So in all of the stress tests so far, I noticed something odd. For some reason, instant cast spells on a Druid will reset your swing timer back to its full duration. Any instant cast, both healing spells or damage spells or buff spells.
To elaborate, if I started autoattacking and then cast an instant spell (Rejuvenate or Moonfire), my melee swing timer would get pushed back to its max duration, delaying the melee swing. If I kept casting over and over, the swing would keep getting delayed over and over, and my character would not swing until I stopped casting.
I tried this on other classes, Shaman and Paladin, and those classes did not have this issue; no matter what spell I cast, autoattacks would not be delayed/interrupted.
Is this intentional? Seems weird that ONLY Druid would have this odd quirk with their melee autoattacks.
From what I understand it has to do with the GDC. (global cooldown)
All druid spells are on the same GCD, while paladin / shaman appear to have some special rules.
If you try your experiment with a mage, priest, hunter, warlock (all can use auto attack) then you will find that their auto attack timer is re-set if they use an instant cast ability.
So this also backs up the “special” paladin / shaman treatment.
The ability to have instant spells woven between swing timers is a special ability unique to paladin/shaman, as the only classes that were intended to actually weave melee with spellcasting like that.
Yo know i really never had a huge problem with it. When i had a mage give water i would usually shift out, drop a wrath, moonfire, then go bear form and finish them and repeat this until i was out of water, and then just stay bear form for killing mobs until another mage past by. I only hit 40 on one recently and I will say that i never had much problems past harpies in stonetalon andthen the troll ruins west of nessingwary.
Won’t be the first class i level but most likely the 3rd or 4th. I really can’t wait to be able to gank again as one.
It is based on the swing speed of the weapon. A weapon with 1.5 or less swing speed will deal its damage even if you spam moonfire and clip the animation. Anything with a longer swing speed gets reset.
If you had a 2.0 weapon you could swing - cast - wait 0.5 for next swing. If you didn’t wait and you just spammed the cast, you would clip the auto attack timer and reset the attack.
It’s not too bad in all honesty, and you don’t have to kill everything in Bear form. I commonly spend half my time or more in caster form and weave between bear/caster depending on mobs I am fighting.