For extremely skilled players or for the majority of players?
Idk. Having the ability to break a polymorph with a self-harm spell or ability seems satisfying, or getting to poly a lock just in time to prevent him from doing anything while you’re feared, mages could counter spell a vanish apparently.
For high skill players, you don’t need to be Pikaboo to use spell batching advantageously. You also don’t really need “skill” from a reflex perspective, you just need knowledge and experience, it’s friendlier to older players than retail is.
Fair enough.
Updated my previous response’s edit to reference your blue post, good find.
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Why is someone who doesn’t want batching a bad player? All the defenders of batching are admitting that their reaction times are too slow to counter their opponent, so they need a grace period. Wouldn’t that make them bad players? Batching is a crutch.
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Bugs = skill…
I can get lucky and proc a bug that screws over my opponent so I am so skilled.
you are wrong batching is lag, and it removes skill not adds it.
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Spell batching is fine. What they have done is mimic the Vanilla experience. Works great. Also, have you noticed how smooth the beta test runs. Big spell batches are handled a little better than lots of small ones. Since we want the system to run well when zones are crowded, this is a good decision.
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Still do this on Henhouse all the time even with the horrendous ping. It’s small plays like this that make pre-WoD WoW a significantly better game.
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Spell batching also makes double crit shatters possible. You can’t guarantee it, but a good frost mage works the odds and gets them now and then. It’s good game play. One more factor to consider as you run an encounter.
Eh, that’s pretty straight forward with a hard cast into an instant. In BC there was a certain haste breakpoint that you could reach that when paired with pet nova from max distance allowed you to get a Frostbolt and two Ice Lances off that would all crit, though.
Who said it wasn’t straightforward? It is one of the many side effects of spell batching. It’s a good use of game mechanics.
Because it demonstrates you don’t understand how the metagame operates. Spell batching allows for outplays by timing a spell in the same batch as another players spell, all the while knowing that doing so benefits you. You can also of course be aware that an opponent is going to try to death coil your charge, and hold for an extra half second, get coiled, and have charge up afterwards. It’s essentially an extra layer of depth to the game via a hidden timer.
Spell batching interactions are immeasurable and often surprising when they happen, which forces you to quickly adapt to whatever just happened. WoD and later gameplay became incredibly scripted because there was nothing out of the ordinary, just memorize the order of cooldowns you need to use to win a certain duel, or to defeat a certain 3v3 comp, and you were good to go.
TL;DR WoD+ requires more reflex, pre WoD required more strategy, awareness, adaptiveness, and prediction.
PS, people are seriously overstating how easy it is to abuse spell batching and how wide the window is. Which is fair because most are not playing on private servers and MoP hasn’t been out since late 2014.
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The problem with removing or reducing it is that it impacts balance.
I knew very well that letting someone get half a second from death was a real risk, and saw others say things like “a smart healer stays on top of the damage” for this reason.
You cannot safely use that last half second of health pool, and this very much does mean you risk a two shot sometimes and need to precast at a possible mana cost.
You could not cleanly just vanish as a rogue until BC with cloak of shadows, and even then you needed to get out of the melee first.
In order to have a real chance of it working, you needed to not take a hit within a not so small window, which means unless you were using it to do a double ambush or break CC, you needed to wait for your moment, and get out of immediate combat even if not game combat.
Removing any of that makes the game much easier.
Is there a guide out there on how to maximize the spell batching system? If not, are the calls for skill simply based on how/if players react to another rng layer?
Comes down to experience, and there’s plenty of old videos that showcase what’s possible. Gegon for Mages is a pretty perfect example.
The quick “guide” is that things which happen within about half a second of each other do not guarantee order, and do not guarantee that all conditions are obeyed.
You can kick a cast in the last half second and while it will go off, it may or may not interrupt the spell, so you need to do it faster to be reliable (also it is on the global cooldown at that point so you need to anticipate that you may need to kick and not lock yourself out of it). You also need to not kick it late, as it will eat your cooldown and not do what you want, so that is worse than skipping it for a better moment. “Almost” is worse than not even trying.
Conversely, a good priest would wait for your backstab to eat your global, then start the heal. At that point even perfect timing for the rogue may mean the heal goes off, or maybe not if it is really perfect and they get lucky with some white hits interrupting through the 70% talent.
In PvE it would just make things much easier all around, you lose that sinking feeling when things are half a second from death, because you lost control, and it is up to the whims of the fine upstanding R. N. Jesus at that point.
#nochanges
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I mained a caster in Vanilla, beta definitely feels extreme/overtuned in this regard.
On a Mage I would regularly poly/blast to interrupt a healer while CS was on CD. I do know that pulling a 1.5s poly off to interrupt a spell already mid-cast was a gamble back then since I could land after the cast but if I timed it correctly I’d hit before the cast completed without a heal going off.
You could definitely “feel” where you would be caught in a batch and fail but that timing in Vanilla felt far far lower than it feels currently. You had a lot less room to fall in a batch back then than you do now.
It definitely feels off, to me. My muscle memory kicked in just about instantly when I got a chance to play it, especially since I still use the same gaming keypad to play.
I feel the “batch” queue is far too open a window as it is currently in Classic. Just about everything feels awful to cast. Can’t compare with melee classes since I haven’t played any in Classic but as far as casting is concerned it definitely doesn’t have the ebb and flow I was so used to.
Also, for the record, not a private server player so I’m not using anything but my muscle memory for reference.
They can adjust it. Right now it feels a bit too wide, IMO. Of course, my memory can be off but it doesn’t feel the same to me. I can go back and play most any game I used to play back then and my muscle memory kicks in, even as far back as the Atari VCS and NES. You do something long enough it becomes second nature even after a hiatus.
Not the end of the world as you can get used to it, but either my internet is bad and causing issues only when I play Classic and no other game or it’s Classic.
How off do you feel it is? If you had to guess, how many ms is each batch?