Patch 2.4.3 and WotLK had faster batching and I call on anyone to watch Reckful’s videos and tell me that they look laggy like Classic. TBC needs to be made the way it was. In layman’s, “some batching” not “lots of batching” and not “no batching”. You can’t just remove batching all together, it wraps the game.
Regarding increased damage.
Ability queue, paired with the removal of batching, are to blame. Hasted GCD’s and instants scale profoundly with those two changes. The game’s tick rate is 4x faster and now you die 4x faster. Yes, removing batching, adding queued spells - they allow for optimized parsing. I’m sure some enjoy this, especially raiders crossing over from retail.
However, within the arena, this optimized damage totally warps the pacing of the game. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Regarding mechanics.
Let’s start with a basic example. Two warriors running at each other mashing the Charge button. The one with better ping wins.
Exactly how is it that fair? The one with better ping wins?
Another basic example. You can no longer Shadow Word: Death a Mage’s polymorph. That’s a pretty huge change unless I’m missing something. Sure, yes, you can still pull it off if you target someone other than the mage - but what exactly is going on here that this made it past Beta?
A less popular example, but an important one.
Kick and Counterspell. Yes, I realize that it’s unenjoyable to have those on a delay.
However, it’s become child’s play to interrupt Fel Domination or even Mass Dispel, whereas before that kind of a maneuver required quite a lot of premeditated guile. In layman’s, reacting to something in 0.5s is not difficult. The average reaction time for any human is about 0.2s.
The examples could fill a novel.
However, there’s a secondary issue here and an even more important one.
> Locking down an enemy with successive abilities like Silence/Stun has become significantly more optimized.
Before, you would have to cast a blanket silence a moment or two in advance to guarantee lockdown. Now you can wait until the very last 0.01s and not only squeeze in more damaging abilities, but also improve the total lockdown time by multiple seconds. The attackers never waste a single drop of efficiency.
So where does this leave us?
Hyper fast arenas with optimized parses where ping can lead to advantages
Different mechanics that few seem to enjoy
A dying part of the game that many would have expected to flourish
Do any of the arenajunkies even stream 2v/3v anymore? Right now the queues are a total wasteland except on Monday when everyone hops on for quick points.
What needs to be done?
Bring back Spell Batching at WotLK/2.4.3 speeds
Disable ability queue
They will complain. They will complain loudly. Those complaints won’t translate into action. The sorry state of Arena, however, has rotted away your numbers.
If you want your arenajunkie streamers to advertise your game then fix these problems now. I very seriously doubt that those changes require much effort.
My ping is 60ms, I don’t have ping problems, but I’ve seen a Warrior with 70ms lose a Charge battle to a Warrior with 30ms enough times to know that the game is not functioning properly.
And by the way, there’s nothing sillier than two Rogues trying to Gouge each other and the chosen victor is the guy closer to the datacenter. We all have similar ping but suddenly a 10ms difference decides outcomes?
I’m not even sure Counterstrike was this punishing in the 90s.
The ping issue in your talk about the warriors has always been a thing.
when you death a mage and he doesnt have shields on it causes pushback on the spell which is why it doesnt work a lot. That isnt an issue with batching as it is with spell pushback. Do it while the mage has a shield on and it works fine.
For kick and Counterspell, people are just better at the game now and know what to look for. Ive kicked fel dom and mass dispel since BC and never really had to much a problem with it.
Yes, but the issue is that Mages are too strong, not that Priests are too weak. Priests are plenty strong.
If you’re out of the loop, here’s what happens. The damage from the ability causes instant pushback on the cast, and so the cast does not go off. Then the Priest takes damage, and then the cast finishes.
Naturally, if the Mage is shielded then this scenario does not happen because he will not take damage to be pushed back, but the point still stands that the mechanic is often different and it is to the Mage’s advantage.
And does anyone think that Mage’s need advantages right now?
It isn’t actually. If you have higher then 30ms deathing sheeps just isn’t realistic unless you can target another player nearby.
It instantly causes spell push back so you have to be in the same .01 of the cast actually completing. The backlash from death happens instantly instead of having a delay like live.
What you use death mainly for is trying to gamble a rogue pushing for blind or deathing a sheep/mana burn so you pushback then either range or los.
My dude. With batching there was literally a ~200ms delay on those abilities.
Skill has nothing to do with it, the mechanism for interrupt was different. Reacting wasn’t an option, you had to cast Kick before you saw the Fel Dom start because batching ticks were sometimes as high as 400ms.
And I don’t doubt that people are better - but it is undeniable that shaving off a delay on interrupts makes it easier to interrupt.
And it is undeniable that Rogues, and Mages, are dominating like crazy right now.
…welcome to online gaming? I don’t know what to say here, people with better internet connections will perform (on average) better than people with worse internet connections.
This is no different than seeing a cast go off, but because of latency you’re just too slow to catch it with a Counterspell and your partner dies. That’s not unfair, you just have bad net and you have to deal with that limitation.
This isn’t unfair either, this is a quirk of batching/latency abused by players in the know. Any average player looking at SW:Death would not think there is sufficient delay in an instant cast spell with no travel time to fit before a Polymorph cast landing, but reflect back after. Perhaps it was an interesting showcase of skill, perhaps not, but it is (largely) gone now and everyone has to deal with that.
Get better at pump-casting and take advantage of how easy it is to squeeze off a Kick/Counterspell from a trigger-happy person. Or just eat the silence like any other CC when and where you need.
So sounds like good coordinated CC has a higher ceiling than before, which means more skill expression and less slush at the top. This is a good thing.
These takes miss the point completely of what classic was supposed to be about… capturing the magic of the original, blemishes and all.
Sure, I can re-adjust and alter my play (as a Rogue main, this means re-adjusting to the fact that it’s now easier for me to interrupt certain spells that used to be very difficult but rewarding to interrupt), but that’s not the point.
Removal of batching is literally taking a WoD gameplay mechanic and forcing it onto classic. Yet nobody is playing classic for WoD mechanics lol.
Wrong. Nobody wants to play on 2004 servers. They wanna walk to dungeons and have class variation. Classic never meant bring back inherent flaws from technical limitations. If you thought you were good back in the day and are getting stomped on now, sorry.