That’s not RNG, that’s you were late on the Lay on Hands by 1 batch. It isn’t sometimes 1ms batch and sometimes 5s batch, it’s the same each time and you just happened to be late. Tank will die 100 times out of 100 attempts if you Lay on Hands in the same batch s/he takes fatal damage.
No spell batching = you loh the tank just before the hit he lives. Just after he dies
Spell batching = you loh the tank right befor the hit. The outcome depends on the timing of the batch. If the hut tands in the same batch he dies in the next batch he lives. If you loh after the hit but they go in the same batch he live if it goes in the next batch he dies.
You can’t hard rely on raw reflexes anymore, that’s right, WoW was slightly more of a strategy game before. Use that prefrontal cortex and figure out beforehand that the tank is going to take a lot of damage, and you will get your heal off in time.
Exactly. It’s not lag by any stretch of the imagination. It will keep the feeling of Vanilla authentic.
Thats the literal definition of lag. Seriouly look it up
Lag: a period of time often between two events.
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Semantics. Do you have anything else to offer?
First of all, spell batching is in all of the time, whether retail or in Classic. How wide that window is in each version is all that changes (50ms I think in Classic? While Retail is a smaller window). Would use “Bigger” or “Wider” Spell batching so folks are getting terminology correctly because they will assume there is no spell batching in Retail [from your statement].
My statement however is still 100% correct, if the LoH is in the same batch as the Tank Fatal hit, he will 100% die which is the nature of the behavior we’re seeing. There’s nothing to argue this because this is exactly the behavior he is seeing:
- Same Batch (Batch 1): LoH (add Tank 80% HP, Fatal Hit (Tank 10% HP - 20% Tank HP = -10% HP) = Dead Tank
If his predictions of incoming damage were better, he would likely use LoH earlier, beating the batch window for the fatal hit (though client may show different):
- First Batch (Batch 1): LoH (+80% HP), tank alive (10% HP) = Tank at 90% HP
- Second Batch (Batch 2): Tank Alive (90% HP), Attack to Tank (90% Tank HP - 20% Tank HP = 70% HP) = Tank Alive
So, this comes down to an understanding of the game mechanics and having the skill to recognize that the tank will die before heals can reach the tank [because there are segments of combat happening every 50ms (?)].
Semantics are important when one side wont even say what they are aruging for out of fear they will sound stupid.
You want Blizzard to artificialy increase the lag time between spell batches.
Yet you keep saying you want spell batching even though it never left because that sounds better.
You know I’d been feeling like WoW combat got a lot more “twitchy” in recent xpacs but I wasn’t quite sure what to attribute it to. Perhaps reduced spellbatching is the culprit.
I wonder if it might have also somehow contributed to CC feeling a lot more over the top than it had in prior xpacs despite the average number of CC abilities not changing.
Having the skill to recognize that your heal that goes off before the attack lands will be ineffective because the hit will land in the same batch. Yes, that’s a form of skill I guess.
It’s also a terrible feeling to preemptively land a heal before an attack and have your tank die even though you healed before the attack landed.
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I like the spell batching. I would love if they kept it in, feels better to me than the current stuff.
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You like healing and dying to an attack 0.3 seconds later because they’re in the same batch?
To each their own.
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The point is that this will increase the difficulty in not being too frugal with mana which will lead to you having to be more predictive and strategic. Yes, there is latency and this is something we all had to deal with back in the day and led to far more memorable encounters. A competent raid leader wouldn’t put this on the person that missed the LoH, but the entire team of healers since this is a team-driven game.
Edit: It’s also important to note that there is a (I believe) a 50ms spell batch window! Did you know that there are 20 spell batch windows in a second? If it’s not obvious, that’s a ludicrously forgiving amount of time.
Edit: I mistakenly believed from different sources that it was set to a 50ms batch window, but have yet to find a solid proof of that number from a blue. Galdor (below) has found an older blue post saying that it used to actually be a 400ms spell batch window in Vanilla, which leaves you with 2-3 batch windows per second if this is the same value they are using for Classic.
Only because it actually feels like it’s the game from before Cataclysm.
Having everything instant like in Retail would feel tremendously off.
Besides, for all we know, the instant batches in Retail are probably part of why the servers have a hard time coping with 200 people in one spot.
When people refer to lag in a video game they’re underyingly referring to three things: server lag, player lag, and game freezing up (although that’s not really lag. That’s a bad computer struggling to keep up).
Server lag is when the server can’t handle everything that’s going on. Player lag is when their internet is on the fritz and they can’t keep up, but the game is going along fine.
This spell batching doesn’t fit any of those three criteria since the spell batching was deliberately set to work that way. It wasn’t just that technology didn’t allow us to batch better, it was a distinct choice to reduce server stress which mattered more back then. Actual server lag would them ramping up batching and causing server lag because the server couldn’t keep up with all the batching and thus slowing down the server. To get around the actual creation of server lag they kept the spell batching to larger batches to prevent this.
When two mages end up sheeping each other it’s not because either one one or both of them is experiencing any server or player lag. It’s because the code was intentionally set up to process that the abilities that way.
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Posted by Celestalon
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.
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bull!@$% /10
No one is aruging that we should get rid of spell batching. We are aruging over how much lag there should be between batches.
I want as little lag as possible.
Other people want up to a half a second of lag.
Average number of CC’s went down in fact, but it feels more frustrating due to the way they changed rotations and abilities in general (there is always something to spam). As for the game becoming more twitchy, that’s completely correct, while I personally think PvP (especially arena) was dumbed down and gutted, in reality it simply shifted focus. In earlier expansions, wider spell batching windows and more abilities for each class overall made the game more hyper-awareness/strategy oriented. WoD and the newer expansions shifted what it meant to be a good player towards raw reflexes and being a god at landing kicks, and following a PvE-esque script to win arena matches. This was seen evidently when there was a huge turnover of arena talent throughout WoD.
It should be as close as possible to how it was in vanilla, obviously too big of a window is just as much of a problem as too small of a window, this should be inherent with #nochanges. I’d go further and say the way it was in vanilla is damn-near optimal from a gameplay perspective anyway.
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Well you’re talking to someone who is going to play a warrior in Classic full well knowing that when I get crippling poison’d I’m going to intercept a someone at 30% in the completely wrong area and they’ll be long gone before I actually get there and that when a priest shields me I’ll be rage starved and I’m ultimately fine with that.
So I say keep it as authentic as humanely possible. You start trying to tweak all these gameplay things and it’s a slippery slope to cleaning up the game as much as possible. You adjust spell batching and as far as I’m concerned you open the door to fixing other bad gameplay mechanics like those.