It didn’t break dual twisting, if batching was still in paladins would have 1 way twisting, which is what they are cryin about now. They briefly had two way twisting because blizzard didn’t think it all they way though when they attempted to re-implement batching on only the seals so that paladins could twist like they did in TBC.
As for the hunter macro, i may be mistaken but isn’t that because of the new macro system and has nothing to do with batching? The original macro system was very open and could to made to do a lot of stuff blizzard decided to remove later. We got the later version of the addon\macro system.
Maybe, I heard the macro problem is not the macro system but how batching is handling the castsequence. The new batching or whatever is in place right now is causing the Steady shots to clip the auto-shots.
The old batching had enough leeway or fudge factor that the Shots were not clipping as it buffered enough to allow both to go off. Now it is not.
At Least that is my understanding of the problem. But I have been wrong before.
I’ve heard that the hunter 1 button macro wouldn’t work LONG before we even heard that batching removal was a possibility.
I don’t have enough knowledge of macro’s to verify that it’s the culprit, but there’s all kinds of macro’s that worked in vanilla that don’t work in classic. Not only were some functions removed, but others were added. Showtooltip for example was NOT a thing in vanilla, you had to manually find the right icon if you cared about the icon (and they don’t all exist), and the tooltip itself was simply not a option at all for macro’s. It’s far more likely the hunter macro was broken by this than batching.
Personally I wouldn’t mind if blizzard addressed that macro, but I don’t think it’d be simple to do so. Changes to the entire macro system would be a lot of work, changes to auto shot to function where it doesn’t get clipped may increase hunter dps (which is already at the top, so that’s not great) If it did increase hunter dps they’d probably need to rebalance them somehow, which is something they’ve already said they don’t want to get into.
The hunter one-button used is nothing more that a very simple ‘castsequence’ macro. There is no secret voodoo or mystery behind it.
Tell castsequence to cast Steadshot and autoshot, using your weapon speed as the delay.
That is it. The whole thing is really one line.
It worked before because the batching was on a 400m/s cycle and the two shots could go off within the cycle. In TBC they change the batching to something like 10m/s and now the stead shot clips the auto-shot.
Again, that is my understanding of the macro, but as I was not the person to come up with it, maybe I am missing something, but if you look at the macro, it really is very simple and there is not a lot the macro system could do to impact it, it is all about the batching and when actions get processed in-game.
But I fear we are straying off-topic, better to stop on this line. I will concede the point to not derail this thread.
here’s a version of the macro from 2008, see a cast sequence in there anywhere? The NEW version of the macro uses a cast sequence in it, and from my understanding the issue comes from the fact if you move and cancel a cast it get’s buggered up. maybe the castsequence version worked better with batching, i dunno, but it’s NOT the same macro that was used originally, and it function’s differently because of this.
You’re leaving out that you don’t always have room for a filler consecrate, and that the extra mana required to maintain twisting reduces your effective duration of sustained high throughput DPS, which is what I experienced in my multiple hours of testing. Standard one-way twist with the premade gear I get just over 75 seconds of mana, without using consecration or exorcism. That time spent auto attacking after will be a drought when you have no mana to twist.
For quick burst single target fights we will be impressive. For anything over 3-4 minutes (pots, mana tide, dark runes) we have no sustain. This averages out to far less than 10%, more towards the 5% I spoke about. Try it out on the beta and see for yourself. Not only that, but you’re talking about haste gear in p6 which won’t reflect most of the actual effort put in for the first year and a half until people achieve that kind of buildout. Which- also coincides with massive power level increases across the board for most classes. (melee)
The problem with calculating damage increase of 1-way twisting vs non-twisting is related to haste and its availability in phase 1. With a 3.6 speed weapon, it requires 20% haste or 315.4 haste rating to achieve a 3.0 AS. There are only a few sources of haste in phase 1:
Haste Potion - 400 haste rating
Thundering Skyfire Meta - 240 haste rating
Drums - 80 haste rating
Mongoose - 2% raw haste - 31.54 haste rating
Abacus of Violent Odds - 260 haste rating
DST - 325 haste rating
If you have drums in your group, you can’t partake in any of the haste sources besides mongoose safely. You will be stuck at 3.36 AS or above. If you don’t have drums, you can use Thundering or Abacus but not both at the same time. This allows you to drop down to 3.09 AS periodically but only briefly.
If you are north of 3.0 AS you will have a .5-1 second delay on every CS cycle cause you have to lock the previous GCD to your swing timer. This is a 7-15% loss on CS damage. On the other hand, if you dip below the 3.0 AS boundary, you will be missing twist windows significantly reducing the benefit of twisting. Not to mention fights require movement which doesn’t always lend itself to hitting a button in that magical .5 second window.
This is why I was saying that haste stacking can out perform 1-way twisting in its current form on average. Sure, if you win at the casino you’ll do better but you could also well underperform. With just what’s available in phase 1, you can pretty easily operate at about 25-30% average haste dropping well below the 3.0 boundary for extended periods of time.
Overall, with the right gearing choices 1-way doesn’t even provide the highest dps ceiling for ret in phase 1. As the phases progress, the availability of haste increases to the point that the paladin should be operating at 35-40% constant haste. The difference grows even larger the more haste you have due to how haste interacts with ppm items and enchants. The more haste you have the more often your on hit haste procs are up along with the proc from lionheart and mongoose.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been on the side of 2-way twisting. 1-way twisting is a trap. It’s easy to mess up so you gain no damage. It’s easy to wind up oom and do no damage. It encourages tunnel vision looking at your swing timer so you die in the fire and do no damage. You also can’t use abilities like consecrate, exorcism, or engineering items without a dps loss. Many of these items are less unforgiving with 2-way twisting. Although none of these are problems when haste stacking.
As someone with no particular stake in 1-way vs 2-way twisting, how is lowering the skill floor with a less difficult rotation for more damage a good thing?
For hunters the trade-off to having their 1 button macro is that it does less damage and is less flexible than manually making sure you don’t clip your shots, what’s the trade-off for 2-way twisting that justifies doing more damage along with a larger tolerance for making mistakes? Genuinely asking since I don’t know and am pretty sure there’s something I’m missing.
The point I’m trying to make is that everyone is comparing 1-way twisting to non-twisting in a vacuum which makes it look like 1-way twisting is a dps increase over the “normal” paladin rotation. This is then being used as an argument against 2-way twisting because it would be twice as much increase.
Through the use of gear, gems, and consumables haste stacking and using the “normal” paladin rotation is actually higher dps than 1-way twisting. Not only is it higher damage, it doesn’t have any of the pitfalls 1-way twisting has. You basically can’t go oom unless you want to spam consecration for even more dps. It requires a total of 2 button presses, 1 every 6 seconds, and 1 every 8 seconds. If you are in range of the boss, you do maximum dps with very little effort.
People are saying “They are already giving you 1-way twisting, that should be enough. Asking for 2-way twisting is just being greedy and it will increase your dps too much”. The problem is that 1-way twisting doesn’t give us anything at all. It promotes a clunky playstyle that is less dps than just gearing, gemming, and consuming properly. Once ZA comes out in phase 5, haste stacking might even out perform 2-way twisting as well.
Fair enough, I appreciate you taking the time to answer. Getting a better idea of how certain classes work under the hood is pretty interesting, especially the ones I never got a chance to play back in the day.
Also, I think the fact that this post has gained so much attention so quickly is a big indicator that this needs to be addressed. It’s also, an indicator of which direction the community wants to go. Two way twisting has the support of the majority.
In addition to that, disinterested parties who are informed of it largely either don’t care or are supportive of the idea. I have yet to run into someone in-game who is against two way twisting. Probably because I don’t play on Smeet’s server.
A full haste stack doesn’t prevent the use of 1 way twisting. A twist is stronger than any button outside of crusader strike (windfury is helpful to make this true in earlier tiers, as it makes twisting about 12% more likely to trigger the burst). So long as you are able to pull off a twist twice in about a 10s window, you’ll be doing more damage for less Mana than exorcism and consecration can offer, thus a dps gain over the normal rotation.
The only way that twisting is ever less dps than a normal rotation, in any optimized character, is when the player is messing up the twists. Otherwise, there’s nothing in a normal rotation to make it stronger than 1 way twisting, especially when you consider that twisting players can ALSO stack haste just like a normal rotation, and always raise dps above that baseline.
If you are talking a normal ret rotation to just be CS and judge, there’s tons of dead time at all levels of haste, to twist as Mana allows. It will never beat a twisting player in the same conditions if the twisting player is executing it properly.
The 3.0 speed boundary is not a cutoff for when twisting is a dps gain. It is just a speed where it fits most easily in what could be called a rotation.
Yes, these are all the pitfalls that twisting has always had, as the class was not designed to be twisting centric. Erasing them pushes the class design from twisting being a high risk tool for more dps to twisting being easy enough to pull off with no particular risk that it is the entire focus of the class.
Even with twisting having all of the downsides it has in 1 way twists, it is still always a dps gain when done properly (and no, that does not require fine tuning your haste). It does not need to be made stronger.
Just like the hunters manually weaving shots so as not to clip auto shot. Higher skill level = more damage. Good paladins will be able to do this and stand out.
A lot of classes already have to deal with, so paladins get to join them in the watching swing timers and health bars.
So the gist of the arguments I am getting from you and many others seem to be that there’s a significant issue doing something “different” than what spell batching allowed in OG TBC.
The feedback people are trying to give, that you seem to not even address, is that the two-way twisting that was implemented on Endless, the PTR (temporarily), and was posted in the blue post at the top of this thread, is GOOD.
Its is more fun.
It is a more natural rotation.
It is a marginal dps increase on a mid-bottom tier dps class.
It HIGHLY unlikely to change the PVP or PVE meta.
There are some obvious changes that already affect Classic TBC, so using the original release as a benchmark for what “should” be OK is just another version of nochangeslol, which really did not turn out well for classic.
I will add that I like the mystery of whether haste in ZA/SWP will be good or not. Apolyon + haste stacking and 1 way twising may eke out a win over Torch + avoiding haste and 2 way twisting, but we don’t really know yet, unless someone has done some math I haven’t seen. Most sheets are using averages, which discount haste procs and being able to flex between the rotations, too (DST).
IMO this increases the skill cap for the high-end player, and makes the barrier of entry for a new ret something more than just auto/judge/crusader. All good stuff.
There’s nothing I can say about some people finding it more fun, I don’t, I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The only class with even a slightly similarly timed rotation are hunters, and they are fighting to get a macro back to automate their rotation so they don’t have to deal with the tedium of it.
It isn’t much different of a rotation. On an optimal speed for 2 way twisting, it gains a free GCD to fill because you don’t shift your swap to SoC back a half second. Sure, it feels better because it keeps to a steady rhythm instead of an alternating one, but it requires the same focus on your swing timer.
That said, I also can’t prove that someone doesn’t like two way twisting. Enjoyment of any particular rotation is subjective.
It’s more than a marginal dps increase though due to the class personal dps balance being much closer in tbc than they were in classic. We aren’t talking adding 10% to ret’s doing 800 dps when warriors are doing 2k. We are talking adding 10% to a class that tops out near 2500 dps when the top dps are only a bit above 3k, and that’s assuming everyone is playing optimally.
And while no, it may not have seismic shifts in the speedrun meta, the vast majority of guilds aren’t a part of that, don’t have everyone performing optimally, and ret’s having an unnecessary dps boost does impact other areas of the game, including pvp balancing.
2 way twisting strictly lowers the skill cap relative to 1 way twisting. There’s no setup required, thus it’s easier.
We already have 1 way twisting for those that want to test their skill and deal more dps.
What I do argue against is the downplaying of the balance and rotational changes to the class in an attempt to try to strengthen the argument that 2 way twisting is something blizzard should be implementing.
Just leave it at:
I like it, it feels better to me, and I don’t find the deviation from tbc to be a problem.
Don’t pretend that the deviations don’t really exist, or that they don’t matter.
Yeah it matters, it rocks, it feels like how it SHOULD feel with two way, it gives us a tiny bump in damage to make us relevant, and there’s 5,000 of us and only one smeet. You’ve written a book at this point, just let the record show it’s getting kinda sad now dude
in the essence of TBC… keep the seal twisting keep the hunter macro.
if the batching is the culprit blizzard needs to go back to the chalk board on that again.