Evade me no longer
by Matthew Rossi 
May 24th 2008 at 3:00PM
For some reason, the first evade bug moment I remember happened in Zul'Farrak. We were clearing the basilisk pulls before attempting Antu'sul (why is it that the optional bosses always have a couple of sweet warrior drops?) and the mage in the group wanted to skip the whole thing. Impatient, he decided to start nuking away from atop one of the hills surrounding the area and managed to pull aggro, but the basilisk couldn't path up to him (and to be honest I'm not sure how he got up there) and promptly went evade. He wouldn't come down because he rightly knew the mob would hit him, and so it took us a solid ten minutes of arguing before he finally came into the monster's reach so that I could taunt it.I'm thinking about this because of the Isle of Quel'Danas dailies, specifically the quest Crush the Dawnblade. For some reason whenever I do this quest I run into Dawnblade Summoners who are evading. This puzzles me because I can't understand why a ranged mob is evading: it doesn't have to path to anything to hit it, just get into range. Is there some way a hunter or some other ranged class can shoot them but stay out of their range?
All I know is, they stay evading for what seems to be forever. There always seems to be one or two hanging out around the Bloodcrystal, impervious to attack, and another couple scattered around the island. Once I found one evade bugging merrily out by the coast, surrounded by imps. I suppose this could just be how they relax.
This may have just made me more sensitive to evades in general, since I seem to have had a week full of them: evades in TK, evades in ZA (the multiple lynx packs evaded twice, that was fun) and a fantastic evade on a Gruul's pug where Kiggler just couldn't or wouldn't hit the moonkin. The lynx packs evading doesn't even make sense, as the mage was right there spamming AoE and they should have had no difficulty pathing to him. Heck, nobody else seemed to have trouble heading over to hit him in the head, what was the problem for the cats, distracted by a momentary gigantic ball of yarn?
Have you noticed any further evade oddities lately? Mobs that seem to get stuck a lot, or particular instances that seem prone to the issue?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Bugs, Odds and ends, Instances
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Gilias May 24th 2008 3:10PM
We've had Vashj evade during phase 3, when everybody else was standing there on the platform with her. She healed herself right back up to 65%, where she got to chill while enraged spore bats poisoned us to death.
klink-o May 24th 2008 10:18PM
We've had that same problem, I've got screenshots of her at like 80% woth sporebat goo all over the place.
Also, you can't walk five feet in Terokarr without bumping into a creature stuck in something.
Sargentd May 24th 2008 3:11PM
It seems to me that there are a lot more evades overall in BC material. I was leveling my 1st character in Outland and every hour or so I found a new evading mob. It seems most of them were in Nagrand.
Blackfish May 24th 2008 5:13PM
Agreed. Defninitely more evaders in Outland. I find them everywhere, usually at least 1 per session. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I play on Auchindoun.
synack May 24th 2008 3:17PM
The ravagers on Razorthorn Rise that you need to charm for the quest Discovering Your Roots are constantly evading because people mount up and fly away without dismissing them. This really slowed down the Phase 4 progress for the Sunwell event on my server (Earthen Ring-US).
Also lately it seems every week during our weekly Karathons, the 4th pack of arcane mobs you must clear before The Curator are always evading inside of the damn wall.
What gets me about evading mobs is you can't hurt them but they can still attack you with no problems. It should be a mutual non-attack relationship. A truce if you will.
Narlic May 24th 2008 3:58PM
Did you have an issue with the chess event teleporting people all the way back to Curator's hallway when you had that one evading arcanes pull? The two have gone hand-in-hand for me the few times it has happened (although it's been a while)
Erika May 24th 2008 3:59PM
That has happened to us many times and even a soft reset doesn't fix it. Then when we tried doing curator with the blueberries evading he never evocated and sent 3 or 4 sparks at once.
Jewbanks May 24th 2008 9:33PM
We had a 15 minute fight with Black Heart the Inciter or whatever his name is H SL.. Luckily he still hits like a kitten, comparatively, in heroic.. Every time he did his mind control either shortly before, during, or right after he would evade and regain some health. Once at 20% for the third or fourth time he returned to 100%. We oomed and just ignored him doing minimal healing to get mana back. We eventually managed to burst him down after a series of luckily short evades.
ErsatzPotato May 24th 2008 10:40PM
Those worms stuck in the wall are a major hassle. No one I know had ever seen it until a couple months ago.
They're still killable but it's a giant pain in the butt. Wait until Curator is pathed to the far end. All the ranged dps runs next to the wall where they are stuck and they'll start hitting some of members. The member being hit can generally attack back. You'll have to have a melee watching for Curator to call the run back to rear wall and repeat it several times.
To Sargentd: second that. Had occasionally seen evading mobs but it was really Nag--and the demon area nearest the quest giver especially--where evading mobs and desyncing issues kicked in. Kinda dread that spot, bugs as often as not. "Crud, still in combat, gotta keep running guys" as the cannon blasts away non-stop over huge ranges.
Sl0th May 25th 2008 7:36PM
We had the evade thing happened in Curators room once. They were standing up on the area with pillars for some reason just inside the door. Oddly enough, this lead to (I think. It was a pretty big coincidence otherwise) the most hilarious fight against Curator I have ever participated in. Curator somehow got very confused. He'd spawn his flares, only to have the flares vanish without a trace. He evocated once for a couple seconds, while he still had mana. He aced as though he was going to reset once or twice (gaining back a bit of HP, but not full, in the process.) And he didn't enrage at all until about five percent. We ended up just killing him in tank and spank fashion while everyone involved was cracking up in vent. I could barely keep my shot rotation going for how utterly ridiculous the fight was. And we won.
The funny thing was that our former guild leader, who was running it with us on an alt, had just gotten done saying he hated Kara because he could find nothing new or surprising in it any more. I think Curator must have overheard him.
rick gregory May 24th 2008 3:17PM
I see the evade bug in Isle dailies too. Oddly, I ran into this playing my 14 druid on Bloodmyst Isle. I was happily killing Sunfury Spies... they were right in front of me and my bear form was mauling their scrawny butts.... then they ran away, evaded, healed up a bit and came back. Odd.
Silverrealm May 27th 2008 11:46AM
Yes you are right, I had this happen too on my Draenei Priest alt.
Krisby May 24th 2008 3:25PM
Worst I have ever seen was Al'ar when he evade bugged. He meteored into the far wall near the entrance. Preceded to bug and be stuck in the wall like some kind of stupid chicken with his head cut off. We couldn't attack him or anything. So they melee ran up and tried to engage him maybe pull him out. All of us who ran near him fell through the world. LITERALLY fell through the world and got stuck. Half the raid. It took 2 hours for all of us to get out of it because nothing worked. We weren't considered dead, or alive. We just seemed to be stuck somewhere in between and it was impossible to use the unstuck or release or anything.
rwhiteruff May 24th 2008 3:27PM
Prior to the Burning Crusade I only had a mob evade bug on me when it had gotten into a position where I could attack it and it could not attack back (which I believe is the point). This happened extremely rarely.
Come Outland I encountered a slightly different variation. These evade bugs are much more prevalent and involve the mob being stuck in place to begin with, rather than coming across impassable geometry. Nagrand is absolutely rife with these bugged mobs, talbuk seeming to be particularly susceptible. Actually Nagrand seems to be the buggiest zone in the game ever, what with all the evade bugged mobs and floating nodes and whatnot. A shame, since it's so pretty.
As far as I can tell from my experience with the things, these new flavor of bugged mob are stuck inside geometry when they spawn. It's not a matter of them not being able to return attacks, but rather a complete lack of mobility. Some spawn halfway into trees or the ground, and others seem to have one foot stuck or something.
The strangest of them are stuck in such a fashion but seem to invisibly run over to melee you. They don't actually evade, but neither do they appear to physically move. This is particularly annoying because you'll be getting hit from literally nowhere and it's nearly impossible to retaliate. Your best bet is to run into the mob and face the other way and attempt to attack it, or (the safer route) try to run out of range so that the mob disengages.
kunukia May 24th 2008 3:43PM
I believe the floating nodes are deliberate. They are always somewhere in the area of a floating island, and at 70 you can fly up and hope they are near enough to zap. True, they usually aren't, but once in a while you can get 'em.
Wear your parachute cloak though, creeping to the edge of an island, trying to get in range...many falls are involved.
Anyway, I have found 6 or 7 floating nodes, and have been able to get 4 of them at one time or another.
ErsatzPotato May 24th 2008 10:41PM
"The strangest of them are stuck in such a fashion but seem to invisibly run over to melee you. They don't actually evade, but neither do they appear to physically move. This is particularly annoying because you'll be getting hit from literally nowhere and it's nearly impossible to retaliate. Your best bet is to run into the mob and face the other way and attempt to attack it, or (the safer route) try to run out of range so that the mob disengages."
If you can't find where it is by turning a lot (melee is screwed if it's a ranged attacker) your best bet is to try aoe if you have it and/or immediately force close the game and hope you survive the few seconds it gets to clobber you. If you kill it, immediately log and return to find where the body is for looting. If you quit when it was alive and go right back in it's going to be smacking you so be ready to fight.
Thander May 25th 2008 4:07PM
I've found if I move far enough a way for it to despawn (disappear from my screen) and return, the mob will be correctly moving again. It just seems to be a problem with the mob spawning wrong as its coming into your view. You can also do this to get loot from a mob whose body is not displaying in the right spot.
jjfilmore May 24th 2008 3:42PM
yesterday me and my friend were playing our alts (me a 20 warrior and him a 17 shaman) and we were questing in the barrens when we came across a rare spawn stuck in a tree but when we were killing him i could only attack him when he was targetting me, and at one point my friend was under attack and almost dead while i was still attacking him while he was evading, and my friend backed out and the mobs health went all the way back up. we did eventually kill him though =D dropped 2 greens
Ichthus May 24th 2008 3:45PM
Magtherion was at 1% and hit an evade bug for half a second which allowed him to heal by 40%. We were ticked.
TTFK May 24th 2008 8:55PM
When a Huntard gets a ranged evade, you can often kick it ouf of evade by setting on agressive then dismissing your pet, standing as close to on top of the mob as possible, and recalling your pet. The pet will then attack the mob allowing you to do the same.
This has worked several times on the pirate ship on the southern Theramore docks.