Classic is already not going to be what it was. It’s a Frankenstein project, but replicating spell batching will make it a lot more authentic than not having it.
Here it is again explaining how spell batching works and why it was horribly random,
I don’t want to get too deep into the under-the-hood workings of WoW servers, but here’s a super short version. Any action that one unit takes on another different unit used to be processed in batches every 400ms. Some very attentive people may have noticed that healing yourself would give you the health instantly (minus client/server latency), whereas healing another unit would incur a delay of between 0ms and 400ms (again, on top of client/server latency). Same with damaging, applying auras, interrupting, knocking back, etc.
That delay can feel bad just due to the somewhat laggy responsiveness feeling, but also because the state of things can change during that time. For example: Holly the Holy Priest is healing Punky the Brewmaster. Punky spikes low, and Holly hits Guardian Spirit in a panic. The server verifies that Holly is able to cast it, and that Punky is alive (great!). The cast goes off, Guardian Spirit goes on cooldown, and a request is placed for the Guardian Spirit aura (that prevents dying) to be placed on Punky. That request will be filled next time the 400ms timer loops, which happens to be 320ms from now. 250ms later, the boss lands another hit on on Punky. Punky dies. Sadface. Another 70ms goes by, and the Guardian Spirit aura request pops up, and goes “Hey guys, I’m here!.. Aww… damn, I missed the party. Sadface.”
We no longer batch them up like that. We just do it as fast as we can, which usually amounts to between 1ms and 10ms later. It took a considerable amount of work to get it working that way, but we’re very pleased with the results so far; the game feels noticeably more responsive.
I can’t guarantee that you’ll never ever again run into cases where Guardian Spirit went on cooldown and the tank still died… but it’ll be literally 40x rarer than before, and the whole game will feel more responsive too.
I already answered to that with an example.
In your classic wow pom pyro gets off first, youre dead. You cant vanish it anymore, you cant reflect it anymore when it goes off with engi, you can ground it anymore when its cast. All you could do would be iceblock or shieldwall.
What do we have? Way less options to counter it and way more options for the bad mage to just press his macro (I imagine that beeing you).
I can go on for hours if u want more examples. All you have is a pve example of a bad healer that cant heal earlier and fails due to it.
I can imagine that beeing you too.
Not sure if I used this batching in vanilla, but sounds interesting. Maybe they’ll look into it before pvp release?
So you mean with the games release as open pvp is pvp?
Yeah the game does feel slightly more responsive than before I will give you that, but the positive impacts batching had on PvP are just invaluable. It’s think it’s very little to do with RNG when you gouge a mages blink. Good rogues will do it nearly 100% of the time, if they’re not on gcd and so far that is your only argument against it. I highly doubt you would ever gouge a mages blink or vanish their pom pyro, and hint hint it’s not because you were unlucky
I meant when they release battlegrounds maybe if enough people ask for it they might at least investigate what would be involved in doing the batching.
Open pvp is a big part of classic wow. I certainly wont play if they do not implement this from the beginning.
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Alright, I made a super short video about spell batching, so maybe you can understand how it shaped vanilla pvp for anyone who isn’t sure how it worked it whatever. I apologize if the sound is low, turn up your volume if you can’t hear me.
https://youtu.be/vcz93USaxBo
In Vanilla PvP a lot of it is about what spell or ability are you going to use on a batch VS what spell or ability is your opponent going to use on that same batch. It’s largely a matter of WHAT abilities you choose VS what your opponent chose. Without batching it’s largely about who can get their abilities to the server first. The bigger the batch the more it compensates for players with poor internet connections, the smaller the batch (or without batching) the more advantageous it is to simply have better latency than the people you’re fighting.
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Thank you for that video. Very informative.
After watching this, it seems like a server side improvement that they’ll stick with since you stated this is how the server responds to abilities today. And since Blizzard stated some “modern” backend improvements, I figure this would fall under them.
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Thank you very much for taking the time to make that. Hopefully it educates some people on the magic that went behind classic PvP. Batching is crucial in making Classic an authentic experience
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Thank your for the visualization.
For the others saying: “well, its modern back end so they wont do it.”
This would not only make the gameplay extremely unauthentic, it would also kill a lot of fun and game depth.
Moments like this shown in many PvP Movies never wouldve happened. Maybe the whole PvP scene never wouldve grown that big. Maybe people never wouldve felt so inclined to it to do movies with hundreds of hours of editing put into it.
So maybe, if they want classic to become a success, they should make sure the game is going to be as it was.
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Here’s another video that showcases batching without the commentary. You can see in the first minute both rogues have each other sapped, then they blind each other immediately out of that sap. They both trinket the blind and shadow dance cheap shot each other. None of this is possible without batching. The rogue with the better ping will always get theirs off first. Not having it removes so much depth.
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Got one more:
Have fun 
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All I have are good memories of spell batching. Particularly in PvP.
Also, If I am not mistaken it was the reason that the shatter combo even worked. Since you would use an instant cast spell at nearly the same time as your casted spell hit the target (let’s say an average of 10-20 ms between both spells if you are mashing). This means that regardless of where you are in a servers batch cycle 95% of the time both spells will strike while the server registers the target as “frozen” leading to the shatter crit chance bonus applying to both spells. If batches are processed in 10ms Windows, suddenly the first spell is waaaaay more likely to consume the frozen debuff before the second spell lands. If they find an alternative to making shatter combos work im all for it, but would still prefer batching for its pvp applications. Yes there is an element of rng involved but it is relatively predictable and opens up big counter play options in some class matchups that they wouldn’t ordinary have.
Shatter combos still work in retail, and they will still work in classic even without it
Shattering used to work a bit differently back then. Spells were basically snapshotted based on if your target was in a freeze or not. So no matter if the freeze faded or broke, if your frostbolt cast completed while the freeze was active it would still shatter. This was changed in I believe legion so that it no longer snapshots, but you can now shatter mid projectile. So if you use pet freeze right as your frostbolt projectile landed it will still count.
That sounds awful. Then again I didn’t play a lock or mage in Vanilla.
It’s not luck, lol
If you’re against spell batching, you don’t understand what’s happening at all in this video (or any high level rogue/mage vanilla pvp video)
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I seriously doubt they are going to overhaul the infrastructure of 7.3.5 just to put spell batching back in. We already know there are certain system tied to it that they are not going to mess with. Now I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Isn’t it curious how basically all the spell batching threads are rogues wanting to exploit the technical limitations of the past in order to do things they weren’t really supposed to be able to do.
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