World of Warcraft, being an open-ended MMORPG, is not subject to unwinnable situations as a whole (it's more of an Endless Game). But there have been numerous occasions when specific quests or dungeons have been broken because of scripting failures or other issues. In most cases, these have to be fixed by a game patch. Notorious ones:
- Many quests involving scripted NPCs could break if the script failed to leave the NPC in an interactive state upon completion. This prevents any other players from getting or completing its quest(s) until the server is restarted or a kind GM despawns the offending NPC.
- One common example is one quest in Gilneas, the Worgen starting zone, when, as you're sent to retrieve a cat, you encounter a Forsaken spy, but Grandma Wahl, in her worgen form, arrives and helps you take down the spy. However, sometimes, the spy doesn't die, leaving you and any other Worgen players at that point unable to proceed.
- Nefarian, Final Boss of the Blackwing Lair raid dungeon, despawns temporarily if the players fail to kill him. But there was a bug where the door separating his room from the rest of the dungeon, which locks during the encounter, would fail to open again, shutting raiders out unless they had wipe prevention or left the dungeon entirely for 30 minutes to allow it to reset.
- Razorgore, the first boss of Blackwing Lair has a unique mechanic in which one player is required to use an orb to mind control him. The orb has a set time limit to use and when it expires it must be used again by that player or any other. A bug would cause the orb to become unusable to any player resulting in Razorgore running to the orb and exploding, killing the entire raid. This bug was only fixed by the time of Cataclysm years later, where the orb became consistently usable and Razorgore no longer explodes when reaching the orb.
- Classic World of Warcraft had a boss named "Garr" in Molten Core. The boss itself isn't intimidating... it's the fact that Garr is accompanied by a lot of smaller adds who proceed to wreak havoc on your raid. Your ability to beat Garr is based almost entirely off of how many Warriors or Warlocks you have, as well as getting your targeting absolutely correct so as to ensure that. It's hard to imagine this now, but early adopters found Garr as the guild destroyer because all the mobs are identical, move around, and you had no way to establish targets.
- Scourgelord Tyrannus, last boss of the Pit of Saron dungeon, is supposed to dismount from his undead dragon Rimefang at the start of the battle and fight you on foot while Rimefang bombards the group with ice blasts from above. Sometimes, though, he dismounts and then immediately remounts again, and then spends the entire battle on Rimefang, out of range and unattackable.
- The workaround: make sure no one attacks him until he begins attacking you. He should automatically aggro a few seconds after landing; then the party is free to engage him. The problem is making sure none of your party members attack him before he's fully ready. This was eventually fixed when the dungeon got added to timewalking: now Tyrannus is completely immune to damage until he begins attacking you.
- During Wrath of the Lich King, the Death Knight starting quest chain could become unwinnable if you died early on and couldn't get back home. This would prevent you from learning key class abilities and getting your talent points. Fortunately, there was little to lose by deleting the Death Knight and rolling a new one. In Cataclysm, you no longer have to finish specific quests to get your class powers.
- During the Alliance "retaking Gnomeregan" event, if anyone headed into the tunnel before the gnome leader, the event would bug out. The problem? He yells "Into the tunnel!!" to all the players present before beginning a scripted battle outside the tunnel.
- The Battle of Darrowshire is known for two things: concluding an epic Tear Jerker storyline and being prone to bug. The player is supposed to use a quest item to summon ghosts to re-enact a battle, and then make sure one particular ghost isn't "killed" before his time. Sometimes the ghosts would simply refuse to appear. Other times Captain Redpath, the ghost you're supposed to keep alive, would simply drop off the face of Azeroth, and the battle would go on indefinitely, preventing anyone else from doing that quest until a server reset.
- Mutanus the Devourer, the final boss of the low-level dungeon Wailing Caverns, appears after two waves of less intimidating monsters. Except sometimes you deal with the waves and are left standing there, staring into the waters from which he's supposed to emerge. If that happens, you've no choice but to leave and either let it be or start all over again. This is caused by attacking and killing the waves while they're still in the water.
- Wailing Caverns, in general, may be the buggiest instance in the history of the game. For a long time, the place could be nearly unwinnable at-level due to glitches that caused enemies to spawn inside walls or underground (meaning you couldn't attack them because they were out of your line of sight, but they could still attack you) and others to disappear completely mid-stride and then reappear at the most inopportune moments. Since the backstory is that it was corrupted by the horrible visions of a druid trapped in the Emerald Nightmare, such twisting of the game's reality is fitting; but that's not much of a consolation when one of those blasted wall-druids has just killed your healer.
- Not one, but both of the first two end-raid bosses in The Burning Crusade expansion pack were Unintentionally Unwinnable until the 2.0.10 patch.
- The naga queen, Lady Vashj, final boss of the Serpentshrine Cavern raid was so badly bugged that even when she was finally defeated for the first time, she instantly respawned and killed the entire raid. One of her most frustrating bugs involved her Mind Control ability that would affect 3 random targets. It shouldn't have been able to choose her current tank as a target... but it could, making her totally unbeatable unless your were lucky and your tank was never picked as a target.
- The mad Blood Elf, Prince Kael'Thas Sunstrider, final boss of the Tempest Keep raid, was unbeatable, because the mechanics of his encounter involve him being un-attackable until you've defeated several other challenges. Before being fixed, his aggro list (the priority order that determines who he attacks) would get filled up with all the healing that was being done to raiders during the first part of the fight. When he finally became active, he would attack and kill all the healers while tanks futilely assaulted him, failing to get his attention as they tried to catch up with several hundred thousand points of healing aggro.
- Some fans have speculated this was more Unwinnable by Design. Each expansion has tiers of gear. 2.0.10 was still in the first "season" of TBC and said bosses dropped gear for the second tier of the expansion. Around that time one can note a sudden drop in "Unwinnable by Design" bosses and new bosses having other pacing mechanisms added that slow down the beating of said bosses.
- C'Thun may have been an example of this. Raiders had been wiping on him without success for several months, with the first kill coming within a day of a hotfix. Some contend that with superior gear he would have been defeatable (no kill till patch), since one key issue (additional opponents spawning in an area where they weren't supposed to and the damage was supposed to be primarily environmental — claws in C'Thuns stomach for the initiated) continued, along with all characters being killed should none be present outside of C'Thun's stomach. The latter issue still causes problems for players that outlevel and outgear the instance, since environmental damage scaled up (reportedly with spellpower) so higher-level characters were still killed very rapidly in the stomach phase and eventually the only remaining characters are sent to the stomach, causing an instant wipe.
- C'Thun's most infamous bug, though, was definitely a mistake. He has a chain-lightning style attack that bounces between players, dealing increased damage with each one it hits, to force players to spread out properly. However, he would sometimes cast it on raids as they entered the room, instantly killing most of the group.
- On the first few months of Cataclysm, the final quest of Vashj'ir was prone to this. To avoid spoilers, a large battle happens, and is supposed to go into cutscene mode. However, sometimes it didn't, letting your character wander about and attack people. If you attacked even one person, the semi-cutscene would break, and the quest would not be flagged as completed, so you would have to restart the quest with no idea of what you did wrong.
- That particular quest and the associated cutscene were so buggy that eventually, in late Mists of Pandaria, the developers just bit the bullet and removed the entire scripted event, changing the objective to simply killing 15 naga in the rift. While it fixed quest progression and allowed players to get the zone completion achievement, it removed a chunk of the story and the emotional climax of the entire (extremely long) Vashj'ir questline, along with the story reason to enter the follow-up dungeon.
- Vanessa VanCleef, last boss of Heroic Deadmines, sometimes despawns if her aggro target falls off the top deck.
- The 10-man version of Horridon in the Throne of Thunder raid was nearly impossible to beat when the instance was first implemented. Somehow, the programmers forgot to scale the HP of the mobs to 10-man difficulty, leaving them with the same HP as their 25-man counterparts. This meant it was mathematically impossible for the average 10-man group to defeat Horridon.
- There is a nasty bug in the worgen starting zone that can leave characters completely unable to progress. You've just arrived in Duskhaven and you receive a quest to retrieve some potion reagents from a crate. When this happens, a Forsaken assassin is supposed to spawn, which you have to kill. Unfortunately for some players, they complete the quest to find the crate, but the assassin doesn't spawn. You can't go back and abandon the quest because you've completed it. There is no other way to make the assassin spawn. Killing them is the only way to start the next quest chain - but you can't, because, etc. Barring sending a ticket and waiting (and waiting...) for a GM response, there's nothing you can do. This bug is still in the game in patch 5.4.
- Speaking of the worgen starting zone, it's possible to glitch your way out of the zone before you get fully turned into a worgen... with no way to get back and never unlocking several features. The chances of accomplishing this without deliberately trying to are extremely small. If you do escape the starting zone without unlocking your worgen abilities, they will be added to your character after logging out and back in.
- Near the end of the worgen starting zone, you have to fight Sylvanas Windrunner by using an area-of-effect buff on friendly NPCs, increasing their damage output and health generation. Unfortunately, the buff could also affect the boss, causing her health to keep regenerating faster than your NPC allies could deplete it, and if she wasn't killed fast enough, the entire quest would reset. Keep in mind, this happens in a starting zone, and it was entirely possible for new players to unintentionally keep buffing her without realizing what they were doing.
- In the pre-patch for the Warlords of Draenor expansion, Blizzard instituted a "stat squish," which brought stats down to more manageable levels, and took out some of the exponential gear scaling between past expansions. Everything was fine at max level, but content from about level 40 to level 89 ended up very overtuned. A hotfix was put in a couple days later to fix this, and while it fixed the problem, it brought with it a worse Game-Breaking Bug: all monsters with some sort of resource bar (mana, energy) suddenly hit even harder than they had before. For example, some level 1 wyrms you have to kill for your first quest as a blood elf were meleeing for two or three times the amount of health a level 1 player actually has.
- This is a somewhat common occurrence for completionist players tackling low-level content for achievements, gear, or end-of-quest XP. Some quests require you to weaken enemies instead of killing them, which becomes an issue if you've been diligently completing every side quest and as such are 20 levels above them. It eventually received a workaround in Legion, in the form of the Soft Foam Sword, a toy that reduces the target's health to near zero if it's at a significantly lower level than you.
- A rather notorious one happens in Siege of Orgrimmar raid when someone tries to solo it. The Paragons of Klaxxi fight in particular is susceptible to Script Breaking if the player kills the bosses too fast for the game to properly assign the next bosses to enter the fight. As players can VERY easily 1-shot them with almost no effort, it leads to a extremely frustrating situation where you are unable to complete the fight because 1 or more bosses are stuck and doing nothing (and thus invincible to damage), keeping the player in combat forever. In this case, the only real choice left is to find a way to zone out or hearthstone, fly back to the raid (it must be noted that the raid in question is pretty far from Jade forest, the area where players get thrown into if they use a portal to Pandaria) and try again while praying this doesn't happen yet again.
- Here's the workaround: make sure you wait for the initial dialogue to finish, then be absolutely sure you are using single-target abilities and you kill each boss one at a time.
- Newly created characters begin the game with the Backpack, a 16 slot bag. You can acquire up to four additional bags and change those bags as you progress, but everyone is stuck with the Backpack, which cannot be removed or upgraded — which gets annoying when endgame players have access to 30 slot bags and would really like that extra space. The dev team is aware of this, but have said in the past that one of the reasons keeping them from addressing it is that they're sure some damn fool would find a way to unequip all their bags at once and render themselves permanently incapable of ever picking anything up.
- In Legion a druid player revealed they were incapable of doing the quest required to gain the artifact weapon central to the new expansion. Why? They had managed to make themselves hated with the Cenarion Circle, the faction all druids belong to, and so could not speak with any of the NPCs. They'd PvPed extensively in that zone and killed guards, destroying their reputation. Not entirely unwinnable as they could regrind the rep in a raid, but still impressive. Blizzard quickly hotfixed this by resetting Cenarion Circle reputation to positive for all players and by disabling the "At War" checkbox for that faction, preventing players from ever lowering reputation with the Cenarion Circle back to hostile again.
- The 8.0 prepatch was apocalyptic when it came to this, and this trope was in full effect to almost every game content
. To list off quickly the most noticeable ones: it was mathematically impossible to finish some M+ dungeons or raid fights as bosses/mobs had too much hp or were casually 1-shotting players with no way to avoid it. Many older raid bosses that were previously soloable were now impossible to do so (some were untouched by the squish and 1shotting players), and leveling a pandaren from scratch was impossible thanks to a noticeable snafu when they squished the starting zone. Many quests and/or achievements were also glitched, requiring stuff that was removed in pre-patch or modified in such a way that was impossible to obtain now. While many of these were fixed fairly quickly, several others were not fixed until weeks after the pre-patch was released. - The 10.0 prepatch turned a lot of content into this trope, not unlike 8.0. While PVP and raiding from current content worked mostly fine (outside wonky ilvl of loot drops), M+ zigzagged depending on key level. While not as noticeable, some dungeons like Lower Karazhan had buffed values in some abilities, leading to random 1-shots out of nowhere. The worst part, however, was older content in general, since it got hit hard with this: almost every content from older expacs was buffed to ludicrous levels , resulting in a lot of the content ending up unsoloable due to increased health and damage modifiers across the board meant to re-adjust the leveling experience for players, but said modifiers ended up buffing content that had nothing to do with leveling at all (raid bosses in some pretty offending examples ended up with twice as much hp compared to 9.2.7, and even dungeon bosses). Many cases of Chromie time leveling also ended up much more difficult and, in some cases, unwinnable due to botched scaling as well (Razorfen dungeons from classic content, as well as Warlords of Draenor dungeons, being cited as common examples).
- Even current (Shadowlands) content was not immune to this. While Mythic Shadowlands dungeons got buffed, they are still technically doable with more gear. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the trials of Ascension feature from Kyrian covenant, because it ended up buffed on prepatch 10.0, leading to several encounters in their hardest difficulty being mathematically impossible to beatnote , and thus the mounts and achievements associated with them also being out of reach for anyone to earn as a result.
