Nobody wants spell batching

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

Literally nobody wants this. I’ve never heard a person say anything close to:

“Man, I am so glad that spell didn’t perform the way I thought it would”
“I love how that spell still hit me after I stunned the mob”
“boy, am I sure glad for that 3 second delay after looting a mob to skin it”
“I love walking away from a vendor while items are still being loaded into my bag”
“That was awesome when the mob waited till after I ran past it to agro so I could get dazed off of my mount”

I don’t know who ever suggested it, but it’s one of those things that sounds good in your head until you actually see it live.

Let’s make no mistakes, spell batching is terrible.

We finally made it to 2019, where we all have decent enough internet and ping to play in real time. Imagine having that back in the day. and what does Blizzard do? Throw the entire game in digital quicksand. On purpose. To bring back “server realism”.

It doesn’t. it slows the game down. It makes you feel like you’re playing in Siberia with 400ms ping. You see things that simply can’t be explained by science.

A mob or another player that clearly ate a counterspell to the face but somehow that cast landed on you. Or even better, getting the spell off AND getting silenced. Our how about the mob that lags to your position a half a second after you were there? Good luck managing to get that pack you’re tanking actually in front of you
Or your pet who seems like someone put his AI in power saving mode.

I appreciate the concern you have with trying to replicate the laggy feel of old servers. But for the love of god, stop.

Whatever code you’re using is breaking the game. It can take almost 5 seconds to buy an item from a vendor. Mob combat behavior is flat out bizarre. Pets act completely strange, either not taking commands or visibly waiting to execute them. It’s causing issues with PVP, how am I supposed to juke a CS if even when I do, the game still silences me? It’s causing issues with combat and highly important class mechanics such as vanish and feign death which need immediate response. Let’s not even mention druids. Shifting into bear, waiting for furor to actually proc and then feral charging? Please. You might as well be casting pyroblast with this server delay.

It’s like restoring a beautiful muscle car, and then telling everyone you swapped out the V12 for a hybrid.

This isn’t vanilla ping
This isn’t modern ping
This is artificial lag

" You think you want it, but you don’t"

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I don’t like batching, either, but it would be fine if it worked correctly when abilities are APPLIED and not with every action or interaction in game.

Currently I think emulating the batching timings broke a lot more than it’s worth. If the current engine batches literally every action because it’s fast enough to be 10 or 20ms that’s probably why upping it to 400ms ruins just, well, everything in Vanilla.

Timings are incredibly off for a multitude of both activation of ability and execution/application. Implementing vanilla batching more than likely required a complete refactoring of the system from the ground up but I don’t think that happened.

Another reason they’ve been silent on the issue with “why does every button play like molasses in the winter?” I know we had slower internet back then but it never felt this slow.

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Is that batching though? They said the batching is still multiple times per second. Maybe that 400 ms lag feel may be something else.

I have 15-20ms to the server I play on and there are still seconds delay on things, and if batching is still happening at least twice a second then what causes the extra second of nothing happening on my screen?

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I have a feeling that if spell batching wasn’t in the game half the issues we’re having with hunters and druids wouldn’t exist and the game in general would feel much more polished overall

It seems like in some afterthought someone decided to add this lag and broke half the game mechanics with it

I don’t have a clue, even with spell batching things shouldn’t be lagging this much. But that’s the only mechanic that’s there on purpose to slow thing down, otherwise actions should be performed more or less instantly with 20ms lag which is practically no lag whatsoever

I don’t play live, but maybe someone who does can give us some insight into the speed differences with artificial lag vs no artificial lag

That’s what this is, artificial lag, and we should use the proper language to describe it from now on.

If I want to feral charge a mob that has a spell like flash heal I literally have to prepare ahead of time to shift into bear and charge within half a second of seeing the cast start to have a chance at interrupting the spell. Half a second. Otherwise, there is zero chance you will stop a 1.5 or 2 second spell. Simply because shifting out varies between immediately or .4 seconds, shifting in takes the same amount, and then getting furor to apply takes a minimum of half a second to apply. Only at that point is there the option to charge, which may still get batched.

So as we can see. A simple mechanic (shift out, in to bear and charge) takes on average a full second to 2 seconds to complete when from my client takes 2 button presses (macro shift out/in, charge)

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Does feel like it, right? Maining a lock in Vanilla I would wait or casts for the juke, 99.9% of the time of the cast nearly finished the juke wasn’t there since it’s dangerous to wait that long to juke. So I would always time my spell lock to the last possible moment and pull it off no problem. In classic I have to hit at least a half second early to successfully stop a cast.

I’ve been able to successfully avoid being silenced, kicked, counterspelled, etc DURING a cast for the entirely of my time in classic. I’ve been hit with them but never during a cast. I’m good at juking but I’m not THAT good to evade every single one. Everyone takes it to the face because people are fast to respond during a juke, they aren’t a guarantee and nobody is perfect but so far - i am.

And I’m really not lol. So there’s more going on.

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The most basic and easiest example I can give is leveling my little shammy west of TB. The harpies there are all spellcasters. Trying to interrupt healers with earth shock was ridiculous. Even when the harpy was clearly casting and clearly shocked, it would routinely finish the cast.

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I agree as I am definitely having issues. 2x I was healing on my priest in WC, both times the tank’s health was very low, my heal goes off and bam the tank is dead. Like it didn’t go off or land. The mana is gone, but the heal didn’t land? Makes no sense since I was not lagging at all.

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That happened to me every now and then in vanilla too, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s happening way more often now with the delay time in classic.

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Veterans call this phenomenon “getting batched”

Basically, the server killed the tank, not the healer or the mobs or the tank himself

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I completely agree with this forum. I play a hunter as my main, and a priest as an alt. Numerous times on my main, my pet has decided to just go on its merry way to the end boss of the instance, when we just began it, and then it figures out it was on passive the entirety and pulls everything back to us. Have lost the tank numerous times in an instance due to spell not hitting, mana is gone, tanks at half health, then dead. As a matter of fact I made a recording of it, in the 5 Instances we ran in dead mines, with me over geared and leveled, we lost the tank 3 times, due to this, tanks level approprite maybe a little high, 2 mobs, half health , insta death. lol, or the fact of 4 of us loose our keyboard functions in the same instance, that was epic, due to artificial lag. Luckily we all were in Discord for that one, so was able to recover somewhat.

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I had to turn invisibility off auto-cast on my succubus while grinding because if she attacks from invis, there’s a 50% chance the mob will evade and re-set itself because it tries to attack her but still sees her as un-reachable even though she should no longer be invisible after the attack.

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yaaaa I keep my succy in invis, and this (mob evading behavior) happens dozens of times in 2-3 hr play session. Its pretty infuriating.

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Yikes…

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I probably exaggerate with the 50% claim, but it happens a lot!

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I can’t even imagine playing a pet class at the moment. They are an absolute mess

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Mostly it’s fine. They do seem laggy in their movements, though.

Spell-locks and seduce are harder to time properly than they should be, though.

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Yes, its really damn annoying. If I want to spell lock or seduce - I need it to cast NOW. NOT the current 1/2 second or 1 second delay… this can mean death fairly often in PVP.

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The problem with spell batching (and the current implementation of leeway) is that it’s a halfassed attempt to emulate something that was the result of crappy mid 2000s internet where people still used dialup to play. With modern internet speeds, it just feels horribly awkward and clunky, and it’s an effective nerf to caster classes.

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I had cable internet when WoW came out and I had a much snappier experience in 2005 than this feels like. (Though I do remember lag and database issues like the loot-lag pose)

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Absolutely. This crap needs to go already