World of Warcraft’s had another brush with a digital plague—on the Moon Guard US server, capital cities were overcome with waves of toxic activity that saw vitriol line the streets. But enough about trade chat—there was also a debuff spreading around and killing people.
The incident occurred late last week, when Stormwind was suddenly assailed by AoE markers and explosions of green slime—captured here by meggoart on Bluesky, you can cleanly see the debuff melting the faces off innocent players by the Trader’s Post (thanks, WoWHead).
The culprit? Withering Contagion, which occurs in the Brackenhide Hollow dungeon from Dragonflight. The debuff is a DoT that can spread to players within five yards of the victim. How exactly it escaped the dungeon seems unclear, though I’m sure the discovery of the glitch has something to do with the current timewalking event, which is encouraging players to run Dragonflight dungeons.
Regardless, it swept through popular social hubs—including the, er, rather infamous inn Goldshire, which you can see exploding in a splatter of goo (and not the usual kind) in this video by ParallelGTA on YouTube. Here’s a longer video by Starry where you can see a tide of pus nearly drowning Stormwind’s Cathedral Square.