You pull up to a field in Westfall and the same mob is standing there in a row of copies - or the Battered Chest you just cleared comes back the moment the whole layer refreshes. Your graphics card is not to blame. On the evening of November 6, day 2 after Forever's global launch, the layering system glitched: NPCs and mobs were showing up in duplicates across layers. Blizzard took the report the same night, and its answer was one line: it is cleaning the zones one by one.
Three first-hand reports in five hours, starting in Westfall
The first thread on Blizzard's US forums went up at 19:52 UTC on November 6 (3:52 a.m. November 7, Beijing time). The poster was in Westfall at that moment: hundreds of mobs crowding the map, with ghost players attacking them. Two minutes later a second thread followed, still Westfall, this time hundreds of duplicate NPCs.
Wowhead rounded the picture up in an article published at 4:11 a.m. Beijing time on November 7: for a period, NPCs and mobs briefly appeared in multiple copies, making some areas dangerous or lining up clones of the same NPC.
Close to midnight, another player posted a video: right after clearing a Battered Chest, the entire layer refreshed in an instant (forum timestamp 00:35 UTC, November 7). Monsters were not the only thing duplicating - chests and the rest of a layer's entities were coming back too.
Blizzard's answer: "a slight blip in the multiverse"
By the time Wowhead published, the official response had already landed in a server message, relayed so far only through Wowhead. As translated: the multiverse had a slight blip, and all zones were being de-blipped. The tone is a joke; the substance is not. Officially, the problem exists, the cleanup is underway, and it covers every zone.
The limits are just as clear. No patch notes have been posted, and no matching blue post has surfaced on the official forums - the response lives only in that server message so far. When the cleanup finishes, and whether kills and loot made during the glitch will be handled, has not been announced.
Until it lands: two habits for leveling and looting
Do not brawl doubled mob packs in low-level zones. Wowhead's account has duplicates making some areas genuinely dangerous - on a map like Westfall, which you cross around level 10, twice the mobs means twice the swarming. Classes with thin health bars should hug the road and back off the moment a field fills up.
The same goes for chests. If a spot you just cleared refills within seconds, suspect a layer refresh rather than a fresh elite spawn. Blizzard has not asked players to do anything extra; the duplicates are theirs to clean. A screenshot or clip with a timestamp and coordinates is all you need if you want to keep evidence.
The official word stops at "in progress" - no completion notice yet. While leveling through Westfall and other busy zones, a glance at mob density is enough: when the copies are gone and cleared chests stay cleared, the cleanup has reached your layer. If the phantoms are still there, move on and level elsewhere.