I have found that Animations are taking priority over actions, their calculations and their application to a degree where Animations are preventing intended gameplay from occurring.
Best/Easiest Example to replicate:
- Choose either a Priest, Mage or Warlock at least level 58 with a Wand of 1.60 speed (what I happen to have for this personal testing)
- Locate any form of Crustburster around Hellfire Peninsula to use as a test subject.
- Approach the Crustburster from behind and get it to start its unburrow animation.
- Get around anywhere from 10-15yd range behind the Crustburster and immediately start Shoot with your wand and allow full auto.
- Observe as the Crustburster simply sits there emerged not turning around, not burrowing, not resetting, getting behind you, nothing.
- Loot your kill.
What I suspect is occurring here, is the unburrow animation is interrupted by the combat engagement and taking of damage. I did attempt to do the same with a thrown weapon on my Warrior, but ti simply reset after the third throw.
I do not believe this is a wand-only bug.
I have experienced other forms of animation slowing/blocking with my priest. If i do not use Power Word: Shield when using my wand and taking attacks, my attack animation and thus rate of attack decrease rapidly, depending on how fast the attacker is, with the shield down.
I have also experienced similar behavior with proc activation of trinkets and skills alike, forcing their animation through and for the duration no other actions are able to take place by the producing entity.
I only played Vanilla Classic for around 2 weeks, leaving for various reasons including the “rush to first” mentality over enjoying the experience. Upon my return, picking up where I left off and upgrading characters briefly prior and only really playing TBC:C around a month and a half ago.
Starting off with my Prot pally, I found being parried, missing and having mobs dodge far too frequently for the level. I took this action with a grain of salt, and used a respec to ensure I had the +hit talent moving forward, this did not help. I asked about it in chat and got : “its an expertise thing” so sure i let it go at that… enter my Fury warrior shortly there after…
My Fury warrior was hating life, the “Warrios suck in TBC” aside, for the level, the amount of dodges, parried and misses was staggering with not only dual wield, but also with a shield and with 2h weapons. I found that faster weapons suffered far more, but again left it alone with “its just TBC changes”.
Today I had this revelation with these Crustbursters and all the pieces seemed to fall into place. Witnessing not only fury warriors but rogues going full spaz when fighting mobs…They were trying for force the animation block out! So then earlier today, my warrior was literally doing peanuts to a mob it attacked as Fury, where it had laid the same one, higher level to rest quite quickly just prior… A Gnome mage stops and laughs at me: “parry, parry, dodge, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, miss, miss, dodge, parry, etc, etc” and I die… to a mob I had just easily wiped out with less than 5% health damage prior, lower level with me, WITH enough +hit and expertise to have prevented it.
– IT ALL LINED UP–
I realized that much of the wonky gameplay issues, mobs in general not acting correctly and being outright buggy in exciting and new ways…was actually the Animations taking priority and not being canceled/overidden properly!
This is very much a bug, I do not know if its simply the modern API thing or what, but in Classic, TBC, WotLK and the short bit in Cata -This was not the case. Animations were overridden and canceled all the time! Animations did not try and force their way through and determine if an action occurred, the algorithms did.
Please allow animations to be overridden, skipped discarded w/e. While animations are nice and all, this is breaking gameplay and effectively ruining gameplay for certain classes and AI activity in general. This will only get worse and more game breaking in Wrath.