Hello,
My 1 year old iMac “dies” - total shut down and has to be unplugged for 20 minutes to be able to restart since new patch.
It can happen 1 second in game or 1 hour in game, irrespective of where my char is.
It can happen when I press 1 single key.
I have done every suggestion by tech, but problem still persists!
I am scared to run WOW now since it completely crashes my iMac.
My iMac works perfectly in any other program!
Please help
Thank you
I fear I have somewhat bad news for you here: owing to the design of MacOS (and pretty much every other operating system these days) it is not actually possible for an application/game to force a shutdown on its own.
This can only be triggered by the operating system or the hardware itself, if there are circumstances that demand it (e.g. hardware overheating, power failure, and similar events). If this indeed only occurs when running WoW it may be related to the game happening to tap into a particular component of your Mac that has an underlying problem, but such problems cannot be caused by games - just be made visible.
You will want to have your Mac checked out by a technician as soon as possible - from the way you described the symptoms there is unfortunately a solid chance there is something going rather seriously wrong on the hardware level.
Thank you for response.
Before last patch, I have used same iMac for WOW during the past year (I had to get a new iMac due to old iMac’s incompatibility with WOW BFA). Problem started occurring with last patch. Do you still believe it is a iMac issue?
And did you tried to analyze the problem? Maybe one of the components get to hot and the system has a safety shutdown?
Try running some stress test like Furmark or something that will hit the CPU as well. Same for memtest and some storage test just to be sure.
Actually, yes - even more so now, to be quite honest.
To explain that in a bit more detail: the last few patches of WoW included a number of updates that made fuller use of the hardware the game had listed as its minimum requirements since the launch of BFA - so while the requirements of the game did not change any underlying weakness in the hardware would by now very likely show up much more prominently.
The game, like any other application, still cannot cause a full systemic shutdown on its own… but it most certainly can put a respectable amount of load on the hardware, and if said hardware cannot handle that (although it very much should be able to, if it meets the listed requirements) the result would be just as described.
Getting these full shutdown crashes suddenly as well. I am on an imac Pro with the Vega 64.
I have had the system under load before without these sudden crashes.
I suspect that the bug is in the latest system update (10.15.4) , because I had a crash in another game as well.
I got a clue in a halfway crash in vanilla, I got graphics artifacts so it could be a bad gfx driver? Specifically, the tree textures (leaves) were bugging out.
BUT Vanilla is at this point unplayable because I get a crash every time I have a play session, not immediately but certainly every session. (Starting to get worried it will corrupt the OS)
You are completely wrong. A bad coded app can easy shutdown/crash computer.
I’ve heard about broken AMD drivers recently but not broken apps that use the GPU 
There is a non-zero chance WoW does something incorrectly but if it would it would be expected to see way more of such reports. There was (and still is?) a regression on macOS that was mass reported but that just crashed the game unless you limited the particle effects.
I have the same problem and only in wow. I am also told the problem is in my iMac. My 1 year old iMac, however my iMac worked fine before last patch - also in wow. My iMac will crash either 1 second in game, 10 minutes or I can play wow an entire day before crash. It crashes and shuts down immediately, has to be unplugged from power, rest for 20 minutes before it will restart - cant be healthy for a sensitive piece of machinery. I have deleted Twitch and am not running any addons. I have erased virus program etc. Now it also crashes the second I sign up for Dungeons. I am not seeing Blizzard taking the problem seriously but only referring problem to me as a hardware problem. Which is unfortunate since I had to buy new iMac last year ONLY to keep playing wow and now wow is almost unavailable to me on same iMac. Can we get some serious looking into this problem, Blizzard. Sad if I have to give up wow after 10 years of gameplay.
Sounds potentially like overheating so I’d check temperatures first as iMacs are fairly compact so they might have issues with thermals, especially if the ambient temperature is warm.
I am not familiar with monitoring software for MacOSX but I am sure there are some and search engines should be able to find some.
Thank you for advice, however it is not likely since it can happen the second I press the keyboard to enter wow. Since there is zero minutes of gameplay it is not likely that the iMac is overheated. Due to the fact that the iMac crashes and shuts down, I get no error messages to work with. Only since last patch this happened! - worked fine before!
Wrong reply to I guess Insta-shutdown could also be due to power draw restrictions or something. OSX should have logs stored so after fresh boot you could try to check what it was saying before the shutdown.
https://www.howtogeek.com/356942/how-to-view-the-system-log-on-a-mac/
Resetting the PRAM is usually the first port of call for these Mac toys.