Back in Vanilla things were not perfect, but one thing that was very reliable was the ease that crowd control effects broke when damaged. Abilities like gouge or blind or seduce or sheep or whatever that breaks on damage, these in vanilla would break if you even looked at them funny or thought about it in a hostile way. In classic wow they do break, but often a second or two after they should, allowing a couple of DoT ticks to break these effects, or even to be attacked by direct damage.
it would be the 400ms spell batch/queue system, its not the same as vanilla’s 1500ms lockout system which prevented this from happening.
So are they just different systems that work similarly and thats the problem in the details?
its similar to when you get Head of the Dragonslayer debuff, it doesn’t go out instantly and takes quite a while to show as a buff, of course this is server lag on top of just the default 400ms spell window, its the only thing I can think of that can explain it “working as intended” yet still feels completely broken.
I have noticed if i queue a frostbolt at an enemy and instantly frost nova the nova is instant and hits the target first then the frostbolt crits them instantly breaking the nova, similar things might be happening with gouge/blind/seduce/sheep, the only thing I can suggest for yourself is to have a /stopattack added to your gouge attack, so you don’t instantly break your own gouge.
something like this:
#showtooltip gouge
/cast gouge
/stopattack
Now i know gouge is meant to stop your auto attack so this shouldn’t be needed but it forces the game to prevent your attacks from landing in the same spell pool/batch.
when server lag is high the batch window increases dramatically, say you’re dueling outside stormwind when the Dragonslayer buff goes out, you get a good extra second or so of response to all spells/abilities making them do strange things.
have a read through this blue post if you’d like to understand it a little better they explain it fairly well. Spell Batching in Classic
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Oh its quite the opposite problem, I can gouge a target with a rupture on him and get 1 or 2 ticks out of rupture before the gouge breaks. I do use stop attack on blind, gouge and sap because blizzards game is not exactly flawless and found that If I dont my character will not behave properly, its just poor quality code or low quality server setup.
I can also blind a target, and then watch as he gets 2 or 3 hits from another player before the effect breaks. That was never so in vanilla, if you even though about hitting a blinded target in vanilla it would break. A gnat could fart at 400 yards and break blind in vanilla.
Almost certainly spell batching. Keep in mind that if you run something like enemy cast bars, ability timers and such they will quite often be out of sync in my experience, because spell batching creates an enormous delay. It’s also why people commonly die while a heal should have landed, spells go off when they should have been interrupted or in some cases people get locked out after stopping a cast before being interrupted, and why shaman can pull a caster mob with earth shock, and despite most mobs being very slow to react, it’ll interrupt a spell being casted a second or two later. Basically blizzard broke the game on purpose, with the no priority system on casts/abilities making it even worse.
I think that extends to the client side. Often when something should have finished (stun, gouge, etc) I’m still locked out on my side, and while my client says I should be fine to be making actions, nothing happens when I try and use abilities. Looking at the ingame logs there’s no logic as to why either. I’ll have full energy and get not behind target errors trying to backstab, then that changes to not enough energy still on full energy, while failed ability casts seem to sometimes consume a GCD too. And I play with 10 ms, on a locally hosted Blizz server.
The one thing that is fairly consistent, is you won’t break your own CC unless you’re using macros to start attack. They seem to have built some protection in there so even if a stray attack does go through, it gets queued prior to the CC in some way.
That’s a very good point you have there.