dodge mechanics, buying the player time to get back into the game.

If true, this kind of feature would essentially give a safety net to anyone who disconnects by accident, helping them avoid dying or failing mechanics through no fault of their own.

That said, a feature like this would also be an obvious target for exploits. And if Blizzard built it in on purpose, it seems odd they wouldn't say anything about adding something this significant, which makes it more likely this is a bug that will get patched out soon.