In this thread, feel free to discuss any class issues related to the reduction of spell batching that you’ve come across while testing the 1.13.7 PTR.
Please submit bug reports via the in-game bug reporting tool in the PTR.
Thank you for testing with us!
Will this affect the ability for multiple people get a songflower buff? ie would all the people trying to get it have to click within 10ms of each other?
Hi, I speak for the classic WoW speedrunning community, and we often use the batching mechanics to hearth somewhere while setting the hearthstone to the previous location.
I will explain with detail: You run up to the innkeeper, open the hearthstone bind location prompt, start casting your hearthstone and then click accept when the spell cast is almost done.
This allow you to, for instance, hearth from Darkshore to Westfall while setting your hearthstone to Darkshore, so you can level faster by using your hearthstone to travel between Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms.
With the reduction of the batching window, this is still possible but instead of having a 400ms window to pull that off, you now have a much shorter window, and if you consider things like latency jitter, what used to be a very consistent trick to pull off, is now pretty much random.
If you look at this through the lens of a speedrunner, that means you have a random chance of losing your run to some arbitrary random mechanic outside your control, which only sucks the fun out of speedrunning the game.
I did some testing on the PTR and found out that changing your HS bind location is still on the 400ms batch window while the 10s Hearthstone cast is not.
Thank you for this change, but also consider that some batching is necessary for some stuff to work and be reliable. Examples : vanishing spells, interrupting people that fake cast (too much batching and fake cast is impossible, too little and you get juked all the time) jumping a charge/intercept, using a cc to counter a cc, such as gouging a fear, shadow step a feral charge, etc. I guess batching gives an edge to rogue mostly… nevermind they wont need any help!
But if its everything in the same window, then ill take 10ms over 400ms any day of the week.
In our testing on the new PTR, we’ve been able to have multiple people get it at the same time.
Will the new more retail like batching also use the retail like mutil thread where there are more channels for abilities to use?
Have you considered just allowing the Songflower to be clicked by other players for some amount of seconds after it has been clicked? Seems like a minor change that would lessen a lot of frustration.
I have a simple macro that I use in battle stance:
/cast charge
/cast Berserker Stance
Currently when I use it, I gain the 12 rage that the charge tooltip indicates, even though my character currently has no points into Tactical Mastery. Is this due to spell batching? Or will the macro continue to work?
I imagine that if the rage is generated on contact but you change stance mid charge, then spell batch timing would not change its behavior.
The main thing that seems like it needs to be adjusted is melee leeway. It’s still a very large radius, which as I understood was originally the case because of the large batching window.
Melee leeway has existed since Vanilla, it still exists in BfA today and has not been adjusted. The formula is the same; there’s a reason it still exists:
Melee attack: MAX(5, SourceCombatReach + TargetCombatReach + 4/3) + IfSourceAndTargetAreRunning(8/3)
Ranged attack: SourceCombatReach + TargetCombatReach + AttackRange + IfSourceAndTargetAreRunning(2)
AoE: TargetCombatReach + AttackRadius + IfSourceIsRunning(2)
Naked Mages can already kill BiS geared Warriors. How much more overpowered do you want them to be?
For ret paladins:
The change in batching seems to have made it so that paladin seals lost their leeway when it comes to reapplying them. If a seal is not active at swing start, it can not proc, whereas before paladins could apply a seal even after a white hit landed and still be eligible for a trigger.
Secondly, the change in batching modified the interactions with the hand of justice trinket. On the 400 ms batching, HoJ could trigger on an SoC hit (.8s after the white hit), then with the HoJ’s built in delay before the next white swing, the extra hit would be eligible for a second SoC proc as it was outside of the internal cooldown of SoC at that point. Under a 10ms batch, that is no longer possible.
That said, the reduction in the HoJ proc delay is an overall buff to the trinket outside of those scenarios (it’s a massive buff to cat druids using it), and actually makes it feel like an extra hit rather than just a swing reset.
Thirdly, through some short testing I had a few instances using SoR where getting a vengeance proc on the hit did not apply to the SoR hit that follows. There may not be enough of a delay to make the follow up hit benefit from the buff the paladin gains between them.
On PTR currently its possible to use abilities like Blizzard or hellfire or hurricane etc. and apply the effect on your target in pvp as well as get them out of stealth without entering combat if you cancel it fast enough.
There is a bunch of mechanics that I can’t test myself but I’m gonna put it out here for anyone willing to test it:
Can you still gouge a mage’s blink?
Can you still break CC with hellfire?
Can you still get a double fear ward by using fear ward at the very end of a fear cast? Back in vanilla/tbc you could use fear ward just like shadow word: death at the very end of the cast, so you could prevent the incoming fear and not lose
the fear ward buff
Can you still pop rogues out of vanish (or stealth) if you hit them within 400ms from vanishing?
You can still have two spells benefit from Elemental Mastery. Dont know if thats intended or not but it’s there. Everything else Shaman feels great and responsive, from grounding to interrupts to even Earthbind ticks.
Bit difficult for me to try and raid on PTR, but I think Sapphiron Chill should be looked into. On live, it appears to apply the slow and then the damage in successive batches, which makes it significantly more forgiving to move out of in the meantime. But with a tiny batching window this might no longer be the case
This strikes me as a tremendous overreaction and mistake which fundamentally changes the game in a way that the people asking for it have never appreciated.
Here are some advanced gameplay tricks I use daily as a Rogue which depend on spell batching:
Vanish immuning PvE mechanics such as Nefarian’s fear
Batching Blade Flurry backstab procs when a mob is positioned just out of blade flurry range, by strafing into range of the 2nd mob after each Backstab.
Gouging Blinks in PvP
Vanish-immuning incoming abilities in PvP (blind, deathcoil, etc)
While so far all of this sounds like complaining about nerfs, in fact this change will be a massive PvP buff for Rogues (a class which doesn’t need it) while also significantly lowering the skillcap and eliminating the advanced techniques which keep the class fresh and challenging 16 years later.
In particular, the massive overreaction to the batching window will mean it’s possible to Restealth off of (improved) Gouge and your opponent can’t batch an attack right as they are coming out of Gouge to deny the Restealth. It’s also a large buff to Vanish by making it harder to batch a spell on Vanish and break the Rogue out.
This is a horrible mistake and I’m extremely disappointed to see Blizzard giving into the whiners and crybabies and taking us further away from authentic vanilla WoW gameplay.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the players who are asking for this change: they think WoW is about reaction. In fact that is wrong, WoW is about prediction not reaction. WoW has always been a rather slow and not tremendously mechanically responsive game. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, BUT, if you died because the ability that would have saved you got batched, the error that got you killed is not that you weren’t able to react fast enough, your problem is that you didn’t understand the situation well enough to see it coming and be prepared.
Fundamentally, these players have failed to understand that WoW - a game with a 1.5 second GCD for most classes - is a turn based strategy game, NOT an action game where blazing fast reaction should matter.
Please reconsider.
You are right in your assessment, but unfortunately most players don’t appreciate how batching allows some really cool tricks in PvP. I remember watching a WSG tournament where some guy managed to kill the enemy FC and secure the victory by using a sapper charge to break a sheep.
Another trick I use consistently is dropping a freezing trap and wing clipping a target on the same batch, so even if your trap breaks early to a dispel or a heartbeat resist, you are not totally screwed since your target is also slowed.
I understand that 400ms batching can be extremely frustrating to a player that doesn’t know how the game works, but it dramatically raises the skill ceiling and it feels very rewarding when you master those subtle mechanics.
Yup, I don’t appreciate what bashing offer at the cost of losing reliability and losing my own reaction time, yep I said REACTION because this game is both reaction and prediction, especially in a world without bashing…your fast reaction will win fights for sure, assuming a good ping ofc.
Skill ceiling? eh I guess so but I’m sure you can live without and since you guys like to exploit, you’ll find new exploits with the new system I’m pretty sure.
awww… bug fix at the end of classic and ret pallies lose again.
@blizzard I must say you were right about “think you do, but you don’t”
I thought I wanted to play this game, but I didn’t want all of the verbal abuse from fellow players due to vindictive design decisions from 17 years ago.
Some minor change could be made to bring ret pallies in line with other melee dps. No one would suffer.
You can fix minor bugs. Classic is basically dead. Maybe just make ret pallies not trash for a few months? Would that be so onerous?
TBC Pre-Patch maybe?
I’m not sure if the TBC pre-patch would work, since I think the talents expect you to be level 70 to fully utilize them.
I’m thinking more of a hack, like a baseline damage increase while inside instances and maybe tack it onto 2h weapon skill or vengeance or something.