How to trick WoW to play from network drive / NAS?

Solution 1:

there is a way in windows to run wow but its clunky. you can go into disk management and create a virtual hard drive on the NAS and put wow in it. after wow is on the virtual hard drive you can mount it in disk management and the game will run fine. its clunky but it works.

Solution 2:

They indeed stopped supporting network drives.

Network folder installations of this game are no longer supported. Please move your game folder to a local drive, then try again.​ Error Codes:

BLZBNTAGT00000BC2

Source

I haven't tested this, but you could as well try to map the shared drive to a folder instead using a symbolic link. I'm not sure, if the launcher accepts that one.

Command for this: mklink /d "c:\whatever\" "\\server\whatever\"

(You need to have elevated rights and the local folder must not exist. It will be created by this command.)