While spell batching is a plague to healers, there are a number of interactions where it is a good mechanic.
This includes the following
Seal Twisting
Imbue Weaving
Reckoning /sit macro
Windfury Storage (both the stormstrike macro and the /cast /stopcast method)
Spell Reflect
Dodging CC effects such as polymorph by batching a self damage effect
There are a lot of skillful tricks you can do with spell batching especially in pvp that I think add a lot of depth to the game.
I am not advocating to put everything back on the 400ms having most things on the new 10ms is good for the game, but there are a lot of interactions that are better left on the old 400ms batch
and remember gentlemen if you’re on the PTR please assist!
I believe they mentioned seal twisting specifically as being changed to work, so I imagine any non-annoying interactions (mages polymorphing each other, etc) would be put in. It’d be funny to see vanish actually work for 4 seasons of tbc arena though.
…and thus should stay dead when it gets killed. Thanks!
Spell Batching has resulted in so many dumb interactions while Tanking and Healing that I don’t care what fun you’re having, I’m tired of seeing a Tank go from 100 to 0 because 3-4 hits didn’t register until the last moment and despite Lay on Hands going off, showing the Heal amount as well, they still die as if nothing was done.
No.
I get you want Shadow Word: Death to be capable of breaking Polymorph reliably but unless they specifically patch in some weird band aid for it, which can have other consequences that are unintended, you really can’t adjust the batching on a per action basis.
I understand that, but I’m also not necessarily in favor of some of the “quirks” anyway, because the band aids often make doing it less skillful and more just “did you hit your button recently” to make it work.
Shadow Word: Death could be changed to do the self-damage portion on a slight delay, which could allow any Priest to treat the spell like a no-CD counter to Polymorph if there’s just enough slush to let you cast it at any point of the Mage’s cast. 400ms is a lot of time to grant someone to fire off such an ability, and if we’re baking in a 400ms delay on the self-damage check, the Mage doesn’t even need to be at the very last moment of their cast.
Honestly, I’d rather just err on the side of removing some of these latency-based interactions than trying to bake them in entirely, because chances are any change that bakes them in will make them much easier to do, and Priests just being immune to Polymorph thanks to an instant and no-CD spell is not my cup of tea.
This is actually how it originally worked. No batching on interrupts, stuns, Blizzard / Hunter Traps (not that it affects those much because heartbeats, but I digress), deaths, self-heals (but still batched other heals), etc. They haphazardly batched everything just to get a solution out the window, including batching random stuff like buying from a vendor which is something that got caught in the crossfire with everything else.
On the paladin specific things you mentioned, they already made an adjustment to seals so that we’re able to twist them without batching (which has brought along some other fun side effects like twisting different ranks of command together), and reckoning doesn’t work the same way in TBC as it does in Classic at all, it’s not a spec you run to do damage anymore.
It was a novel and fun experiment to recreate the bad tech effect, It was fun for a while for sure. But it turns out it’s not ideal when you really get into it.
Some of these interactions still will exist, but the timing will be tighter. Judgement on seal of blood AND Shadow word death have a spell animation that plays before the damage is dealt. So technically those interactions may still work. But the animation window is smaller than a batch window.
Nice post, I didn’t actually know about that tidbit.
Makes sense too.
In other words spell batching was never the problem but moreso a lazy implementation of it and just slapping it on everything.