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Character: Kavric@Eranikus
Using Blind on a rogue who has just vanished used to break the vanish, but now ill get an error saying invalid target. This includes when im targeting the enemy rogue for that fraction of a second before target deselects.
I tested it by having friends spam vanish when coming out of a CC. Over hundreds of duels only a select few interacted with blind at all.
There should only be 4 possible outcomes when attempting to blind a vanishing rogue in wotlk, assuming evasion isnt up.
1: you blind too early, so theyre correctly affected by blind.
2: you blind in the same window as they vanish, which negates the blind.
3: you blind late, and theyre pulled from stealth by the cc.
4: you miss for a variety of reasons.
Dueling other rogues was something i did tirelessly on live wotlk servers. Never once did i get an invalid target error. Thousands of duels. (Not arena tournament or other servers. Proper wotlk. Auchindoun NA, Arthas NA, Balnazzar NA.)
Whats causing this weirdly tight frame where the two spells interact like this?
To be clear, there should be no scenario where my chaeacter doesnt activate blind. It should either be too fast or too slow. Not an invalid target and fail to fire.
I didnt play era or tbcc due to real life constraints so my first exposure to this was in wrath classic. So i would hesitate to say its exclusive to 3.4.0, this is just my first time experiencing it on the modern client.
That being said, its been here since launch of wrath classic. So, not a new bug. I didnt realize we has a wrath bug report forum until now.
I’ll look into it, can you actively see the Rogue you’re trying to Blind and it says invalid target? E.g. he vanishes, you press blind, and you see him fading, then targeting goes away?
The invalid target shows up while the rogue is still visible including the vanish buff on their buffs.
I have a short recording here you can see. It happens roughly at 11 seconds.
The method we were using for testing was just for the player who was going to be vanishing to spam vanish while coming out of gouge, and the other to just attempt to blind as they vanish with the goal of either the blind being negated or the blind negating the vanish.
If you slow it down you can see that as gouge ends, and the vanish buff appears on his frame, I’ve pressed blind and the invalid target appears before his target frame disappears and it switches to no target.
Here’s two separate frames showing blind being pushed and then the invalid target.
He’res one showing that it wasn’t the result of being grouped in a party.
I was wondering if the recordings and screencaptures above address your question about the bug?
The order seems to be → Vanish (with me blinding on the same frame or within miliseconds of the action) → Invalid Target, blind doesn’t activate → Vanish and Stealth start to function and I drop target → I have no target.
First off, thanks for all of this - it’s really helpful. I apologize that I can’t provide screenshots in return, but I’ll share with you my results.
So I conducted an investigation on this and verified that: Blind then Vanish resulted in a Blind that doesn’t land, and Vanish then Blind resulted in a Blind breaking the Vanish in 3.3.5.
But my investigation also resulted in showing that the invalid target result actually existed in 3.3.5 in almost the same manner as your experiment, but not quite as frequent as it is on 3.4.2. When it’s going to happen on 3.3.5 it doesn’t give you an Invalid target message immediately, it will have your blind lightup, begin the gcd on the icon, and then it will fail and return the Invalid target message when the target fades.
So the reason you’re getting Invalid target while the enemy is still fading is likely due to the fact that original WotLK had a small delay/batching and now batching is 10ms.
The interaction was possible because the game registered a successful cast of Blind and Successful cast of Vanish and then needed to resolve them.
But because Blind lands so quickly now you can no longer Vanish someone’s incoming Blind, you’re just Blinded. So the game never registers a Successful Vanish cast.
And because Vanish registers so quickly now you can no longer Blind someone’s vanish, they just get the Vanish off, and you are given Invalid target. So the game never registers a Successful Blind cast.
You can maybe still do this but it would have to be within .01 seconds of each other.
So this result of the Invalid target existed, but was almost never seen back in the day, but due to a different batch window in Classic - the old interactions of Vanish and Blind will be very very very rare.
I hope that explains it.
Little note on this:
Not completely closing the door on this because there may very well be something up with this Invalid target/stealth as I’ve seen some strange clips lately but I’ll keep it in mind if I find other instances I can reproduce and are more awkward.
This is what we’ve found as well. Spamming duels trying to force the interaction maybe 1% or less of the time we got an actual negated interaction.
This is also probably affecting most of the other things I’d planned to bring up as being inconsistent. Like Gouging a mage who blinked for them to appear at the destination affected by gouge. Now you’ll simply prevent the blink as they can’t activate it while incapacitated.
That’s exciting news.
I don’t suppose there’s any chance of changing the batching to be more “faithful” to the original game? As you’ve confirmed, it was consistent and (Relatively) reliable to force this interaction with good timing. Which made it a really core part of rogue vs rogue gameplay, inside and outside the arena. From what I’ve been told by people who played TBCC, this batching issue didn’t exist and the interaction worked the same way as it should’ve. So I guess I wonder why it’s been changed?
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, and I’m sure this holds little sway, but the ability to do these things was something very special & has a very near and dear place to most (old) rogues hearts who played back then.
I’m sure most people are satisfied that the “negate” interaction currently works correctly with projectile spells, but that instant-cast 10ms batching window in 3.3.5 can be the difference between life & death, and the true Rogue experience is to have that window.
Thanks for your efforts on this. I’ll stay hopeful.
Won’t speak on this too much but batching was changed coming out of Vanilla Classic WoW for many reasons - so bringing it back, even for two abilities, probably isn’t a thing that’ll happen. I’m afraid the authentic batched experience is not something you’ll get in the modern version of Classic.
Don’t underestimate the sway here. I actually am very aware of this, I played Warrior/Rogue/H Pal/Ele Sham throughout original Vanilla/TBC/WotLK and arena’d a lot. Gouging a Mage’s Blink was basically GG if you could guess if they’ll blink your Cheap Shot or Kidney and figuring out which kind of Mage player they are with their blink. Rogues also could double Blind and double Sap each other and just stand there watching one another for 10 seconds spamming their next ability. So it’s something I have fond memories of, and even kind of adored the charm of it. I know it was an expression of skill to be able to understand the system, and use that to play mind games or read people. But I think it was usually seen as more chaotic - “I pressed my ability and it didn’t do what it said it would do.” so having more consistency to the behaviors of things I think is just a better gameplay experience on average, at least for me. Can’t tell you how many times I Lay on Hands someone and they still died.
I do get this shifted the Arena meta a little bit for Rogue v. Rogue. Before it was attempting to outplay them was the right move, and you were rewarded if you could. Now it’s best to trade cooldowns on a script and win if the script favors you. Less dynamic, less variance, but also less frustration moments.
Yeah. That’s pretty much what it boils down to. It’s the same as (rogue v rogue comp) arena was post-wrath basically. Gone are the high risk high reward outplays, but the actual script and micro are much more important.
Well, anyway, if you find anything regarding the invalid target that’d be great if it turns out to be something. Thanks for expanding on this, and at least crushing my hope rather than leaving it open for the batching haha. Better to know it won’t happen than to anguish over it.
Just to confirm, would that batching thing you mentioned where it’s just the modern client being much faster at registering keypresses, or whatever, be causing other interactions like the gouge blink we mentioned, or things like being unable to sap a rogue who is vanishing?
The vanish one is strange to me because it’s something you can spam harmlessly and should go off no?
Exactly so. When I say sapping a vanish, I mean that sap “window” on rogues who vanished in previous expansions, 3.3.5 so for example, if you were beside a rogue who was in combat and they used vanish while you were A: in stealth and spamming sap. B: vanished before they did and started to spam sap or C: were using shadow dance, and spammed sap on that rogue, the sap would catch the rogues vanish and they’d end up in a Sap.
I mean that if I’m attempting to sap a rogue intentionally, knowing they will vanish, so I’m repeatedly as fast as I can pressing my sap button targeted at that rogue, in 3.3.5 that will put them in sap if they vanish. (obviously, they need to be in combat first or you’ll just sap them normally.)
So specifically, I can’t seem to recreate any conditions to counter a rogues vanish on the modern client by using sap. I expect it’s batching but since spamming was a valid techinque to do this in the past, I don’t understand how batching can interfere with it. unless my keypresses are literally too slow and the batching is just that precise.
Again this appeared to work in TBC, classic (hearsay). So I’m concerned it’s the batching thing but since sap has some other conditions i wonder if it’s not the invalid target issue?
My current theory is that when someone vanishes you see them but they aren’t a valid target while they’re fading.
They have successfully cast vanish and if they disappeared in 10ms it would look like they just straight up disappeared instantly.
But the animation, smoke, and final movement of them plays or is visible to you.
So my theory is you see them during that time, but they’re already affected by stealth and the rules of being in stealth for targeting.
I think a way to bring attention to Vanish and not batch being an issue here you’d need to have a low level Rogue that you would easily see the entire time they’re vanished, like legit level 30.
Have them be in combat, you spamming sap next to them, and then have them vanish. Does it say invalid target? Or do you sap them right away?
This is what’s confusing to me. As I’m using gouge as a timer. Like my opponent is spamming vanish as they leave the CC to make sure we don’t mistime it. Obviously there’s a margin of error but I’m pressing blind within miliseconds of their vanish since we’re counting down together on the gouge.
So yeah, the target and frame is visible. But that happened in live wotlk too.
This is a screenshot of a screencapture I have of some old duels from 2008, whih are low resolution and unfortunately i’ve lost the original files so I have to use this method lol. as you can see it’s the same thing, minus the fact that i’m not blinding them.
But when I would blind them, the icon wouldn’t show up in the first place.
Hmm…
Am i misunderstanding or does that confirm your findings? Sorry.
It seems that sometimes the vanish icon and their frame would show the rogue had activated vanish, and other times it wouldn’t.
I realize the resolution is poor but the last two of the above screenshots are of my friend vanishing my blind back in 2008 on live servers, Auchindoun US. that’s my rogue I’m posting on, Varick, before the transfer off of Auchindoun. In the 3rd one, you can see the Vanish Icon and the frame and all those other things which you describe here.
But then, in the 2nd screenshot you can see that they’ve done the same thing but there’s no indication on their buff bar that anything has happened.
Does this provide any new information? I’m not sure. Edit: Mixed up 2nd and 3rd.
