Spawn

To spawn in most games means to spontaneously come into existence, as in the case of a mob appearing right beside you during a fight, for example. In the context that that particular mob had probably just been killed, it would be deemed a respawn.

Spawning is a game mechanism to replace killed mobs and harvested resource nodes over time. This way areas won't be completely empty with nothing to kill or harvest. Mobs that drop quest items and resource nodes that provide quest items also must respawn or their quest item(s) can't be looted again.

When one first encounters the spawning of mobs in a game, and I speak mainly here of MMORPG type games, it can be somewhat disconcerting. Since the player wasn't mentally prepared for the spawn to appear and join the fight, their strategy and tactics might not have made allowances concerning add(s). And since they can't figure out what just happened quickly enough to apply crowd control measures (such as mezzing, rooting, stunning, or sheeping) the add(s) or run, the player normally dies.

Typically though, a mob that has spawned next to a player will act unaware of the player for a few seconds. If you notice a mob spawn next to you, you have an opportunity to quickly get out of aggro radius. Unfortunately, most of the time you will not notice the newly spawned mob until it attacks you.

Respawn time

In larger raid dungeons the NPC's will typically be on a one week respawn time. This is a measure taken by Blizzard to prevent high-level players from repeatedly farming the dungeons. This does not apply to normal instances.

• Note: while looting and skinning corpses can in some cases cause the body to disappear faster, there is no evidence that these actions actually make the NPC respawn faster.

The respawn time is the amount of time an NPC or resource node takes to be replaced after having been killed or otherwise used. This depends on the NPC or node and location. In some areas the respawn time is very short. In others, it can be very long. Resource nodes and mobs that are critical to quests frequently have short respawn times and will reappear after a few minutes. Other cases of short respawn times usually occur when it is expected that a large number of players will be killing NPCs.

On the other hand, some rare mobs have very long respawn times, such as Broken Tooth, who has an 8 hour respawn time. Generally, named mobs will have longer respawn times than non-named ones, while bosses will have no respawn time, as they do not respawn. Mobs found in raid dungeons will usually have a respawn timer that is as long as the instance reset, though there are cases where this is untrue.